July 17th, 2025
2 min read
At NTT DATA North America, innovation is a daily practice. Nitin Bajaj, VP Generative AI, NTT DATA, and Mary Leos, Senior Director and NA Innovation Center Lead, NTT DATA, joined us to offer a powerful glimpse into how they’re helping clients move from exploration to real, scalable value with generative AI and other transformative technologies.
They shared NTT DATA’s approach to rapid change: stay grounded in real client needs, build with scale in mind, and create innovation that lasts, backed by a global, diverse, and deeply collaborative team.
Bridges and Barriers
Last year was the year of experimentation, Bajaj says. Clients came in filled with curiosity, asking what generative AI could do. The NTT DATA team responded with more than 750 projects across 400 clients, diving deep into customized use cases.
This year, the conversation has shifted dramatically.
“Now it’s all about scale,” Bajaj says. “Clients are asking: how do we embed this into our business to drive tangible outcomes?” Bajaj and Leos are both seeing patterns emerge across sectors, enabling their teams to develop repeatable solutions and industry-specific offerings. One example: reimagining the life and annuities claims process using agentic frameworks, to deliver faster, more efficient service in a traditionally slow-moving industry.
AI in Society
At NTT DATA’s Innovation Center, Leos focuses on both the now and the next. In daily engagements with clients, she helps uncover what’s immediately actionable, while also guiding them toward long-term shifts on the horizon, from quantum computing to domain-specific AI models.
“It’s not just about what GenAI can do today,” she says. “We’re asking how it will evolve. How will it integrate with other breakthroughs like machine learning, informatics or quantum?”
She points to a compelling project in the public sector. It uses GenAI to process citizen complaints more efficiently, while also giving residents real-time dashboards showing the status of their concerns. It’s a simple shift with a profound impact on trust and civic engagement.
What makes the model at NTT DATA work is the tight collaboration between innovation leads and business practices. Leos and Bajaj emphasize how they co-create with clients, bringing them into focused GenAI labs to identify pain points and build out prioritized solutions.
“You walk out of these labs with a top-three roadmap for innovation,” Bajaj says. “It’s not just ideation. It’s execution-ready.”
Leos also notes that diversity is a key driver of innovation, not just in terms of gender or background, but in global perspectives and lived experience. Her teams include contributors from Japan, Italy, Romania, and beyond, and they collaborate across borders to design richer, more nuanced solutions.
“When we bring in cultural and generational diversity, we unlock better answers for our clients,” she says. “It’s one of our greatest assets.”
Almost every business process over the next few years is going to be fundamentally transformed with agentic AI. And it is just so exciting to see that and work through that and help our clients achieve the value from it
