'India Is Buying Technology Faster Than Building Talent for It', Says Hero Group's Shefali Munjal

What holds us back is not one thing; it is a chain. First, mindset — Indians still buy insurance to save tax, not to manage risk, so they often buy the wrong products, or nothing at all. Second, risk perception — people consistently underprice the cost of hospitalisation or the loss of income until it is too late.

Third, the product itself — policies are complex, hard to compare, and difficult to understand. That is why insurance in India is still sold, not bought; it remains a push product, not a pull product. And fourth, trust — every past instance of mis-selling leaves behind a residue of doubt, because insurance is a promise that is truly tested only at the moment of claim.

Layer on top of this a distribution model that still has not fully cracked the last mile, and you have your answer. The real point is this: low penetration is not just a demand problem. It is a design problem — of products, trust and reach. Fix those, and the demographic and digital tailwinds will do the rest.

Both things are true, and the industry has to be honest about that. On mis-selling, progress is real — tighter regulation, better training and greater accountability have brought complaints down materially. So, if the question is whether the sale has become cleaner, we have come a long way.

But confidence is not won at the sale; it is won at the claim. And that is where the gap still lives. A single rejection — where a family encounters an exclusion they were never made to understand at purchase — can destroy more trust than a thousand smooth onboardings can build.

The root of the problem is structural: for too long, the culture has been transaction-first and commission-led, where the relationship effectively ends once the policy is issued. That is precisely the wrong moment for it to end. As a broker, I would say this is ours to fix: we must own the full lifecycle, and stand with the customer at the claim, not just at the sale.

The credibility gap is entirely closeable — but only when the industry consistently puts the customer ahead of the commission. We are moving that way. We are not there yet.

I think about this less as a business problem and more as a question of values. It starts with a distinction between inheritance and custodianship. An heir receives and consumes. A custodian holds something in trust, answerable for handing it on stronger than they found it. Once you adopt that lens, almost every governance and succession failure comes into focus — because most of them stem from confusing ownership with stewardship.

The challenges are multiple, and they compound. Many founders do not let go. There is also a refusal to separate ownership from management which is why so few family businesses survive into the third generation. It is also important to understand the real reason behind family disputes; they don’t usually come not from a shortage of wealth, but from a shortage of clarity — clarity on roles, rights, responsibilities and who decides what. Entitlement is the final challenge: assuming an heir should run the business simply because they can inherit it.

The best family businesses institutionalise trust before they need it. They put governance, succession, and values into a framework before crisis forces the issue. That is the difference between a family owning a business and a family stewarding an institution.

The risk nobody is pricing in is human. We are buying technology far faster than we are building the people to run it. According to ManpowerGroup's Talent Shortage Survey, four out of five Indian employers are struggling to fill roles, and applied AI skills are now among the hardest capabilities to find.

But this is not only a question of whether our people can use these systems. It is also a question of whether anyone trusts them. We are layering AI into healthcare diagnostics, financial advice, hiring decisions and customer interactions. Trust in those systems — trust in institutions, trust in data use, trust in how decisions are made — is the invisible balance sheet nobody is auditing closely enough.

You can be resilient to every external shock and still be hollowed out from within: unready people on one side, unearned trust on the other. AI initiatives rarely fail only because of technology. They fail because adoption is weak, leadership is absent, and people do not feel equipped or trusted to use the tools well.

Because it is no longer a soft sector. It is one of the smartest places to put serious money to work. Globally, the cultural and creative industries generate over $2 trillion a year. The returns are real, and they compound across jobs, exports, intellectual property, soft power — and the dignity of millions of creative livelihoods.

The mistake corporate India still makes is treating the arts as the cheque you write after you have made your money, rather than as one of the places where money should be working in the first place.

My one caution is the same one I always give: do not spread thin across a dozen causes. Pick a niche, back it with time and patience — not just a cheque — and stay the course for years. For my family, that niche is art and culture, and I believe it will prove one of the most consequential investments we ever make.

Not merely because we inherited a love of the arts, but because we see ourselves, like others before us, as stewards of a civilisation's creativity — charged with handing it on richer, more visible and more economically alive than we found it.

One shift, above even AI: the coming-of-age of India's people.

We are the youngest large nation on earth at precisely the moment the rest of the world is growing old — a young India in an ageing world. That single asymmetry is the defining fact of our decade.

It moves through every channel at once. Economically, it is a consumption story. As people cross income thresholds, they do not merely begin to spend; they begin, often for the first time, to protect what they have earned. Technologically, this is the largest generation that will ever work alongside AI.

India will not simply adopt it; it will shape how humans and machines coexist. Socially, it is quietly rewriting who gets to participate at all. But a demographic dividend is not a demographic destiny. It is a window, not a guarantee, and it does not stay open forever.

Whether it pays out turns on one question: do we equip these young people, and does opportunity reach the woman in the small town and the craftsman on the margin, not just the gleaming corridor? Get that right, and India becomes the human capital of the world.

Get it wrong, and we will have created the most destabilising thing a society can — a generation promised everything and prepared for nothing. So my answer is human. It is our greatest opportunity, our sharpest advantage and our hardest test.