{
  "id": 10637891,
  "title": "CTO Summit 2026 Agenda: How India’s Tech Leaders Are Rebuilding Products, Teams & Systems For AI Era",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/29/cto-summit-2026-agenda-how-indias-tech-leaders-are-rebuilding",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-09-29T06:49:04.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Inc42",
    "slug": "inc42",
    "url": "https://inc42.com/buzz/cto-summit-2026-agenda-how-indias-tech-leaders-are-rebuilding-products-teams-systems-for-ai-era/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The inaugural CTO Summit 2026, organized by Inc42, PhonePe Payment Gateway, Oracle and powered by OceanBase and Seedling Labs, will be held on September 30, 2026, at JW Marriott, Bengaluru. The summit will gather over 150 tech and product leaders from companies such as Swiggy, Flipkart, MakeMyTrip, PhonePe, Razorpay, Rapido, Meesho, ShareChat, BookMyShow, Cashfree Payments, Acko and Naukri.com. The summit aims to explore the technology and organizational decisions being made as AI moves into production.\n\nSwiggy's CTO, Madhusudhan Rao, will discuss how AI is transforming the commerce architecture beyond simple consumer-facing features. The session will cover the infrastructure requirements for external AI agents and the role of Swiggy in this transformation. Flipkart's CPTO, Balaji Thiagarajan, will explore the shift from keyword-based search to systems that understand consumer intent and the complexities of building conversational commerce across vernacular languages, noisy speech, low-end devices and inconsistent connectivity.\n\nAs AI-assisted coding becomes more prevalent, verification of generated code becomes a challenge. Tech leaders from Cashfree Payments, LeadSquared, Eightfold and JioHotstar will discuss the impact of accelerated code generation on engineering teams and the need to measure real productivity gains. The session will also examine the changing roles within engineering organizations as AI absorbs more routine work, the impact on mid-senior mentors and architecture roles, and the implications for hiring, career ladders and engineering leadership.\n\nThe summit will also cover the architecture required to support 10X AI workloads, which are facing infrastructure issues in India. Kuku, BookMyShow, Razorpay and Oracle will discuss graceful degradation, capacity planning and architectural changes necessary for AI workloads. Additionally, leaders from ShareChat & Moj, Meesho, Shadowfax and Rapido will address inference costs, model routing, latency, low-end devices, vernacular inputs, model drift and the decisions behind the AI serving layer.\n\nData quality is a fundamental constraint for operating AI at scale. Leaders from Fibe, PhonePe and OceanBase will discuss the challenges of fragmented customer IDs, messy catalogues, stale inventory and inconsistent payments data. They will also explore how to build a robust data foundation for AI at scale without starting another multi-year transformation. Finally, the summit will feature fireside chats and live demonstrations of systems currently operating in the market, including MakeMyTrip Group CTO Sanjay Mohan's insights on Indian travel intent, Rapido CTO Srivatsa Katta's discussion on resetting the engineering organization and infrastructure for AI, and Zomato's demonstration of how AI at India scale is translating into enterprise systems.",
  "summary": "There was a time when adding AI to a technology roadmap largely meant identifying a few use cases, running pilots…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}