KONE Opens First Digital Experience Centre in India, Pune

What happened

KONE has opened its first Digital Experience Centre in India, located in Pune, marking a new facility dedicated to showcasing the Finnish elevator and escalator maker's digital and connected technologies to customers and partners in the country.

The centre is positioned as a dedicated space where visitors can engage with KONE's digital offerings in a hands-on setting, reflecting the company's broader push to deepen its presence and digital capabilities in the Indian market.

Why it matters

For an equipment-led business such as KONE, a physical venue built around digital demonstration signals a shift from selling hardware to selling outcomes — uptime, safety, convenience and data-backed servicing. Experience centres of this kind are increasingly used by industrial and infrastructure companies to make abstract capabilities like IoT-enabled monitoring, predictive maintenance and smart building integration tangible for building owners, architects, facility managers and developers who ultimately decide on long-term service contracts.

The move also points to how digital transformation in built-environment sectors is being driven as much by commercial and procurement conversations as by engineering ones. Letting customers see and interact with connected technology before committing to it can shorten sales cycles and build trust in services that are otherwise difficult to evaluate from a brochure or spec sheet.

The Renascence take

Experience centres are often treated as marketing set-pieces, but for B2B infrastructure players they function more like trust-building devices in a high-stakes, low-frequency purchase decision.

The real value of a facility like this isn't the technology on display — it's that it gives a risk-averse buyer, such as a developer or facility manager, a low-stakes way to "test drive" trust before signing a multi-year service contract. In industries where the product is largely invisible once installed, letting people touch, see and question the system in person does more to influence a long-term relationship than any specification sheet ever could. Operators pursuing similar digital transformation stories elsewhere in the region should treat such centres as behavioral tools, not showrooms — designed deliberately around the hesitations and questions that stall B2B decisions, rather than simply around the products themselves.