INTERVIEW: Founder and Director of Progreva, AJINKYA DESHMUKH
Ajinkya Deshmukh is the Founder and Director of Progreva, a technology consultancy with operations in India and Estonia that delivers custom software and IT consulting to enterprise clients across Europe and India. For a decade, he has worked as a product management consultant with Ingka Digital (IKEA), shaping real estate expansion and planning tools used across 32 markets. His earlier career spans Capgemini, Nagarro, HCL Technologies, and BNY. He holds a Master’s in Global Business from SP Jain, Australia (Gold Medal Awardee) and a BE in Computer Engineering from PICT Pune. A naturalised Swede after seven years in Sweden, he divides his time between Estonia, India and Sweden. In this interview, he discusses Progreva’s approach to customised AI and technology solutions, AI and data privacy, and the role Mauritius can play in developing AI and data-driven solutions.
1. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global AI market size was pegged at USD 294.16 billion in 2025 and is poised to reach USD 2,480.05 billion by 2034, showcasing a CAGR of 26.60 percent during the forecast period. Given Progreva’s expertise in technology and digital solutions, how can AI benefit companies by leveraging cutting-edge AI-based solutions?
We are fortunate to live in such exciting times. A couple of years ago, people were asking AI basic questions. Today we have generative AI across text, visuals, audio and video, combined with automation. Financial modelling, data migration and repetitive, mundane tasks can now be handled with the help of AI.
The use cases are endless. Take sales and marketing. With the right connectors, AI can build targeted lead lists and intelligent dashboards based on signals such as a target company receiving funding, a leadership change, or a press release. These signals help companies spot opportunities and promptly act on them.
Companies can also bring their data and documents together in one place with an Agentic RAG system. AI agents then scan that knowledge base to answer customer or employee queries, or pull data from different platforms into dashboards covering cash flows, employee data, sales pipelines or market intelligence. AI is also used for forecasting in supply chain and logistics, for instance, finding the best delivery route based on demand.
What I want to emphasise is that the solutions we build are customised. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Every product starts with the right product mindset, which is why product management consulting and user experience design are core Progreva offerings. We ask basic questions first: Why are we building this? Who are the users? What are their pain points? How can we make their lives easier?
That helps to set the tone for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Following this, our UX experts map the user journey and design the solution intuitively, and the product manager prioritises what must be delivered first, with engineering following suit: development, quality assurance, automation, and security and penetration testing. Product, design and engineering, with the user at the core. Our services cut across all of it, with an intelligence and automation layer on top.
We have also built our own AI-native products such as ProgShield that helps users decode complex data privacy laws such as GDPR in simple English. We have trained the LLM on specific data privacy laws and gave it the right context. Keeping up with a law that keeps changing is time-consuming, and ProgShield answers questions, simple or complex, in the same vein as explaining to a five-year-old. We have also built OnePro, our own HR software for timesheets, payroll, payslips, and invoicing.
2. Progreva is an Estonia-based company and is well entrenched across continents, from Europe to India. Can you share the services leveraged in terms of AI and technology pertaining to data-driven insights? What constitutes your market USP and target customer profile?
Our USP starts with a diverse client portfolio of enterprises and SMEs across Estonia, Northern Europe, the U.S., and India. We also hire some of the smartest tech talent. A Progreva consultant could be working with Swedish, Dutch, Chinese, and American stakeholders in a single day. Much of our team is globally educated and has worked across the world, so being open-minded and culturally aware comes naturally to us. For a small to mid-sized company, that sets us apart.
We simply don’t solve tickets and take full responsibility for the customer’s problem. We put solution options on the table with their pros and cons, decide on the approach together with the client, and deliver it by adopting an end-to-end approach. We develop, test, and deploy, and make sure the end user gets the value originally intended.
Our target customer is any company that wants to be at the forefront of using technology to transform its business. If our customers believe technology can perform miracles, which it can, we are the right people to work with. Rather than claiming expertise in one domain, we consider ourselves experts in problem-solving. We start from the problem and reach the expected outcome, then figure out what process or technology gets us there. So, our customers span continents and revenue sizes.
3. According to recent reports, there has been a 16.7 percent year-on-year increase in cyberattacks in 2025, while 54 percent of large organisations view supply-chain challenges as a major obstacle to cyber resilience. How does Progreva view the importance of strategy when it comes to using AI tools to prevent cybercrime and data breaches?
Data sharing between companies must be handled with the utmost care. One way is to have suppliers work within the client’s own environment. Instead of using their own IT infrastructure, including email, vendors get an account in the customer’s landscape, so everyone works in a single ecosystem protected by best-in-class cybersecurity.
