HGS is a global business process management and digital experience company that has grown from supporting one healthcare insurance client with 23 employees in Bengaluru to around 18,000 people across 10 countries, serving more than 1,000 brands. Global CEO Venk Korla has more than 25 years of experience across digital services, customer experience, entrepreneurship, and technology, and previously served as CEO of HGS Americas. Pulse 2.0 interviewed HGS Global CEO Venk Korla to learn more about the company’s Realized AI strategy, HGS Agent X, intelligent experiences, and AI-driven business transformation.
Venk Korla’s Background
When asked about his background, Korla shared:
I’ve spent over 25 years working in digital services and customer experience. I started out as a young entrepreneur, which was a real crash course in how business works.
My entrepreneurial journey began while I was still in engineering school in India, where I built and supplied computer systems to large organizations and universities.
After exiting that business at 24 and moving to the U.S. to work in a corporate environment for a couple of years, I saw a huge opportunity in the evolution of healthcare. I figured if we could do banking online, why couldn’t we do healthcare online?
I started a business called Element Solutions to solve that problem, which HGS eventually acquired. Since then, I’ve combined my engineering roots and entrepreneurial spirit to help drive HGS’s growth.
Before stepping into the Global CEO role at HGS in mid-2025, I served as CEO of HGS Americas, where I led the company’s growth and transformation across the U.S., Canada, and Latin America and HGS’s digital business before that.
I stepped into my new role with a deep respect for what HGS’s previous Global CEO, Partha DeSarkar, built over nearly two decades and a real sense of excitement about where we can take HGS next.
Our people are our greatest strength, and my job is to make sure we’re giving them the tools, the technology, and the culture to do their best work for our clients.
HGS’s Evolution And Korla’s Responsibilities
When asked about HGS’s evolution and his primary responsibilities as Global CEO, Korla explained:
HGS started as a boutique BPM and contact center company within the Hinduja Group. From supporting one healthcare insurance client with 23 employees in Bengaluru, we have expanded to around 18,000 people across 10 countries, delivering a range of services to over 1,000 top brands, with over 50 years of history.
We grew by being reliable, deeply embedded in our clients’ operations, and showing up consistently across verticals such as healthcare, banking, retail & consumer products, and the public sector. That’s the foundation we continue to build on.
What’s changed today is the problem we’re solving. Earlier, it was all about speed and efficiency. Now, the focus is on making the experience more intelligent, without losing the human connection.
We didn’t arrive at that shift overnight. It came from years of watching what actually worked for clients and what didn’t. Those are hard-won lessons, and they’ve shaped everything about how we evolve.
As Global CEO, my job breaks down into three things. First, I set the strategic direction and ensure we’re building the right capabilities for where the market is heading, not where it’s been.
Second, protect the culture. As we scale our AI capabilities, we’re deliberate about helping transform our talent to align with today’s evolving world of technology-led services delivery.
And third, I stay close to clients. We co-create with our clients, and that’s not just a tagline, it’s how we actually work. Which means I need to be in those rooms and meetings, not just reviewing information about them.
Favorite Memory
When asked about his favorite memory working for the company so far, Korla said:
I can’t really point to one. For me, it’s about working side by side with our teams across the world every day, seeing ideas come alive during hackathons, and collaborative sessions with our clients. That’s where the real magic happens.
Core Solutions And HGS Agent X
When asked about HGS’s core products and features, Korla detailed:
HGS combines technology, data, and human empathy to offer outcome-led solutions that rapidly deliver proof of value to enterprises.
These range across agentic process automation, data analytics, platform engineering, and brand experience.
Our solutions work in layers, with each building toward smarter, more intelligent experiences for our clients. Realized AI is the overall framework that ties everything together.
Realized AI is grounded in one principle: AI’s value lies in measurable, repeatable outcomes, not demos.
We put that into practice through our 90-Day Proof of Value (PoV) program. We scope a single high-impact use case with the client, agree on success metrics upfront, things like reducing average handling time, improving self-service containment rates, or increasing fraud detection accuracy, and deliver proof within 90 days.
If the agreed outcomes aren’t achieved, the financial risk is on us. We structured it that way deliberately, because we wanted to remove the leap of faith from the equation.
From a solution perspective, HGS Agent X is our sovereign, technology-agnostic AI backbone, basically a single, scalable orchestration platform that works across systems without locking clients into any one cloud, CRM, or vendor.
It acts as an intelligent overlay across legacy platforms, modern CRMs, and regulated environments, enabling workflows to run seamlessly across siloes, without the need for a long, disruptive IT overhaul.
With a built-in 24/7 human-in-the-loop safety layer, HGS Agent X delivers the accuracy and guaranteed outcomes required in high-compliance industries such as healthcare, BFSI, and the public sector.
The platform underpins all our Intelligent Experience solutions, including Knowledge Assistant, Customer 360, AMLens, and Interaction Intelligence, giving clients a consistent, portable agentic layer regardless of the outcome they choose to deploy.
Our focus is on leveraging the HGS Agent X platform and building tools that are purpose-built and trained on the domain knowledge of a specific sector.
We believe that the closer AI gets to the actual work, the more useful it becomes. That’s the direction we’re moving in.
Navigating AI Adoption And Change Management
When asked about recent challenges in the sector and how HGS is addressing them, Korla explained:
As an industry, we’re moving from being largely people-led from a delivery capability perspective to becoming technology-led with strong human oversight.
