Thank You, Partners, For Making Inc42's CTO Summit 2026 A Success

On September 30, Inc42 hosted the inaugural edition of the CTO Summit 2026 at JW Marriott, Bengaluru, bringing together 200+ senior technology leaders as delegates and speakers to discuss how India's technology ecosystem is building and scaling in the AI era.

The summit brought together CTOs, engineering, product, data, and AI leaders from India's leading tech startups like Meesho, Swiggy, Flipkart, and Rapido for conversations around AI adoption, engineering productivity, infrastructure, architecture, and the systems needed to build at India's scale.

Across 10+ sessions, the discussions went beyond AI experimentation to examine what happens when the technology moves into production, from the economics of running AI workloads and the quality of data powering applications to verification, resilience, and the changing role of engineering teams.

Speakers explored how AI is reshaping products and the way users interact with them. Swiggy's CTO Madhusudhan Rao joined the summit to share his views on how the listed food delivery platform is using AI agents to take commerce beyond its app, while Flipkart CPTO Balaji Thiagarajan discussed the shift from keyword-led product discovery towards systems that can understand consumer intent.

The conversations also moved into the engineering organisation itself. As AI-assisted coding increases the amount of software teams can generate, technology leaders discussed how design, review, testing, and verification are becoming increasingly important, while exploring how AI could make systems thinking more important as routine coding becomes increasingly automated.

Building for India's scale emerged as another key theme. Leaders discussed the challenges of building AI products for users across budget smartphones, multiple languages and patchy connectivity, while keeping infrastructure and inference costs under control.

The conversation highlighted the need for technology teams to account for these constraints when designing AI systems for a market as diverse as India.

The summit also featured three technical demos that offered a closer look at AI being applied in real-world systems. Dushyant Garg, lead, strategy & enterprise growth at Nugget (by Zomato), showcased how Zomato's experience operating AI at India scale is being translated into enterprise systems through specialised agents, real-time intelligence and governance layers.

Srivatsa Katta, CTO at Rapido, walked through how the company has adapted its engineering organisation and infrastructure for the AI era, including its use of coding agents, an LLM Gateway and AI Catalyst.

Prabu Ram, SVP, Engineering at Razorpay, showcased Slash, the company's autonomous engineering agent built to combine company context, connected tools and workflow triggers to execute engineering tasks.

The summit also examined the infrastructure and data foundations behind these systems. Discussions around architecture focused on capacity planning, resilience and preparing for failures beyond a company's own technology stack, while leaders from PhonePe Payment Gateway, OceanBase and Fibe discussed data quality, access controls and the need for reliable data foundations for AI applications.

PhonePe Payment Gateway's CTO Srijon Biswas shared how fintech is using AI across internal workflows, with more than 200 AI agents being used by around 1,600 employees daily. He discussed examples of AI-driven efficiency gains, including around 22 person-days saved per app release and audit processes that were reduced from four days to three minutes.

As AI takes on more routine engineering work, Biswas said, "You need more people who can make stronger decisions and get them correct more often."

Oracle's Palanivel Saravanan also underlined how companies are bringing AI models closer to their data. "Everybody is looking at how they can get the models much closer to their data, so that the model can learn better and respond to the user better," said Saravanan.

From AI agents and product discovery to engineering productivity, infrastructure resilience and data governance, the conversations reflected a technology ecosystem moving from asking whether AI should be adopted to figuring out how it can work reliably and economically at scale.

But none of these conversations would have been possible without the support of our sponsors and partners, who helped bring the inaugural Inc42 CTO Summit to life. Thank you for powering these conversations.

Presenting Partner PhonePe Payment Gateway

PhonePe Payment Gateway is a digital payments and financial services platform offering services across payments, financial products and commerce.

At the Inc42 CTO Summit 2026, PhonePe CTO Srijon Biswas joined Inc42 CEO and cofounder Vaibhav Vardhan for 'How PhonePe Is Combining DPI And AI For 720 Mn+ Users', where they discussed how the company is using AI to improve efficiency and build more personalised financial experiences at scale.

Biswas also discussed how India's digital public infrastructure could provide the foundation for more personalised AI-led financial experiences, while navigating consent, privacy and data governance.

PhonePe also featured in 'Building The Data Foundation For AI At Scale', where Kisalay Ranjan, head of engineering, merchant payments, PhonePe, shared perspectives on data quality, access controls and the need for reliable data foundations for AI applications.

Co-presenting Partner Oracle

Oracle is an enterprise technology company offering cloud infrastructure, databases, applications and other technology solutions for businesses.

At the CTO Summit, Oracle was part of the conversation around the architecture and infrastructure decisions required as Indian technology companies scale.

Palanivel Saravanan, head of infrastructure cloud engineering at Oracle, participated in the session 'The Architecture Of 10X: Engineering For India's Next Scale Curve', alongside Vikas Goyal, cofounder & CTO, Kuku; Noel Curtis, CTO, BookMyShow; and Prabu Ram, SVP, engineering, Razorpay.

The discussion explored capacity planning, resilience and the need to prepare for failures across both internal systems and external infrastructure as companies operate at increasing scale.

Powered By Partners OceanBase

OceanBase is a distributed database platform that helps businesses manage data workloads at scale.

At the Inc42 CTO Summit, Bhanu Jamwal, GM, India Business at OceanBase, participated in 'Building The Data Foundation For AI At Scale', alongside Kisalay Ranjan, head of engineering, merchant payments from PhonePe and Anil Sinha, CTO from Fibe.

The session examined the data challenges companies face as AI applications move into production, including fragmented information, stale data and the need for clear access controls.

The discussion also looked at how technology teams can make data available to AI applications while maintaining control over how it is accessed and used.

Seedling Labs

Seedling Labs is an AI-focused technology company working on systems and infrastructure for businesses building AI applications. Its work focuses on helping businesses build and scale AI systems for production environments, with an emphasis on reliability, control and performance.

At the Inc42 CTO Summit, Shanti Kuropati, Founder & CEO, SeedlingLabs, participated in the editorial roundtable 'Building The AI Stack For Scale, Cost And Control', alongside Vivek Manoharan, CEO & CTO, Gravitas; Harsh Sahu, cofounder & CTO, Matters.ai; Kiran Reddy Singam, VP, product & tech, BigHaat; Vikas Roy, director of engineering, Vahan.ai; Govind Soni, cofounder, CoinSwitch & Lemonn; Shiv Buddharaju, VP of engineering, Oxmiq Labs; and Vinay Rai, executive VP of technology, Netradyne.

The discussion explored the architecture choices companies are revisiting as AI workloads scale, including model selection, unit economics, AI agents, reliability, observability, permissions and guardrails.

We would like to thank PhonePe Payment Gateway, Oracle, OceanBase and Seedling Labs for supporting the inaugural Inc42 CTO Summit and helping create a platform for technology leaders to exchange ideas and experiences.

To all the speakers, partners and technology leaders who joined us in Bengaluru, thank you for being part of the conversation and helping make CTO Summit 2026 a success.