Product descriptions:
Adani Digital Labs enhances airport travel and global connectivity by innovating airport services, duty-free, retail, food and beverage (F&B) and entertainment while upholding top safety and security standards. By replacing legacy systems with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, they transformed their travel and lifestyle services, enabling real-time, AI-powered personalization for millions of users on the Adani OneApp. This shift has led to a 29% reduction in operational costs and a 20% acceleration in time to market, delivering smarter recommendations that drive meaningful business growth across India’s digital ecosystem.
Identifying systemic roadblocks to data innovation
Adani Digital Labs, the digital innovation engine of the Adani Group, is on a mission to redefine customer experience in India, starting at the airport and expanding across travel, utilities and lifestyle services. At the core of this transformation is Adani OneApp, a fast-growing digital platform with millions of users. Designed to integrate services across the Adani Group’s vast consumer ecosystem, the app delivers seamless travel planning, contextual recommendations and personalized commerce. But as adoption scaled, so did the technology challenges.
Legacy infrastructure couldn’t keep pace with the demands of a modern, AI-powered experience. Sluggish processing hindered complex analytics and machine learning workloads, making real-time insights and personalization nearly impossible. Manual data handling — like Excel-based uploads and fragmented pipelines — slowed operations, introduced risk and drained team resources. The result was a fragmented data environment that limited innovation and delayed value delivery.
“Our vision is to leverage our data and advanced technologies not only for hindsight, but to predict outcomes, personalize experiences and optimize operations,” Sagar Gulati, Head of Data at Adani Digital Labs, said. “We’re building a data-driven future for the Adani Group.” To achieve that vision, the team needed a modern platform — one capable of unifying data, enabling AI at scale and supporting the rapid development of personalized, real-time user experiences.
Moving from manual backups to automated efficiency
Adani Digital Labs selected the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to lay the foundation for a unified, AI-ready data environment. The choice followed a competitive evaluation process in which Databricks stood out — not just for its performance and scalability, but for its collaborative, partnership-driven approach. “It wasn’t just about the features,” Sagar said. “Databricks became an extension of our team, offering early previews, direct engineering access and commercial flexibility that empowered us to deliver real business outcomes quickly.” Core platform features like Delta Lake and Photon give their teams the performance and reliability to operate at scale, while enabling faster and more cost-efficient data processing.
The team began by migrating high-impact technical use cases like automating manual data pipelines and supporting compute-heavy workloads. This focused approach allowed them to prove value early while gradually moving additional jobs from legacy systems. Databricks’ engineering support and early feature access helped accelerate time to value, while internal upskilling ensured long-term success. Now, Adani Digital Labs can process structured and unstructured data together, enabling real-time decision-making across a single, unified platform using Declarative Pipelines for automated extract, transform, load (ETL) and change data capture (CDC) to keep systems current in real time. Teams of engineers, analysts and data scientists collaborate more effectively with interactive notebooks, building and deploying features that power richer, smarter customer experiences in Adani OneApp. Tools like Databricks SQL and BI integrations make data accessible to nontechnical users, while Unity Catalog provides secure, governed access across all teams.
The impact has been more than technical — it has changed how teams work. With governance baked into the lakehouse model and data access streamlined, teams iterate faster, collaborate more easily and innovate at scale.
Turning data into tangible business value
Since migrating to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, Adani Digital Labs has launched over 15 production use cases across real-time analytics, AI and business intelligence. These include automated ingestion, geospatial analysis and ML-driven product recommendations — all contributing to a more dynamic and personalized OneApp experience.
Revenue-impacting features, such as dynamic pricing and personalized duty-free and F&B suggestions, are already showing results. “These weren’t just technical achievements, they’re revenue-generating wins,” Sagar said. “With Databricks, we turned insights into features that directly affect customer satisfaction and business growth.”
Operationally, the shift has delivered significant efficiency gains. By consolidating jobs, leveraging CDC, optimizing code and moving to event-driven architecture, the team reduced redundant processing and cut data infrastructure costs by 29%. Faster iteration cycles — enabled by Databricks SQL, Unity Catalog and advanced automation — have reduced time to production by 20%, helping the team scale innovations with speed and confidence. Most importantly, Databricks has helped unify the data ecosystem, breaking down silos, improving governance and aligning IT and business goals. “Databricks aligns with our IT goals by simplifying architecture and improving governance, while meeting business needs for faster, scalable insights,” Sagar noted.
With a strong data foundation in place, Adani Digital Labs is now charting an ambitious path forward. Plans are underway to build a composable customer data platform that will bring even greater intelligence and adaptability to the Adani OneApp. By continuing to scale AI, deepen personalization and expand data-driven services, the team aims to transform how millions of people engage with the Adani ecosystem, setting a new benchmark for digital experiences across India and beyond.