India’s resource-intensive industries—mining, construction, agriculture, and forestry—are undergoing rapid digital transformation amid unique market challenges. Ash Agarwal, CEO of SYMX.AI, a global leader in industrial AI and IoT solutions, provides candid insights on navigating India’s diverse landscape. Agarwal outlines SYMX.AI’s disciplined entry strategy, focusing on ROI-driven adoption, connectivity innovations, and targeting high-potential sectors like mining and construction.
India’s resource-heavy sectors are at an inflection point, where digital transformation is no longer optional but uneven in execution. Ash Agarwal shares with CXO XPERTS how the company is navigating market complexity, tackling infrastructure gaps, and driving measurable ROI in mining and construction.
India is a diverse and complex market. What are the key markets where you see the greatest potential for SYMX.AI?
India is a rich and diverse market, and for any new technology to gain traction here, several forces must align simultaneously — infrastructure readiness, digital maturity, willingness to trial, and a conducive procurement process.
The reality is that having a good product and finding someone who wants it doesn’t automatically lead to a successful transaction. There are multiple transaction friction points that vary significantly by geography. This concept—what I call Adam’s principle of transaction friction—is crucial to understand.
In the USA, the market operates differently. If your product is genuinely good, you will find business; that’s the hallmark of American markets. In India, being good enough isn’t sufficient. There are additional hoops to navigate that are simply part of operating here. This isn’t negative or positive—it’s simply the reality of India’s current economic stage.
Encouragingly, India’s public sector procurement has evolved. The government now places 70% weightage on quality and only 30% on price, moving away from the old lowest-bid model. Despite being only three to four months into the Indian market, we are already working with three to four public sector companies — which we consider a strong early signal.
In terms of sectors, where do you see the most promising opportunities?
Without question, mining and construction represent our strongest focus areas. These are sectors where we have extensive credibility and proven capability.
We follow a disciplined approach: in mature markets where we’ve operated for years—say, five years in mining—we can experiment with adjacent sectors. But in India, where we’re building credibility from scratch, and here we won’t experiment. We need to deliver results in sectors where the conditions are optimal.
When I say construction, I’m talking about quarries, road construction, and tunnel building. In India’s mining sector, there’s a prevalent model where excavation and haulage operations are heavily subcontracted. Large companies have vast networks of contractors operating their equipment. This structure presents both opportunities and challenges.
Mining operations in India often rely heavily on subcontractors. How does that affect your go-to-market approach?
This is a genuinely complex challenge. When we design our go-to-market strategy, we evaluate four key factors for any market segment: infrastructure readiness, digital maturity, willingness to pay, and operational processes. Large mining companies tick all these boxes—they have infrastructure, digital maturity, financial capacity, and formal procurement systems. They’re ideal customers. But a significant portion of their operations, particularly excavation and haulage, is subcontracted out.
Smaller contractors operating fleets of 30 to 40 trucks are in a very different position. Their immediate concerns are operational survival — driver shortages, daily cash flow, keeping vehicles on the road. Introducing an AI-driven efficiency platform to a contractor who is short two drivers is simply not the right conversation.
Our approach has been to work through the end customer — the large mining company — even when operations are contracted out. They care deeply about two things that we can directly influence: safety and fuel efficiency. If a contracted operator drives recklessly, it affects the end customer’s safety record. If trucks are running with low tyre pressure or clogged air filters, the end customer bears the fuel cost. These are compelling enough incentives for the end customer to mandate or sponsor our technology across their contractor base.
You mentioned fuel efficiency as a major value driver. Can you put that into perspective?
Fuel is the second-largest line item in the mining industry, and the numbers are staggering. I was working with a major coal mining company in Indonesia whose annual fuel consumption was approximately 875 million litres — close to a billion dollars’ worth of diesel.
When I told their head of business operations that fuel consumption can be reduced by 10%, his response was striking. He asked me not to mention this to anyone else in the company. His words were essentially: ‘You’re telling me I’m leaving $100 million on the table every year — people will lose their jobs over this.’ That story illustrates just how significant the commercial impact is, and why even modest, provable improvements carry enormous weight in this industry.
India is known for its buyer mind-set around cost. How do you navigate pricing conversations here?
I would characterise the difference this way: the Western world is time-poor, and India is cost-poor. In the West, ‘I’ll pay more to save time.’ In India, ‘I’ll spend more time to save money.’ That distinction shapes everything about how buyers evaluate technology investments.
