Women Leading the Shift toward a Smarter AI-Enabled Workplace

By: Vipin Luthra, Sr Director- Corporate functions, Diageo

Vipin Luthra is a seasoned technology leader with over 25 years of experience driving large-scale digital transformation across FMCG, retail, and enterprise technology domains. Currently serving as Director, Corporate Functions at Diageo, Vipin leads technology strategy, digital transformation, and innovation across Finance, People, Legal, and Corporate Relations value streams. Vipin also heads Diageo’s SAP and Anaplan Centers of Excellence (CoEs), driving transformation, delivery excellence, and system optimization transformation, data governance, and system optimization

In a thoughtful conversation with Women Entrepreneurs Review Magazine, Vipin shares compelling perspectives on how AI is transforming industries, defining productivity, and changing capabilities in organizations. Her opinions bring out the strategic priorities that leaders need to adopt in order to open up meaningful value and position themselves to the next wave of innovation.

To explore more about her vision, leadership mindset, and AI-driven outlook, read the complete article below.

How do you see AI shaping the future of our industry, and what opportunities should leaders prioritize in the next 3–5 years?

AI is set to fundamentally reshape the future of every industry. It is not just a trend; it's a transformative force fundamentally reshaping every industry through three key dimensions.

Personal Productivity – AI serves as a co-pilot, helping individuals work smarter and faster by providing better insights, automating routine tasks, and offering contextual assistance.

Operational Excellence – Organizations can achieve significant efficiency gains by leveraging AI for automation, augmentation, and acceleration across domains such as supply chain management, customer engagement, finance, and human resources. This leads to improved scalability, accuracy, and cost optimization.

Game-Changing Innovations – Apart from enhancing productivity and operational efficiency, AI has the potential to unlock new business models, products, and customer experiences, tailored to the specific industry and the strategic ambitions of its leaders.

Leaders across sectors should first focus on the two most immediate areas of AI application — personal productivity and operational excellence — before advancing toward innovation-driven transformation. These present near-term opportunities with tangible returns. The third area — innovation — can be selectively prioritized depending on industry maturity, risk appetite, and overall vision.

How would you build organisational capabilities for AI — in terms of skills, partnerships, and leadership alignment?

Building organizational capabilities for AI requires leaders to recognize that value creation spans three horizons — personal productivity, operational excellence, and game-changing innovation — each demanding a distinct yet connected approach blending skills, partnerships, and leadership alignment.

Building a Culture of AI to Enhance Personal Productivity

Leaders should focus on fostering an accessible and trusted culture of AI. Provide employees with secure, enterprise-grade AI tools that are easy to experiment with, and democratize access — AI should empower every function, from Finance and Supply to HR and Marketing. Encourage experimentation, learning, and scaling of small use cases.

Driving Operational Excellence through AI Expertise and Scaled Adoption

Leaders must evolve from experimentation to structured capability development. Invest in role-based training — data literacy for all employees; prompt engineering for business users, and model design for technical teams. Develop expertise in hyper automation, predictive analytics, and generative AI to optimize processes end to end. Form strategic partnerships with AI vendors, cloud providers, and system integrators to accelerate adoption and knowledge transfer. Build a Centre of Excellence (CoE), scalable platforms, and governance models to ensure sustainable growth.

Enabling Game-Changing Innovation — Driving Disruptive Impact

Foster a future-oriented, disruptive mindset. Encourage teams to reimagine business models and create an innovation ecosystem by partnering with startups, universities, and research labs. Align leadership around risk appetite, ethical AI principles, and long-term innovation bets. Establish innovation labs, venture partnerships, and bold capital allocations that support transformation and differentiation.

In your view, what are the most impactful ways AI can create measurable business value for an organization?

AI creates measurable business impact across three key dimensions, each delivering value through individual efficiency to enterprise transformation.

Personal Productivity — Driving Bottom-Line Efficiency

• AI as a digital co-pilot boosts individual productivity by automating routine tasks, enhancing decision-making, and enabling faster execution.
• Value comes from time savings, reduced errors, and higher employee engagement, directly improving operating margins.
• Knowledge management and policy Q&A systems, document summarisation, email and meeting co-pilots, and self-service assistants that simplify daily workflows

Operational Excellence — Optimising the Bottom Line

• AI in process automation, predictive analytics, and hyper automation streamlines operations, optimizes supply chains, and improves customer interactions.
• Measurable outcomes include lower costs, faster cycle times, reduced risk, and consistent service quality.
• AI-driven invoice processing, financial period closing automation, intelligent service desks across domains, and predictive or suggested ordering in supply chain functions

Game-Changing Innovations — Driving Top-Line Growth and Market Disruption

• The most transformative value comes from AI-driven innovation — reimagining products, services, and business models in entirely new ways.
• This is where organizations can unlock new revenue streams, redesign sales models, and disrupt entire industries.
• Examples: AI-enabled personalized products, autonomous decision systems, or platform-driven marketplaces that shift the value chain.
• Some of the examples are- creating new sales channels, end consumer engagement , defining new products design etc

In essence, AI delivers value at multiple levels — empowering people, optimising operations, and enabling innovation.

How are leading organizations applying AI in human resources management, and what risks or opportunities do you see in this area?

AI is playing a highly impactful role in Human Resources Management. I see three main areas where its application is most visible and impactful:

Talent Acquisition & Hiring: AI can help organizations attract, screen, and assess candidates more effectively. If used correctly, it can help organizations ensure that the right talent, with the right skills, fits the proper role. There is a massive opportunity through AI for improved hiring cycles and candidate experience, and better talent matching.

There are risks that organizations need to be careful of like potential biases in algorithms, a lack of transparency in decision-making processes, and an over-reliance on automated filters.

Employee Experience & Engagement: AI can enable employees to effectively connect with the organization’s culture, people, and policies. It can support personalized HR services, chatbots for queries, and even tools to monitor well-being and engagement. There is an opportunity for real-time feedback, higher engagement, and proactive support for mental health.

Learning & Capability Development: AI can drive personalized learning journeys, capability mapping, and upskilling aligned to business needs. It can also help predict future skills gaps and guide career growth. There is an opportunity for accelerated learning, better alignment of workforce skills with strategy, and continuous development. If not implemented inclusively, employees may feel pressured by AI-driven assessments or left behind in digital adoption. The human touch should always be a priority and not be overlooked.

“AI is the new UI.” In HR, AI is transforming how organizations hire smarter, engage deeper, and develop talent faster. The real opportunity is in striking a balance between efficiency and empathy — utilizing AI to augment human decision-making, not replace it.