April 10th, 2025

2 min read

Sandip Gupta is responsible for developing NTT DATA’s global strategic alliances with key technology providers. Those strategic alliances are focused in three areas:

  1. 360-degree relationships to drive innovation and build solutions for internal use as well as for clients.

  2. Bringing together NTT DATA’s industry expertise and client intimacy to pair with the tech platforms from NTT DATA partners.

  3. Differentiation in the market by building innovative solutions that leverage the full NTT DATA portfolio of services.

Gupta is a strong believer in the power of collaboration, and he shared his perspectives on how NTT and its partners work together to drive AI innovation. 

Bridges and Barriers 

At the heart of Global Strategic Alliances team’s work with partners lie two key elements: customers and R&D.  

“Across NTT and NTT DATA, we spend a lot of money on innovation and R&D,” he says. “We continuously look at where the gaps are between what our clients are looking for and the solutions we have. We bring our technology partners to fill that gap or strengthen our assets to deliver unique value propositions for our clients.”  

What’s especially important to customers right now is an AI-driven stack. So, as the market evolves, NTT is working with each of its partners at different levels and developing a range of AI assets, including the Smart AI Agent platform. “We are working with each of our partners to incorporate their technologies to enrich our GenAI solutions including Agent AI platform that we can take to market,” Gupta says. “It’s AI for smarter, faster IT support, accelerated trouble shooting, reduced downtime, and enhanced user satisfaction.” 

Gupta gives two strong examples of partner collaboration to deliver best-in-breed results for customers: 

In Spain, the retailer Carrefour needed to improve its ability to meet dynamic IT demands during high-traffic events. The solution was to move from on-premise systems to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) utilizing GCP’s flexibility, scalability, and robust governance features, which aligned with Carrefour’s need for agility and cost flexibility.
“NTT DATA played a pivotal role in this transformation by providing a comprehensive portfolio of cloud services, including governance, service management, and cost optimization,” says Gupta.  NTT DATA integrated Carrefour’s core IT management tools with cloud-native tools, ensuring high availability and reliability. The solution consolidated over 100 legacy applications, supporting business processes in more than 200 hypermarkets, and a new e-commerce platform.

Another example is Continental Automotive. “We’ve seen major interest in AI use cases and concepts to reduce the burden of manual workloads in recent months. A prime example of that is Continental Automotive, a division of world-leading automotive supplier and tire manufacturer Continental AG,” Gupta says. Drawing on the powerful capabilities of the Microsoft Azure platform, the NTT DATA team helped develop an AI-powered solution for requirements management engineering. This new approach allows Continental to extract customer requirements from complex documents, then map them to existing product features — reducing manual efforts for this by up to eight times. This innovative use of AI is helping Continental to efficiently handle up to 30,000 requirements per project — accelerating product market launches, and optimizing engagement with customers and suppliers alike.

Gupta also points to the NTT DATA GenAI TechHub platform, created for its developers. It incorporates partners’ technology, accelerates deployment and the use of GenAI. “The NTT DATA GenAI TechHub is a ready global repository of reusable GenAI prototypes, components, toolkits and solutions,” he says. “Built on scalable infrastructure, it leverages leading hyperscalers like Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud to integrate GenAI use cases and solutions.” 

Key to all of these AI-driven solutions is an innovation ecosystem involving partners, customers and NTT itself. “We drive innovation with our partners by industry, drinking our own champagne and applying these technologies internally,” Gupta adds.  


AI in Society 

We are a complex machine like any other global systems integrator, and we look for partners who can fill certain customer needs where we potentially don't have a solution today, or we anticipate a problem that we need to look for a solution.
Sandip Gupta, Head of Global Strategic Alliances, NTT DATA

NTT works with partners both large and small. When it comes to startups, Gupta says, he looks for partners that have a solution that has been deployed with a few customers and has some real-world validation as proof points. They don’t necessarily need to have received investment because sometimes companies can build based on little to no investment. 

“We are looking for companies that are taking feedback and input, working together on the initial set of POCs (proof of concepts) and then scaling,” Gupta explains. “We have a lot of work in the application, network, and data center space, in security, so we look at a broad range of opportunities that we have with our clients where startups can potentially fit very well into our innovation architecture.” 

Having unique alliances with multinationals and local firms in AI is a big differentiator for NTT as it focuses on collaboration to support customers and innovate the future.