Sudeepta Choudhuri

Moderated by Dr. Akash, the Day-1 lunch-hour panel brought together four senior industry voices — Maharajan Muthuswamy (Director, BNY), Ashish Mahnot (Industry Principal, Infosys BPM), Sudipta Choudhury (CEO, AI Human; ex-Vodafone, Tata, Birla), and Sanjeev Bhalla (Founder & CEO, Adveritium Global Partners; ex-McKinsey) — to put one question to the room: what has actually changed in what industry wants from B-school graduates? The framing was deliberate. Citing GMAC, Dr. Akash anchored the panel on three pieces of data: 90% of global recruiters still plan to hire MBAs (the MBA is not dead), 31% now treat AI fluency as a decisive hiring factor, and AI tools and skills now sit alongside problem-solving, strategic thinking and communication — not after them. The conversation then unfolded across three themes: foundational mindset, the AI baseline, and workplace readiness. On foundational shifts, Sanjeev Bhalla offered the cleanest framework — McKinsey's Access → Analysis → Judgment arc, with the first two now commoditised by AI. Sudipta Choudhury underlined that the skills change but the attitude (go-getter, collaborative, owns the last mile) hasn't shifted in twenty years. Ashish Mahnot brought a three-part lens — AI etiquette, AI ethics, and domain readiness — anchored on the warning that "no AI engine is going to teach a manager how to acknowledge a grievance." Maharajan Muthuswamy reframed the timeline brutally: when he joined as a developer he had three months to learn the domain; today's analysts at BNY get fifteen days, with code expected in production by day sixty. On gaps in current graduates, the panel converged on five: too many certificates and not enough projects taken to the last mile (Sudipta); poor deadline and timeline management (Sudipta); rigid mindset that demands a project change in week two (Maharajan); post-COVID erosion of basic professional behaviour — being on video, being presentable, taking ownership (Ashish); and the inability to manage complexity and ambiguity — to break a problem down, solve it, and synthesise it back up (Sanjeev, who introduced the Iceberg Principle that 10% of how we behave is dictated by the 90% within us). On the AI baseline, the shift from AI literacy to AI fluency (or AI awareness vs AI fluency in Infosys's vocabulary) was unanimous. Maharajan introduced two specific tools — Microsoft's Windsurf (now a mandate for every BNY developer, multi-LLM-backed, week-of-work-into-hours) and Anthropic's Mitos (closed-trust-circle release; BNY is one of the early enterprise users for banking-system fraud safeguarding). Sanjeev's framing landed in one sentence: "We're not looking for people who can use ChatGPT in the best prompt way. We're looking for people who have the judgment to know how to use AI." On workplace readiness, Sanjeev offered the single most actionable critique of B-school culture: "In Canada, the placement office created network. There were no companies coming to campus. We had to network, find CFOs, see how our skills matched, and find a job. That's the true power of placement offices — opening the network of distinguished personalities so students know first-hand what's expected of them." Maharajan and Sudipta added the on-the-job practice of running induction in show-and-tell mode rather than PPT — "by end of this financial year, our team will not use PPT. Tell the story through working applications." Two questions from the audience grounded the conversation: a question on whether internship-domain mismatch hurts career trajectory (panel: no — be domain-ready in your target sector regardless of where you interned), and a question on the right curricular-vs-extracurricular mix on campus (panel, paraphrasing Sanjeev: there is no formula — be authentic, be the best version of yourself; the institution's job is to be a buffet, not a prescription).

Editorial summary compiled by the FDP team — not a verbatim transcript. Spotted an inaccuracy? Let us know.