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.

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