Anshul Saxena: Advancing India’s Roads and Sites Through Intelligent Monitoring

A steady force helping mines, highways, and logistics lines work with safer judgment!

Imagine a crew on a remote road trying to keep machines running through heat, dust, and tight deadlines. Picture a mine at dawn where workers depend on heavy equipment but receive little live detail about what lies ahead. Think of a logistics chain stretched across districts where trucks move constantly while leaders wait for updates that come too late. These scenes happen every day across India. They carry effort, risk, and responsibility, yet real-time understanding stays limited. This challenge stands at the heart of the country’s infrastructure story.

This is the world that captured Anshul Saxena’s interest. He became fascinated by how large operations function and the intelligence they could gather through data. While working inside India’s infrastructure ecosystem, he saw two things side by side. First, the scale of opportunity. Second, the absence of clear insight on the ground. Roads stretched for miles. Mines worked through long shifts. Logistics chains pushed through pressure. Yet the people managing them often moved without live visibility. This awareness stayed with him.

That constant exposure sparked the idea behind Cognecto. Anshul wanted a solution that improves efficiency while supporting the people who make progress possible. He aimed to connect rural roads where communities rely on safe travel. He wanted frontline workers to receive guidance that protects them during intense shifts. He wanted leaders to make informed decisions rather than relying on scattered updates. Cognecto began with a simple belief. When machines and sites express their condition through data, everyone gains clarity.

Each monitored kilometre serves a purpose for Anshul. It shows smoother roads, safer industrial shifts, and stronger coordination. He sees these outcomes as part of Viksit Bharat’s mission for technology-driven and inclusive development. Every improvement contributes to a future where growth reaches every corner of the country.

Anshul believes that data gives life to the silent stories inside infrastructure. His journey shows how curiosity, responsibility, and humanity can come together to build a movement that supports workers, informs leaders, and strengthens India’s path forward.

Let us learn more about his journey:

Learning to Build for India

When Anshul looks back at how his journey toward becoming CTO began, the story always returns to India itself. The terrain, the unpredictability, the constant reminder that technology must adapt to the country and not the other way around. That early realisation shaped everything that followed.

He recounts that the earliest challenge was scale. India’s infrastructure is vast and diverse. When the team began monitoring PMGSY roads across multiple states, they faced inconsistent connectivity, terrain, and data quality. They built resilient edge AI systems that could analyse images and sensor data locally before syncing to the cloud.

That experience eventually shaped Cognecto’s DNA. Design for India’s realities. The same philosophy later helped the company succeed in mining, logistics, and highway projects where conditions were just as demanding.

Keeping Vision Real and Useful

As his role grew, Anshul often found himself balancing two worlds. One was the excitement of breakthrough technology. The other was the grounded responsibility of public value.

He learned quickly that progress meant holding both together. That understanding eventually shaped how he approached strategy at Cognecto.

At Cognecto, he outlines the way vision and execution go hand in hand. The company’s strategy is guided by one principle. Innovation must create measurable public value.

When Vision AI assesses road surface quality or safety compliance on expressways, or when Shift Planning optimizes workforce allocation at a mining site, the end goal remains the same. Better outcomes for organizations and citizens. That alignment between national impact and customer success keeps their innovation grounded and relevant.

When a Tool Becomes a Catalyst

There are moments in any technology journey when a product evolves into something bigger than planned. For Anshul, Vision AI became one of those moments.

Vision AI started as a road quality assessment tool for infrastructure projects. As the models evolved, they began identifying deeper insights. Patterns of premature wear, traffic-induced stress, and maintenance prioritization.

In one state highway program, the AI helped authorities optimize maintenance scheduling, saving both time and taxpayer money. The same technology, applied in mines, reduced accident risk and equipment downtime. That crossover potential, one innovation serving multiple sectors, captures the spirit of Made for India AI.

Letting Context Drive Creativity

Inside Cognecto, Anshul learned that true innovation comes from people who understand the impact of their work. He built the culture around that idea. He recalls their approach to nurturing innovation through context. Every engineer at Cognecto knows that their code or algorithm will eventually touch a real road, a real vehicle, or a real worker.

