Do your work and go home: Aditya Puri on leadership without frills

Mint India Investment Summit, Puri received the Lifetime Achievement Award and engaged in a candid fireside chat with editor-in-chief Ravi Krishnan. From why he moved to India in 1994 to artificial intelligence in banking and the work culture he batted for, this chat covered a wide range of subjects. Edited excerpts:I think India is still a very under-penetrated market as far as finance is concerned.

So, opportunities are phenomenal. Fundamentally, I would be as excited. That time, we had the public sector and private sector.

The public sector has come up, but ultimately demand exceeds supply in financial services. You have the ability now to meet that demand more easily at a lower cost because fundamentally, you are looking at a customer-focused organization that is agile, resilient, efficient and transparent. There were a different set of opportunities available at that time.Now, you have semi-urban and rural India, which is not penetrated; you have the ability to use the information that is available to fundamentally transform the business.

I think banking will be transformed. At the moment, there is too much hype, but AI is here to stay. But it's not as if everything is going to be implemented overnight, and there is too much negative hype on job losses.

But would I join banking? Yes, because I didn't do engineering!So, there were multiple factors involved. First, when you work for a large multinational, you really don't know whether your success is dependent upon the procedures and the brand, et cetera, of the multinationals. So it was an opportunity to actually put together something from the scratch, and we all had very high ambitions, where we said, why can't we create a world-class Indian bank, starting from