India’s technology leaders are moving beyond AI experimentation to confront the harder problems of scale, reliability, infrastructure economics and engineering productivity.
The inaugural Inc42 CTO Summit will bring 175+ senior technology leaders together on September 30 in Bengaluru to unpack the engineering decisions shaping India’s AI era.
Across panels, firesides and live demos, the agenda will explore 10X architecture, AI-native engineering teams, verification, data foundations and the changing role of technology leadership.
There was a time when adding AI to a technology roadmap largely meant identifying a few use cases, running pilots and figuring out where the technology could improve productivity.
That phase is rapidly giving way to a harder one.
As AI moves deeper into products and engineering organisations, technology leaders are confronting questions that go well beyond which model to use.
What happens when AI starts writing a meaningful share of production code? Who verifies it? How should engineering teams change when individual developers can produce substantially more? What happens to infrastructure costs when an AI feature moves from a pilot to millions of users?
At the product layer, another shift is underway. Search boxes are beginning to understand intent, consumers are interacting through conversations rather than menus and filters, and AI agents are beginning to interact directly with commerce infrastructure.
For tech leaders, these changes are increasingly connected. The AI product cannot be separated from the engineering organisation, data foundation, infrastructure economics or architecture underneath it.
This is the conversation at the heart of the inaugural CTO Summit 2026 by Inc42 and PhonePe Payment Gateway, taking place on September 30, 2026, at JW Marriott, Bengaluru.
Co-presented by Oracle and powered by OceanBase and Seedling Labs, the summit will bring together 150+ tech and product leaders. Across 10 sessions, leaders from Swiggy, Flipkart, MakeMyTrip, PhonePe, Razorpay, Rapido, Meesho, ShareChat, BookMyShow, Cashfree Payments, Acko and Naukri.com will unpack the technology and organisational decisions they are making as AI moves into production.
The day will begin with Swiggy CTO Madhusudhan Rao going inside what happens when AI moves beyond a consumer-facing feature and begins changing the underlying commerce architecture.
Swiggy is opening parts of its commerce infrastructure to external AI agents through four MCP servers and 66 tools spanning discovery, menus, carts, ordering, reservations and tracking. The conversation will examine what it takes to make that infrastructure usable by machines and what Swiggy’s role becomes if external models increasingly own discovery and conversation.
Flipkart CPTO Balaji Thiagarajan will take the conversation to discovery, examining the shift from keyword-led search towards systems that understand consumer intent, and the complexity of building conversational commerce across vernacular languages, noisy speech, low-end devices and inconsistent connectivity.
As AI-assisted coding moves from individual experimentation towards a larger share of production software, generating code faster is creating a different bottleneck: verification.
In ‘How Engineering Changes When AI Writes The Code’, tech leaders from Cashfree Payments, LeadSquared, Eightfold and JioHotstar will examine what happens when code generation accelerates faster than senior review, testing, security and architecture capacity and how companies should measure the real productivity gains.
But changing how code gets written also changes the organisation around it.
‘The Great Engineering Reset: Teams, Talent & Leadership After AI’ will examine which roles shrink, grow or change as AI absorbs more routine work, what happens to the mid-senior layer responsible for mentoring and architecture, and what this means for hiring, career ladders and engineering leadership.
AI workloads are arriving on top of an infrastructure problem Indian technology companies already know well: scale does not arrive predictably.
A festive sale, IPL match, UPI spike or the 9:15 AM market opening can quickly test assumptions around capacity and resilience.
‘The Architecture Of 10X’ will bring together technology leaders from Kuku, BookMyShow, Razorpay and Oracle to examine graceful degradation, capacity planning and the architecture decisions companies are reconsidering as AI workloads begin hitting stacks designed for a different era.
The conversation will extend into ‘Building AI Systems For Indian Scale’, where leaders from ShareChat & Moj, Meesho, Shadowfax and Rapido will tackle inference costs, model routing, latency, low-end devices, vernacular inputs, model drift and the build-versus-rent decisions behind the AI serving layer.
Before companies can operate AI at scale, many are running into a more fundamental constraint: their data.
Systems built for dashboards and reporting were not necessarily designed to give models and agents clean, contextual and continuously available information.
In ‘Building The Data Foundation For AI At Scale’, technology leaders from Fibe, PhonePe and OceanBase will examine problems ranging from fragmented customer IDs and messy catalogues to stale inventory and inconsistent payments data, alongside where real-time data matters and what CTOs can fix without beginning another multi-year transformation.
The summit will also feature firesides and live demonstrations around systems already operating in the market.
MakeMyTrip Group CTO Sanjay Mohan will unpack what 8 Mn AI conversations are teaching the company about Indian travel intent; Rapido CTO Srivatsa Katta will go inside how the company has reset its engineering organisation and infrastructure for AI; and Nugget by Zomato will demonstrate how Zomato’s experience operating AI at India scale is translating into enterprise systems.
Razorpay CPO Khilan Haria will provide a technical walkthrough of Slash, its autonomous engineering agent that combines company context, connected tools and workflow triggers to execute engineering tasks.
Meanwhile, PhonePe CTO Srijon Biswas will examine how India’s identity, payments and transaction rails could become context for more personalised AI-led financial experiences for 720 Mn+ users, while navigating consent, privacy and data governance.
The question is no longer simply where companies can use AI. It is what happens after they decide to use it.
How does the product change? What happens to the engineering organisation? What infrastructure needs to be rebuilt? Which data needs to become accessible? And where do the economics stop making sense?
These questions are being answered inside technology organisations right now, through experiments, failures, reversals and architecture decisions that rarely make it outside engineering rooms.
The inaugural Inc42 CTO Summit 2026 will bring those conversations into one room.
Source: Inc42
