CTO Summit 2026 Agenda: How India’s Tech Leaders Are Rebuilding Products, Teams & Systems For AI Era
by Team Inc42 · Inc42SUMMARY
- 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.
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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.
From AI Features To AI-Native Products
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.