On May 15, 2025, DocQ hosted Next-Gen Operations: Automating Processes, Finance & Beyond with AI — a curated executive roundtable at Le Méridien, Sector 26, Gurgaon. The invite-only evening brought together CIOs, CTOs, and CFOs from across industries for a candid conversation about where intelligent automation is heading and what it takes to get there.
The event was held in cooperation with FnShift Solutions, and featured talks by Anuj Sehgal (CEO & Co-Founder, DocQ), Atul Pratap (Co-Founder, FnShift Solutions), and Farman Khalid (Chief Digital Officer, Emaar India).
Why a Roundtable, Not a Conference
Enterprise technology events tend to fall into two categories: large conferences with broad themes and little depth, or vendor demos disguised as thought leadership. We wanted neither.
The roundtable format was deliberate. A small group of senior decision-makers — the people who actually sign off on transformation initiatives and live with the consequences — in a room together, sharing what's working, what isn't, and what they wish vendors would understand.
No booths. No sales pitches. Just a focused conversation among peers navigating similar challenges.
The Central Theme: From Chaos to Velocity
The evening's presentations centered on a question that every operations leader is grappling with: how do you move from fragmented, manual processes to automated, intelligent workflows — without multi-year implementation timelines and without disrupting what's already working?
Three perspectives framed the discussion:
The Platform Perspective — Anuj Sehgal walked through how DocQ approaches enterprise automation: not as a single-function tool, but as a platform layer that handles documents, workflows, AI extraction, e-signatures, and system integration in one place. The key theme was reducing the number of systems enterprises need to manage, not adding another one.
The Implementation Perspective — Atul Pratap from FnShift Solutions brought the practitioner's view. Process transformation projects succeed or fail based on how well they're implemented — and the gap between what technology can do and what organizations actually adopt is where most value gets lost.
The Enterprise Buyer Perspective — Farman Khalid from Emaar India shared the CDO's reality: balancing innovation ambitions with operational constraints, justifying automation investments to the board, and managing the change management challenge that comes with every new platform.
What Emerged from the Discussion
The roundtable format works because the best insights come from the conversations between presentations, not the presentations themselves. Several themes emerged consistently:
AI readiness is a data problem, not a technology problem. Multiple attendees noted that their organizations have access to capable AI tools but lack the structured data pipelines to feed them. Document intelligence — extracting structured data from unstructured documents — was identified as a critical first step that unlocks everything downstream.
Finance operations are the proving ground. Accounts payable, procurement, and compliance were the most frequently cited starting points for automation. They're high-volume, rule-based, and measurable — ideal for demonstrating ROI before expanding to other departments.
No-code matters more than AI buzzwords. The executives in the room were less interested in model architectures and more interested in whether their teams could configure and maintain the automation without dedicated developers. Platform accessibility was a recurring theme.
Integration is the real bottleneck. Most enterprises don't need another standalone tool. They need automation that connects to SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and the dozens of other systems already in place. iPaaS capabilities and pre-built connectors were discussed extensively.
The Conversations That Happened at the Table
Some of the most valuable exchanges happened informally — during networking before the sessions and over dinner afterward. Leaders from different industries discovering they face identical challenges. A CFO from manufacturing comparing notes with a CTO from real estate on vendor evaluation criteria. A compliance head asking pointed questions about audit trail requirements that sparked a broader discussion on governance.
These connections are the real output of a roundtable. The presentations provide structure. The peer conversations provide clarity.
What's Next
The Gurgaon roundtable was the first in what we're planning as a series. The format works — senior leaders value candid, small-group discussions far more than large-scale conferences. The feedback from attendees confirmed that there's appetite for more of these conversations, in more cities, with more focused topics.
If you're a senior operations, technology, or finance leader interested in joining a future roundtable, get in touch. We're planning additional events across India and the Middle East.
Next-Gen Operations: Automating Processes, Finance & Beyond with AI was held on May 15, 2025 at Le Méridien, Sector 26, Gurgaon. The event was organized by DocQ in cooperation with FnShift Solutions.
