Beyond Ready-Made Roles: Shruti Thakral’s strategy for a workforce that thrives on uncertainty

Digital disruption is no longer a buzzword—it’s the new reality, redefining how banks operate, compete, and grow. What does it take for a Chief Human Resources Officer to not only keep up, but set the pace for the future of work in this landscape? 

At Airtel Payments Bank, a leader in India’s digital finance revolution, these questions are answered daily. This People Matters CHRO Perspective features Shruti Thakral, CHRO of Airtel Payments Bank, whose bold and forward-thinking approach to building, empowering, and sustaining a workforce that thrives amid perpetual change. 

Her insights slice through industry clichés, spotlighting how courageous leadership, relentless innovation, and an unwavering people-first culture are reshaping success in one of the world’s most competitive sectors. For anyone curious about turning transformation into lasting impact, this conversation is essential. 

Edited excerpts

Over the past few years, the BFSI talent landscape has undergone a significant transformation, especially amid the rapid evolution of banking practices, regulatory oversight, and technology-led business models.

One of the most profound shifts has been the increasing dependence on highly niche and specialised skills. Today, banks require highly product, business, and technical expertise, with employees expected to become subject-matter experts in highly specialised areas of work. This has fundamentally changed how organisations approach hiring and talent development. It has increased the need for highly targeted hiring while simultaneously reinforcing the importance of internally building and upskilling talent.

The second major shift has been the conscious strengthening of control organisations across the BFSI ecosystem. As digital banking expands rapidly, organisations are investing deeply in strengthening their second and third lines of defence to ensure that business growth happens responsibly and customer trust remains uncompromised. This focus on governance, compliance, and risk management has become increasingly central to workforce planning and capability building across the industry.

Together, these shifts indicate that the future of work in BFSI will be driven by specialised expertise, stronger governance capabilities, continuous learning, and the ability to adapt quickly in an increasingly technology-led environment.

One of the most complex talent challenges facing the BFSI sector today is building sustained agility within the workforce.

The industry is evolving at an unprecedented pace due to technological advancements, increasing regulatory scrutiny, AI-led transformation, and changing customer expectations. Employees today are expected to learn continuously, experiment confidently, and adapt rapidly to evolving business environments.

Traditionally, large banking institutions operated within highly structured ecosystems where stability and defined processes were central to how organisations functioned. However, the industry has transitioned from highly structured environments to significantly more dynamic ways of working over a very short period.

Today, employees at all levels, including frontline field executives, are expected to identify new use cases, understand emerging business lines, leverage data insights, drive automation, improve efficiency, and make faster decisions simultaneously. Expectations around quick thinking, experimentation, and learning agility have risen significantly. Ensuring that employees are able to continuously keep pace with this evolving environment while maintaining resilience and performance is perhaps the biggest workforce challenge organisations face today.

The adoption of AI and automation is fundamentally reshaping the BFSI sector, creating significant opportunities in productivity, innovation, and scale. At Airtel Payments Bank, we see this as an opportunity to enhance productivity, innovation, and scale, while enabling employees to be more effective in their roles and to focus on higher-value work. The emphasis is firmly on augmentation and empowerment. 

The future of work in BFSI is expected to look very different over the next few years. We anticipate that nearly 50–60% of existing roles will evolve meaningfully over the next two years. This evolution will cut across functions and hierarchies. Irrespective of technical background, employees will increasingly be expected to understand AI use cases and incorporate AI-enabled tools into their everyday work.

At the same time, one of the key workforce risks emerging across industries is AI-led anxiety. There is growing concern that AI may lead to job losses, which can create resistance and slow down experimentation and adoption. Addressing this anxiety through communication, proactive skilling, and employee empowerment will be critical for organisations moving forward.

Airtel Payments Bank is proactively preparing its workforce for AI-led disruption through a structured, multi-layered skilling approach. At the core is a strong focus on building adaptability, learning agility, problem-solving, and an experimentation mindset - capabilities essential for a digital-first BFSI environment.

