Looking beyond AI: Industry experts bullish on deeptech to solve real world problems

While artificial intelligence is yet the most buzzing word in 2025, emerging technologies too are breaking new grounds into sectors like never before. 

In a panel discussion at DevSparks Pune 2025, YourStory's summit for developers, Dr. Ruchi Saxena, Founder-Director, Caerobotics, Arun Vaswani, Founder and CTO, Augmentastic, Pushkar Pradhan, Associate Director, PwC India discussed how latest advancements in the deep tech segment, from robotics, blockchain, and AR/VR are being leveraged to solve real world problems. 

The speakers were part of a panel discussing “Emerging Technology Spotlight: Deep Tech Innovations for Devs”, which was moderated by Rishabh Mansur, Head, Community, YourStory. 

Dr. Ruchi Saxena, Founder-Director, Caerobotics, whose work at the firm revolves around leveraging emerging technologies for sustainable development, highlighted her journey of turning to drones to address critical healthcare delivery gaps.

A medical doctor turned technologist, Saxena’s fieldwork exposed critical gaps in remote healthcare—while telemedicine allowed doctors to prescribe medicines, they often didn’t reach patients due to damaged infrastructure such as floods or landslides, which led her to explore drones as a solution. 

“The problem was, I had no idea what drones were. At that time, there were just two companies—one focused entirely on photography and videography, and the second was focused on defense ... but nobody was talking about saving lives with drones. That’s when I felt the need to bring people together, ask why we don't have investments coming in for drones in public health and disaster management,” Saxena says. 

This led to the founder to discover over 50 applications of drones—from saving human lives to protecting whales, including managing human-animal conflicts such as elephant attacks.

“I’ve also been excited about Generative AI and applying that to medical history-taking, especially with women in India. They are not often heard enough... The focus is on detecting early symptoms before they develop into diseases—tracking factors like sleep patterns, stress, or heart rate variability through smartphones and smartwatches,” she adds.

The company is also doubling down its focus on GenAI, specifically to improve women’s healthcare by catching early signs of stress or disease through smartwatch data and mobile phones.

Similarly, Pushkar Pradhan, Associate Director at PwC India, highlights blockchain as a key enabler in addressing inefficiencies, especially in sectors with multiple stakeholders, vast data volumes, and trust deficits.

“That is where blockchain can be applied. Most large corporations face these inefficiencies. So we thought we should focus on blockchain, learn more, and deploy it as a solution to reduce inefficiencies, lower costs, and have disruptive revenue streams. Blockchain is something that I'm very bullish about,” he says.

He adds that CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) are also gaining traction, with several developing countries adopting them as a direct application of blockchain technology.

Arun Vaswani, Founder and CTO, Augmentastic explains how the firm is creating immersive training environments for engineering and medical applications, offering virtual hands-on experiences.

“We are creating complete training environments for industrial and medical fields, providing in-hand experience in that environment virtually, where it's very difficult to give that kind of training physically. This includes oil and refinery or medical dissection training. In one case, we conducted a training for assembly and disassembly of equipment,  we saw a 40% better output than traditional methods,” Vaswani said.

While the conversation avoided the mention of AI, Arun indicated that AI would be more of an enabler to further automate the training processes through fully automated training solutions. 

Ruchi added, “AI is now like your mobile phone… you cannot work without it. Let’s accept that AI is now a part of our world. Now is the time you [developers] don’t have to spend 16 hours coding, but can start thinking and ideating, getting inspired by talking to people, going into different sectors…Let AI do your job that you used to do once upon a time.”