
India is no longer a ticket-taker: Zinnia India CEO Josh Everett

Talking to ETGCCWorld, Zinnia India CEO Josh Everett — who's watched the Indian GCC sector evolve over 25 years — traces the shift from India as an execution hub to India as a genuine strategic center, using Zinnia's own roughly 1,600-person, nine-city India operation as the case study. The teams there don't just execute engineering tickets; they run global HR operations and contribute to strategy across functions.
Past the Pilot Stage
Everett is candid that AI adoption at Zinnia is well past the pilot stage — he puts the share of code written with AI assistance at around 65%, validated by engineers before it ships — and that the next big shift for the industry is hyper-personalization, using the vast data insurers already hold to make customer experience feel individual even at scale. What's more interesting is where he thinks the real bottleneck sits: not the technology, but company culture. He describes a split between organizations curious enough to experiment and iterate, and those too cautious to try, with the first group pulling ahead.
Betting on Tier II Cities
On India specifically, he points to a deliberate expansion into Tier II cities to chase talent beyond the metros, and argues the country is also an underrated insurance market in its own right — still under 4% penetration, with a regulatory environment and digital infrastructure he compares to the conditions that made India's digital payments boom possible. Asked whether AI threatens jobs, he frames it as a rebalancing rather than a reduction: the demand for top talent doesn't go away, it just shifts toward higher-value work.
India is no longer a ticket-taker. It is a developing, executing, and testing strategy. The depth of capability that exists here is evident in the work being done every single day.
Read the Full Article
Want to dive deeper? Read the complete interview on The Economic Times.
Read the Full Article on The Economic Times