Digital Transformation at Scale: Why Most Indian Enterprises Are Still in the Pilot Trap

A pattern has emerged in CXO India's conversations with technology and operations leaders at large Indian enterprises: the pilot that never becomes a programme. An organisation launches a promising digital initiative — a process automation, a data analytics platform, a customer experience redesign — demonstrates proof of concept, and then stalls. The pilot runs for months or years in a contained environment while the core business continues operating as it always has. Transformation, in effect, happens at the edges and never reaches the centre. The causes are well understood even if the remedies are rarely applied. The most fundamental is a resourcing contradiction: companies allocate digital transformation budgets to initiatives while simultaneously protecting the legacy operating models that those initiatives are supposed to replace. The business units that must change their processes to realise the digital investment are the same business units whose leaders are incentivised on the short-term performance of those processes. Without resolving this contradiction — which requires board-level commitment to managing through a transition period of reduced productivity — the pilot stays a pilot. The second cause is a leadership capability gap that is rarely acknowledged honestly. Scaling a digital programme requires a different skill set from building a pilot. Pilots reward creativity and technical cleverness. Scale requires process discipline, change management rigour, and the ability to bring along middle management that did not choose to be disrupted. The executives who are best at one are rarely best at both, and companies that do not distinguish between the two phases — and staff them accordingly — consistently underperform their potential.