There’s a lot of noise in the market suggesting this shift can happen overnight, but the reality is, most customers aren’t fully ready for that transformation yet.
Contract structures, operating models, and change readiness are still catching up. While technology is available, the challenge is change management and adoption, and that’s one of the toughest issues we’re navigating today.
HGS is overcoming it by focusing on continuous innovation, tuning out the noise, and investing deeply in culture, talent, and skilling, both within our teams and with our clients.
The pace of technology change today is way faster than organizations can adapt, and learning how to navigate that change responsibly is the journey we’re on.
How The Technology Has Evolved
When asked how HGS’s technology has evolved since launching, Korla said:
That’s an interesting question. HGS’s early days were focused on contact centers and back-office processing, areas where we excelled.
But the real asset we were quietly building, without really realizing it at the time, was domain knowledge.
Fifty years of operating inside industries like banking, healthcare, and retail gives you a full understanding of those sectors that you simply can’t replicate by reading about them.
The inflection point came when we started using that domain knowledge to train AI, not in a broad, catch-all way, but with real specificity.
We also learned early on that clients weren’t ready to hand over all conversations entirely to machines, and honestly, they were right not to be.
So, we shifted our focus toward using AI for knowledge management and agent support rather than all-out replacement. That pivot turned out to be exactly right, and it’s the foundation of how HGS Agent X works today.
One key callout that I would like to reiterate: while technology has changed a lot over the years, the lesson for us has always been to use AI to make people better at their jobs, and the results follow.
This is the philosophy behind our Intelligent Experience positioning.
Key Company Milestones
When asked about some of HGS’s most significant milestones, Korla highlighted:
I’ll start with the problem we’ve been trying to solve for our customers over the last few years, as it tells our story better.
Most organizations we talk to are stuck in the same cycle, where they’ve run AI pilots and the technology worked, but they can’t point to a real business outcome.
The pilot proved the concept but didn’t prove the value. And when you can’t prove the value, you can’t get a budget to scale. That’s the gap we built our Realized AI framework to close.
Our recent launches of Realized AI and the PoV program are major milestones for HGS.
We’re putting ourselves out there differently than everyone else in the industry, because we know our approach works and that all companies need a solution for how AI will evolve alongside them.
This builds on years of embedding ML and NLP into our work, often ahead of the market.
What’s changed now is the timing. With the rise of LLMs and agentic AI, our approach is exactly where client demand is, focused on value, speed, and scale.
And that’s where we’re doubling down.
Customer Success Stories
When asked to share specific customer success stories, Korla explained:
We are seeing significant results from our AI engagements. Let me share two success stories.
HGS recently partnered with a leading US bank to strengthen its fraud risk monitoring while maintaining stringent standards for privacy, compliance, and cybersecurity.
We deployed AMLens, an AI-powered investigation assistant designed to reduce manual effort, improve analyst focus, and ensure consistent case narratives.
The solution enabled the bank to move away from fatigue-heavy, manual reviews to a secure, high-speed investigation model, while retaining human oversight for final decisions.
The results: the bank scaled from reviewing a few hundred cases a day to tens of thousands, and achieved a 75% faster overall investigation turnaround, a speed of under 200 seconds per case, and a 100x increase in analyst productivity.
In another example, a global healthcare organization in the glucose monitoring space was looking to speed up their response time with high-intent diabetes patients without increasing their headcount.
By implementing HGS’s Speed-to-Lead Conversational AI and Recap AI services, the client established an FDA- and HIPAA-compliant, AI-driven customer experience layer that enables faster outreach, consistent information delivery, and structured insight capture.
The results: 50%-65% more patient engagement by acting at the moment of interest, 35%-45% increased potential sales by responding faster, and less than 5 seconds to respond to patient inquiries.
Competitive Differentiation
When asked what differentiates HGS from its competition, Korla said:
I believe it’s our globally local approach and our willingness to take thoughtful risks alongside our clients.
Unlike many who might sell a black box AI solution, HGS focuses on transparent, accountable AI with humans always in the loop that clients can trust.
Many of our clients have stayed with us for over a decade because we don’t just provide technology-led solutions, we evolve with them as their needs change.
Future Goals
When discussing HGS’s future goals, Korla explained:
Our vision is to be the go-to partner for business transformation through intelligent experiences powered by AI, data, and human empathy, turning AI’s potential into real progress by delivering intelligence rooted in certainty.
Today, clients don’t need more pilots or promises. They are looking for AI to work in the real world and deliver measurable outcomes.
HGS is bridging the gap between automated operations and the human moments that customers actually remember. And we do it in a way that’s built to deliver value from day one.
Our Realized AI framework and PoV approach cut through the noise by helping clients see what works, prove impact quickly, and scale with confidence, thus moving complexity to certainty.
In line with this, we’re strengthening the HGS Agent X ecosystem, expanding our AI and data partnerships, and continuing to combine technological depth with real human understanding in our solutions.
We’re also doubling down on sectors like healthcare, financial services, retail, and the public sector, where the stakes are higher, expectations are sharper, and experience defines success.
The 90-Day Proof Of Value
When invited to discuss another topic, Korla concluded:
I’d just like to invite organizations to visit hgs.com/90-day-pov. If you’ve been hesitant to dive into AI because of the cost or the uncertainty, we’ve removed those barriers.
Let us prove the value to you, on our dime.