Where that isn’t possible, the supplier’s cybersecurity measures should be clearly defined, verified and approved by the customer before signing up. These should then be written into the contract, along with penalties, a breach response procedure and the SLAs the supplier must meet. Any data the supplier shares further down the supply chain should be approved in advance, with a clear reason. Global data protection laws require clarity on how data is stored, shared with third parties, and transferred across borders.
Contracts alone won’t solve the problem, because they do not always reflect reality. The trick is to audit the supplier landscape and data-handling processes from time to time.
AI itself is a double-edged sword. It can identify vulnerabilities across the IT landscape very effectively, but it can also be misused to break into a client’s environment. In the July 2026 Hugging Face breach, an autonomous AI agent escaped its test sandbox and compromised the company’s systems. So, we have to be extra careful about how we use these tools, what instructions we give them, and what guardrails we set.
4. How crucial is data in the current times, particularly when it comes to addressing market gaps through data analysis, metrics and curated solutions, and what role does data science play?
Addressing market gaps starts with identifying them. Traditionally, that meant secondary research on the internet. Today, AI does it far more efficiently, reading spreadsheets, Word files and PDFs, and scanning the open internet for customer complaints that reveal what people actually need.
AI can also analyse ticketing data. Think of the Pareto Principle: 20 percent of problems consume 80 percent of the time spent on problem-solving. AI can pinpoint that 20 percent, freeing up the team’s bandwidth and leading to happier customers.
Still, there is a human connection that should not be missed. The users of our solutions are real people, like you and me, not AI tools, at least for now. We still need to learn what they want and what would make them happy. But much of that can be automated, from building the customer list and finding email addresses to generating the survey, with AI then assessing the results.
AI can also spot patterns and make predictions, for example flagging potential employee attrition or finding the best-performing product categories.
5. Can you share the various solutions offered by Progreva as a global company through tailor-made tools and implementing AI solutions through content, coding, and data insights, to achieve real business outcomes? How do you bridge the gap between the real potential of AI and achieving real business outcomes?
For one of Sweden’s leading furniture retailers and its real estate division, we designed and engineered a system that moved capital expenditure projects for stores and warehouses from spreadsheets into a robust database. Handling financial data on spreadsheets simply doesn’t make the cut anymore. The tool manages projects worth €1 billion and is live across 32 markets with more than 1,000 users. That is a true business outcome.
For a leading European energy client that manufactures transformers, we built a desktop solution deployed in the factory. It guides them through the specifications and configurations for designing transformers and places the manufacturing orders.
For a Swedish FinTech that provides loans to businesses, we built a platform where applicants enter details such as company and tax IDs, with credit checks and bank statements pulled swiftly once users approve. We are also building an AI-based solution to flag likely loan defaulters.
We are also extending our data privacy solution to cover India’s DPDP Act alongside GDPR, aimed at small and medium enterprises. It explains the regulations in plain language and advises on the steps to stay compliant, and customers can book a call with Progreva experts for legal and IT guidance.
Ultimately, bridging the gap between AI’s potential and real outcomes means identifying a genuine business problem first and then using technology to solve it. AI is not an end in itself. It needs to make a process more efficient, reduce manual effort, improve decisions or create measurable value. That is where our tailor-made approach comes in.
6. How does Progreva plan to tap into the African market through Mauritius, aiming to emerge as a hub towards the continent, where the UNDP has backed the latter through its National Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategy, strengthening skills in AI and data foundations?
I am quite bullish on Africa because it is an emerging continent. When a market is already highly digital, it feels like everything has been done. Where is the fun in that? What many emerging markets lack is solutions built for them, and when you launch those, you touch people’s lives every single day. When quick-commerce apps launched in India, they created instant gig jobs, and customers suddenly had groceries at their doorsteps in under 10 minutes.
Africa is huge as a continent, with large distances between cities. There is enormous room to optimise logistics, warehousing and supply chains, while cutting food and fuel wastage.
Mauritius, as a leading financial hub, also offers the chance to build systems that offer the right financial instruments to help people grow their wealth, and automate application processing with less exposure to financial crime. Technology can help lenders manage lending more efficiently, from restructuring debt to predicting Non-Performing Assets.
Tourism remains a significant pillar of the Mauritius economy. According to reports, tourist arrivals grew 1.5 percent in the first half of the year, while receipts rose 18 percent to around Rs 55.9 billion. With Uber now in the local landscape, AI and automation can enhance the entire travel experience, from immigration and airport processes to hotel check-ins. That needs the government and the private sector to work together, especially since tourism stays vulnerable to wars and geopolitical disruptions.
For Progreva, Mauritius is a strategic entry point into Africa, not just geographically, but as a place where AI and data-driven solutions can be developed and adapted for the wider continent. The opportunity is to build solutions around real problems and scale them across markets where they create tangible outcomes.
