NTT Data exec: Drop 'tier-2' label, Mangaluru is AI-ready

Deepak Satya, the India head of NTT Data, wants the industry to stop calling Mangaluru a tier-2 city. During a recent visit, he proposed a new label: AI-ready city.

"We should stop calling some of our cities as tier-2, tier-3 and all those things," Satya said. "No where do we see that any of our cities are in any way tier-2 or tier-3. I was proposing that we call Mangaluru AI-ready city."

He said the AI shift creates an equal opportunity for all cities. "Nobody can say we have got 20 years experience working on Claude, nobody can say that we have got 15 years experience working on OpenAI," he said. "We are all on a level-playing field, and this is our time to capture this moment and just leapfrog."

NTT Data's presence in Mangaluru grew through the acquisition of Niveus Solutions, a cloud engineering firm based in Udupi. The deal closed in 2025. Niveus brought about 1,000 team members into NTT Data's India workforce of 40,000.

Satya said the team initially focused on Google Cloud Platform but now works across Amazon, Microsoft and other platforms.

He is pushing to expose global leadership to Mangaluru. "We make sure that they come to Mangaluru and see the vibrance and potential that this city has," he said. "We will not leave any opportunity to bring our leadership teams into Mangaluru and have meetings here."

Satya said he is also talking to peers in other global practices about expanding in Mangaluru. He pointed to recent acquisitions of companies in the Udupi-Mangaluru region by global players as evidence that the city can attract talent and investment.