They encourage experimentation through internal Innovation Sprints, where cross functional teams test ideas from AI-based pothole detection to dynamic shift scheduling. Each idea must connect back to customer impact and to India’s growth story. That shared purpose keeps innovation focused and meaningful.

Building Together, Not in Silos

For Anshul, collaboration is not a process. It is a way of working that shapes every product they build. Especially in sectors where success demands expertise from many worlds. He describes how collaboration becomes their superpower. Infrastructure and industrial AI require hardware engineers, data scientists, civil experts, and operations specialists to work in sync.

When developing Vision AI for highway monitoring, the team brought field engineers, analytics experts, and government stakeholders together to co design the product. The result was a system that understood both the technical and administrative realities of road management. The same collaborative approach shaped Shift Planning Intelligence, which now helps construction and logistics companies deploy manpower efficiently across large projects.

Turning Doubt Into Confidence

Whenever new systems enter traditional industries, skepticism is natural. Anshul learned early on that people trust what they see, not what they are told. He shares that they overcome skepticism through results. Instead of long presentations, they deploy small pilots.
Once a site engineer sees Vision AI automatically flagging road defects that used to take days of manual inspection, trust builds quickly.
When managers witness AI-driven planning cutting idle hours by 20%, adoption follows. Demonstrated impact becomes the most effective argument.

Measuring Success Through People

Over time, Anshul realised that numbers alone never reveal the full story of technological progress. Real success shows up in everyday improvements that people feel. For the team, success is about sustainable transformation. Beyond uptime or accuracy, they look at how technology improves transparency, accountability, and decision making.

If Vision AI helps ensure that a rural road in Mizoram remains motorable through monsoon or that a state expressway project maintains its quality benchmarks, that counts as real impact. Their success metrics tie directly to citizen benefit and national progress.

Leading With Purpose

Handling large and complex technology programs brought Anshul lessons that shaped his leadership more than any textbook ever could. He notes leadership as an exercise in clarity and purpose. Complex projects like integrating AI into multi-state highway networks require trust, patience, and empathy.

He has learned that people follow authenticity more than authority. When teams understand why their work matters, that they are improving lives and not just systems, their motivation grows.

Staying Curious in a Fast World

In fields that evolve by the month, curiosity becomes a lifelong companion. Anshul keeps himself and his teams anchored in continuous learning.

He shares his view that continuous learning is non-negotiable and spends time exploring new research in AI ethics, edge computing, and sustainability. Within Cognecto, they host Learning Labs to stay ahead. What keeps the team agile is humility, knowing that strong ideas can surface from anywhere, including a young developer who spots a fresh data pattern in road imagery.

A Choice He Would Rethink

Every leader carries one or two decisions they would adjust if given another chance. For Anshul, that moment sits in the early days of scaling their platforms. He adds that he would invest earlier in scaling the analytics framework across both infrastructure and mining verticals simultaneously. Each iteration strengthened their ecosystem and made the technology more versatile.

Those refinements helped them build a unified intelligence platform that now serves everything from rural roads to urban expressways.

Innovation Grounded in Responsibility

As Cognecto’s systems expanded into public infrastructure, Anshul stayed focused on one principle. Progress means little without responsibility. He expresses how ethics guide every design decision. In public infrastructure, data must be secure, transparent, and unbiased.

Their Vision AI operates under strict privacy protocols, with human review always in the loop. The goal is to enhance governance, not replace it. Innovation grounded in ethics earns lasting trust, which he considers essential for national transformation.

A Legacy Built for India

At this stage in his journey, Anshul often thinks about what his work might contribute in the long run. The answer always circles back to India and the people who rely on its roads and industries. He hopes the company is remembered as one that turned India’s infrastructure and industrial challenges into opportunities for global innovation.

If their technologies help each monitored kilometre of road remain safer, each digitized site become more efficient, and each worker feels more supported, then they have contributed meaningfully to Viksit Bharat 2047.

“My dream is for Cognecto to stand as proof that Indian technology, rooted in responsibility and vision, can build the foundation of a stronger, connected India,” affirms Anshul.