We have introduced AI learning journeys for employees across functions, ensuring both technical and non-technical teams can effectively leverage AI tools in their daily work. Skilling is tailored to functional needs - for example, HR teams focus on productivity transformation, while Risk and InfoSec teams are trained on governance and responsible AI.

To accelerate adoption, we are identifying internal “change agents,” alongside partnerships with global platforms, and driving engagement through workshops, hackathons, and hands-on experimentation.

Importantly, these efforts are reinforced by our talent philosophy, which emphasises continuous learning, adaptability, and openness to change as key performance indicators, ensuring we build a resilient, future-ready workforce equipped to meet evolving BFSI demands.

At Airtel Payments Bank, our employee value proposition rests on two pillars - a strong culture and competitive people practices. We empower employees early with high-impact roles, encouraging ownership, experimentation, and accelerated growth.

We actively promote internal mobility, enabling employees to explore cross-functional opportunities aligned with their aspirations, supported by well-defined career paths.

Our culture is a key differentiator, reflected in our recognition as a Great Place To Work for four consecutive years. Employees value the openness, access to leadership, and collaborative environment.

To reinforce long-term engagement, we offer competitive benefits, including comprehensive medical coverage and broad-based long-term incentive plans that extend beyond senior leadership to mid-management.

Airtel Payments Bank has significantly evolved its hiring strategy to align with the changing needs of the digital banking ecosystem.

One of the shifts has been a balance between outsourcing support and hiring with leadership. Leaders today play a much more active role in evaluating talent and ensuring alignment with the organisation’s long-term vision and culture.

The hiring process now includes multiple levels of evaluation, including dedicated assessment rounds focused on leadership fit, cultural alignment, values, and competencies.

The organisation also follows a highly targeted hiring approach focused on specialised skills, niche capabilities, relevant qualifications, and domain-specific expertise. At the same time, Airtel Payments Bank strongly believes in taking calculated talent bets. While technical expertise remains important, the organisation is also open to offering large opportunities to individuals who may not yet be fully “ready-made” for a role but who demonstrate strong potential, adaptability, and learning agility.

Technology has also played a major role in transforming the hiring experience. Airtel Payments Bank has adopted forward-looking hiring platforms and leverages AI-enabled recruitment tools and automated candidate journeys to improve discoverability, streamline applications, and enhance overall candidate experience.

At Airtel Payments Bank, skilling and continuous learning are deeply embedded into the people agenda and are strongly driven by leadership involvement across the business.

The organisation follows a highly customised and democratised approach to learning, where programmes are designed for the specific needs of teams and functions rather than a one-size-fits-all model.

The Bank provides employees with significant flexibility and ownership over their learning journeys through continuous learning opportunities. Employees are given the freedom to utilise this empowerment based on their own learning interests and career aspirations — whether for attending conferences, enrolling in online courses, pursuing certifications, or participating in workshops.

In addition, Airtel Payments Bank has a dedicated continuous education policy under which employees are pursuing long-term education programmes.

The objective is to build a culture where continuous learning, experimentation, adaptability, and organisational agility become integral to the employee experience.

At Airtel Payments Bank, technology adoption is always approached through a customer-first lens. While digital innovation enables greater speed, convenience, scalability, and operational efficiency, the ultimate objective remains strengthening customer trust and delivering seamless experiences.

As banking becomes increasingly digital, maintaining the right balance between technology and human connection becomes even more important. Technology can simplify processes, personalise services, improve responsiveness, and enhance accessibility, but trust in banking is ultimately built through transparency, empathy, accountability, and responsible service delivery.

This is why the organisation continues to invest not only in cutting-edge technologies but also in strengthening governance frameworks, customer-centric controls, and human oversight mechanisms. The focus is on ensuring that technology empowers employees to serve customers better rather than replacing the human element that builds trust and long-term loyalty.