Most companies approach AI adoption surgically: identify critical functions, train select teams, deploy tools where returns appear obvious. Finance teams get forecasting algorithms, customer service receives chatbots, engineers build machine-learning models. Everyone else attends awareness sessions and continues working as before.
PayU, an Indian fintech firm processing billions in digital payments, has taken a different gamble. Every employee—regardless of role, seniority, or technical background—receives access to AI training through MyAcademy, a digital platform offering everything from Udemy modules to Harvard content. The company built Toqan, an in-house generative AI platform that HR professionals, finance teams, and operations staff use alongside engineers.
“Artificial intelligence isn’t a tool. It is the backbone of our business’ future,” says Deepa Zacharias, CHRO, PayU. “If AI is going to be everywhere, then AI skills must belong to everyone.”
The fintech pressure
PayU operates in a particularly demanding space. Fintech requires both technological speed and regulatory precision—innovate too slowly and competitors capture market share; move too fast and compliance failures destroy trust. Payment processing tolerates no errors. Customer data demands absolute protection. Regulatory requirements shift frequently.
“Artificial intelligence isn’t a tool. It is the backbone of our business’ future. If AI is going to be everywhere, then AI skills must belong to everyone.”
Deepa Zacharias, CHRO, PayU
This creates acute talent challenges. PayU needs people who understand both technology and financial systems, who can innovate within constraints, who grasp AI’s potential whilst respecting its risks. Such combinations prove rare and expensive in India’s competitive tech labour market.
The company’s response centres on building capabilities internally rather than perpetually recruiting scarce expertise. The logic appears sound: if critical skills remain persistently unavailable in the market, organisations must create them.
AI for everyone
PayU’s MyAcademy provides structured learning, but the company emphasises what Zacharias calls the “70 per cent of learning that happens on-the-job.” Employees participate in cross-functional projects, hackathons, and innovation challenges designed to build what she terms a “builder culture.”
This sounds progressive, though it also resembles standard corporate learning rhetoric. The distinguishing factor, if genuine, lies in whether non-technical staff actually engage with AI tools meaningfully or whether access becomes another underutilised employee benefit.
More substantively, Toqan—PayU’s proprietary generative AI platform—signals genuine investment beyond simply licensing external tools. Building in-house AI infrastructure requires significant engineering resources and ongoing maintenance. Companies don’t undertake such efforts casually.
Whether HR and finance teams genuinely use Toqan to “explore new ways of thinking, solving and innovating,” as claimed, or primarily employ it for basic automation whilst engineers do sophisticated work is difficult to verify externally. The rhetoric suggests the former; organisational reality often produces the latter.
Zacharias practices what she calls “reverse mentoring,” working with a young Gurgaon technologist to understand AI developments. This humility about knowledge gaps—particularly from senior leadership—can signal genuine cultural openness. The difference emerges in how organisations respond when junior employees actually challenge senior assumptions.
Policies following people
PayU frames its approach as policies evolving with employees rather than preceding them. “We don’t do things because we have a policy. We shape policies because of where our employees are and what they need,” Zacharias explains.
The company uses “parental leave” rather than “maternity leave,” offers insurance recognising diverse identities, and maintains hybrid work based on trust rather than tracking. These policies reflect progressive HR thinking whilst also resembling approaches many technology companies have adopted.
What provides circumstantial evidence of genuine cultural strength is PayU’s retention data. Average tenure exceeds three years in India’s hyper-competitive tech market. More tellingly, the company maintains what it calls a “boomerang employee” pipeline—professionals who leave, work elsewhere, then return.
Boomerang rates offer useful cultural signals. Employees returning after experiencing alternatives suggest the original workplace compared favourably to options. Of course, boomerangs might also reflect limited opportunities elsewhere, career missteps, or simple familiarity rather than genuine cultural superiority. But persistently strong boomerang pipelines across multiple years indicate something beyond coincidence.
PayU also reports employee engagement scores placing “living our values” and “zero tolerance for unethical behaviour” at the top. Survey results require cautious interpretation—design, timing, and response rates significantly influence outcomes—but consistent patterns across multiple years carry more weight than single snapshots.
The entrepreneurship paradox
Perhaps PayU’s most distinctive claim involves embracing employee entrepreneurship. The company encourages internal innovation whilst supporting alumni who leave to build their own ventures—sometimes as mentors, occasionally as investors.
This creates what Zacharias calls the “PayU alumni effect”—a network where former employees become collaborators, customers, or strategic partners. The relationship doesn’t end at exit; it evolves.
This sounds enlightened until you consider the obvious tension: organisations investing heavily in employee development typically want to retain that talent, not watch it depart for competitive ventures. PayU’s willingness to support alumni entrepreneurship suggests either remarkable cultural confidence or acceptance that retention battles in technology prove unwinnable regardless of investment.
The company attempts to balance entrepreneurial freedom with regulatory responsibility—critical in financial services where innovation without guardrails produces disasters. PayU maintains that compliance constraints function as “enablers” creating “safe space for experimentation.”
This framing—guardrails as freedom rather than restriction—reflects sophisticated thinking about innovation in regulated industries. Whether the balance actually works in practice versus sounding good in communications is harder to assess. Fintech companies claiming perfect balance between innovation and compliance often discover otherwise when regulators arrive.
Purpose beyond posters
PayU begins internal communications with vision and culture—a ritual Zacharias describes as ensuring employees understand “how their work contributes” to becoming “indispensable to India’s digital commerce.”
This emphasis on connecting individual tasks to collective purpose resembles contemporary management thinking about meaning and engagement.
The company’s goal-setting processes work backward from vision to individual objectives, theoretically creating clear line of sight between daily work and strategic direction. CSR initiatives provide additional avenues for employees to contribute beyond commercial objectives.
Jugalbandi or just good HR?
Zacharias describes PayU’s approach as “jugalbandi”—a term from Indian classical music denoting two instruments in harmonious dialogue. The metaphor suggests humans and AI each maintaining distinct voices whilst creating something neither could alone.
It’s an appealing image, though it risks romanticising what may simply represent competent HR execution: invest in learning, respect employee needs, maintain flexibility, encourage innovation within boundaries, connect work to purpose. These aren’t revolutionary practices; they’re elements of effective people management that prove difficult to sustain consistently.
What distinguishes PayU, if anything, is comprehensive integration rather than individual programme innovation. The company has built multiple reinforcing systems—universal AI access, proprietary tools, flexible policies, alumni networks, purpose communication—that theoretically create cultural momentum beyond any single initiative.
Whether this produces genuine competitive advantage in India’s brutal fintech market, where differentiation proves elusive and customers switch platforms readily, remains to be demonstrated. PayU’s experiment in democratising AI and embracing entrepreneurial culture offers an intriguing approach. Whether it represents the future of work or an expensive bet that few companies can afford—and fewer should attempt—will become clear only through sustained business performance relative to more conventionally managed competitors.