Mint All About AI Tech4Good Awards & Summit 2025: Celebrating Innovation with Purpose
The Awards recognised transformative AI solutions, including multilingual platforms, waste management innovations, and AI's potential to enhance inclusivity.
The second edition of Mint’s All About AI Tech4Good Awards and Summit, sponsored by Salesforce, brought together industry leaders, innovators and policymakers to celebrate the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in driving societal impact. The event, hosted in Mumbai, highlighted the role of AI in uplifting communities, fostering inclusion and addressing pressing global challenges such as sustainability, education, healthcare and financial inclusion.
Keynote Highlights
The evening commenced with an inspiring keynote by Binoy Prabhakar, Chief Content Officer, HT Digital Streams, who stressed upon the importance of using technology responsibly to transform lives. Reflecting on the success of the initiative, he said, “At Mint, we have always believed that the real story of AI isn’t about machines replacing humans. It’s about humans redefining what’s possible with machines.”
The keynote was followed by a welcome note by Arundhati Bhattacharya, President & CEO, Salesforce South Asia, who spoke about the importance of responsible use of technology. “Technology is not just a collection of shiny gadgets or intricate algorithms. At its very heart, it is an unwavering enabler, the courageous bridge that connects the disconnected,” she said.
However, she added that innovation without empathy risks deepening divides, urging businesses to pursue solutions that are relevant, scalable and sustainable. “Let us innovate not just for fleeting convenience but for lasting impact,” she added.
This was followed by a virtual address by Amitabh Kant, former G20 Sherpa and former CEO of NITI Aayog, who underscored the need for India to develop sovereign AI capabilities. “India must take bold strides to build a thriving end-to-end AI ecosystem. The opportunity is immense, and the potential for global impact is unparalleled,” he said.
A special address by Abhishek Singh, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and IT, highlighted India’s strides in AI and digital public infrastructure. He stated, “India’s digital public infrastructure story is a shining example of how technology can empower people and expand access to public services.”
Watch the Summit livestream here,
Transforming Education
A fireside chat at the event featured Arundhati Bhattacharya from Salesforce and Raghav Gupta, Head of Education - India and Asia Pacific at OpenAI, who discussed the transformative role of generative AI in education, its potential to democratise learning and the importance of guiding young users to use AI responsibly.
The summit featured two engaging discussions. The first panel discussion, moderated by Leslie D’Monte, Consulting Editor at Mint, explored the theme of scaling responsibly with generative AI and agentic AI. Panelists, including Ganesh Gopalan, CEO & CO-Founder, Gnani.AI Rucha Nanavati, Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Mahindra Automotive Rishi Verma, Head - Global Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence, FSS Amit Deshpande, SVP - Customer Success, Salesforce, shared insights on the opportunities and challenges of adopting AI technologies in enterprises. Nanavati highlighted, “We are at a stage where we are asking, ‘What can AI do for me?’ rather than fearing its impact on jobs.”
The second panel, moderated by Abhishek Singh, Deputy Editor at Mint, delved into the theme of ‘Data for Good: Making responsible AI Work at Scale’. Panelists, including Rahul Matthan, Partner at Trilegal, and Kashyap Kompella, Founder of RPA2AI Research, discussed the importance of responsible AI governance and the need for organisations to embed security and compliance into their frameworks. Matthan said: “AI is a necessity for India to flatten its development trajectory and achieve its goals.”
Award Winners
The highlight of the evening was the presentation of the All About AI Tech4Good Awards, which recognised impactful AI innovations across various categories. This is the first edition where international entries were also included from South Asia to start with. Read on to know are the winners and the change they drove,
Best Use of AI for Empowering People with Disabilities
Gold: Sarvam AI – Developed a full-stack generative AI platform enabling multilingual conversational agents in 11 Indian languages, improving inclusion, cost efficiency and digital sovereignty.
Silver: Ridlan AI Foundation – Piloted Milab Setu AI, a facial recognition system that identifies missing elderly and disabled individuals within minutes, achieving a 60 per cent faster identification rate.
Best Use of AI for Sustainability
Gold: EcogenX Innovations – Transformed waste management into a predictive ecosystem, diverting more than 12,000 tons of waste from landfills and enabling real-time waste tracking in three cities.
Silver: Singapore Technologies Engineering – Integrated AI into city traffic operations, reducing incident detection time to under 2 minutes and cutting energy usage by 18 per cent.
Best Use of AI for Financial Inclusion
Gold: Rezo.ai – Deployed an agentic AI platform that improved debt collection efficiency to 96-98 per cent, cut loan approval time to 48 hours and enabled multilingual AI agents across 13 languages.
Silver: Nivinsure – Built AI Suraksha, an AI-driven coverage assistant that reduces claim disputes by 60 per cent, accelerates settlements and improves fraud detection.
Best Use of AI in Agriculture and Food Security
Gold: Sickle Innovations Private – Created an AI optical grading sorting system for fruits and vegetables, boosting accuracy to 95 per cent, tripling sorting speed and cutting labour costs by 40 per cent.
Silver: DayaTani Digital – Developed Park Daya, an AI-powered field advisory platform that improves yields by 18-25 per cent and reduces query resolution time to under 10 minutes.
Best Use of AI in Health and Sanitation
Gold: Remidio Innovative Solutions – Enabled instant, affordable eye screening through AI, reducing costs by 80 per cent and helping Kerala screen 4 lakh rural citizens annually to prevent avoidable blindness.
Silver: Singapore Smart Tech – Used AI-driven analytics to improve orthodontic product design, reducing defects by 35 per cent and improving supply accuracy.
Best Use of AI for Education and Livelihoods
Gold: Niveda Foundation – Deployed AI-driven learning analytics that cut dropout rates from 40 per cent to 12 per cent and improved job placements by 45 per cent.
Silver: Udhyam Learning Foundation – Launched an AI mentor via WhatsApp, enabling 15,000 teams to submit 37,500 project attempts in one week, improving submission quality by 30 per cent.
Special Recognitions
Young Innovators Award: Sudhanshu Yadav – Developed an AI learning assistant that provides personalised step-by-step guidance to help students build confidence and master new skills.
Women Innovators Award: Patenti Technology Solutions – Created an AI-driven IP analysis engine that halves analysis time and improves SCP detection accuracy to 91 per cent, democratising IP intelligence for innovators and enterprises alike.
Technology as a Force for Good
The Mint’s All About AI Tech for Good Awards and Summit 2025 comes as a celebration of innovation, empathy, and ethics, showcasing how technology can be a powerful force for good. As the evening concluded, the message was clear: the future of AI lies in its ability to serve humanity and create a more inclusive, sustainable, and prosperous world.
Note to Readers: This is a Mint editorial initiative, sponsored by Salesforce.