What’s missing in the Indian market is a clear sense of opportunity cost — the cost of not adopting. If a buyer is spending 30,000 rupees a month on a gym membership it seems expensive. But if a doctor tells them they will face serious health consequences without it, the calculus changes entirely. We apply the same logic: if you don’t implement SYMX.AI, what exactly are you losing each month?
We are an ROI-first company. Rather than leading with technology features, we build detailed financial models for each customer — showing low, medium, and high scenarios. In our standard case, a customer recoups their investment within 45 days. From day 46 onwards, they are net positive. For Indian customers who remain hesitant, we sometimes offer a simple arrangement: if you see results within 45 days, you pay us. If you don’t, we take our system back and walk away. Forty-five days is four meetings. The risk to the customer is essentially zero.
What is the biggest structural challenge to technology adoption in your industry globally?
The primary challenge is not artificial intelligence or data analytics — it is infrastructure. Specifically, data access and connectivity.
Multiple equipment vendors exist: Caterpillar, Komatsu, Volvo, Liebherr, P&H, Atlas Copco, Sandvik, and Epiroc. Each maintains proprietary data access through separate software paywalls. A customer with a mixed fleet—which is almost universal—must subscribe to multiple systems that don’t communicate with each other. JCB data doesn’t integrate with Komatsu data. Komatsu doesn’t talk to Hitachi. Customers want unified visibility across their entire fleet, but it’s technically impossible with current vendor models. That is an enormous inefficiency.
Then there is the connectivity problem.
How are you addressing the connectivity challenge?
Roughly 90% of the global mining industry operates without reliable internet. You cannot tell a mine operator to install broadband as a prerequisite for your solution — they’ve been trying to justify that budget for years and failing. So we built our own network. Using a repurposed mesh Wi-Fi architecture, our IoT devices form a peer-to-peer network, truck to truck. Each device that collects machine data also acts as a Wi-Fi node. We can cover 40 kilometres of a mine with high-speed connectivity, without laying a single metre of optical fibre. We are currently filing for a patent on this approach.
The solution involved clever repurposing of existing WiFi technology. Standard WiFi routers have limited range—typically functional only within immediate proximity. We extended this to 900 metres by creating a mesh network where each IoT device collecting truck data simultaneously functions as a WiFi node, extending coverage throughout the mining area.
It’s elegant engineering with no proprietary components. The same hardware that captures operational data provides connectivity infrastructure.
You have referenced GE Digital’s experience in this space. What lessons does that hold for SYMX.AI?
GE Digital invested approximately $5 billion in industrial AI and predictive analytics for mining around 15 years ago. The technology was genuinely good. The intention was right. But the market was not ready — the infrastructure wasn’t there, the organisational mindset hadn’t evolved, and the data ecosystem didn’t exist.
GE had to write off the entire venture. It wasn’t the technology’s fault, and it wasn’t the customers’ fault. It was simply the wrong moment to enter.
The lesson for us is about timing and risk-sharing. India is ripe right now — companies are actively seeking these solutions. But apprehension remains. Our job is to remove every conceivable barrier to entry, structure commercial arrangements that place the risk entirely on us, and demonstrate value within weeks rather than months. When the market is ready and you remove the risk for the buyer, adoption follows.
How do you differentiate SYMX.AI in a market crowded with technology vendors and startups?
The Indian technology market has a significant noise problem. When we entered, we made a deliberate decision not to position ourselves as a startup — because the word has been diluted here to the point of meaning almost nothing. An idea and a slide deck is not a startup.
We have been operating for 18 years. Our customers include Glencore, Vale, Newmont, and other Fortune 500 companies. That track record is our differentiator — but we cannot simply state it. We have to demonstrate it, in the right rooms, with the right people.
That is why our India entry strategy has been top-down: building relationships at the C-suite level, participating in high-calibre industry forums, and ensuring that when we do speak about our capabilities, we are doing so alongside partners like Deloitte and Accenture. Credibility is earned contextually. In a crowded market, who you are seen with matters as much as what you say about yourself.
SYMX.AI’s entry into India underscores a pragmatic blueprint for industrial tech success: prioritise sectors with proven fit, solve core infrastructure hurdles, and lead with demonstrable ROI. By addressing transaction frictions and partnering with end-customers, Agarwal’s team is poised to scale across India’s mining and construction ecosystems. As public sector shifts favour quality over lowest bids, companies like SYMX.AI are well-positioned to drive efficiency, safety, and sustainability in these vital sectors.
