Unveiling The Inc42 AI Summit 2026 Agenda: Decoding Playbooks Shaping India’s AI Future
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Back in 2008, Apple popularised a simple idea — think of a use case, and “there’s an app for that”. Nearly two decades later, the tech industry seems to have arrived at a new inevitability — think of an app, and chances are, it has AI baked into it.
This shift says all about the evolution of the tech industry. Artificial Intelligence (AI), often hyped as the force that could one day take over humanity, is, for now, busy solving and optimising the human problems we’ve struggled with for years.
After years of research and adoption, AI is now moving from experimentation to infrastructure, becoming foundational to how systems operate, services are delivered, and value is created. In India, meanwhile, builders are shaping this transition in their own distinctive way.
India’s AI market is now entering a category-defining phase and is projected to cross $126 Bn by 2030, expanding 5.3X over the next five years. While India may still be playing catch-up in frontier AI research, it is increasingly carving out an edge in execution, rapid deployment, and building at scale.
Enterprise AI is emerging as the larger value pool, with the segment projected to grow from $11 Bn in 2025 to $71 Bn by 2030. Consumer AI, meanwhile, is scaling on the back of adoption and distribution, with the market expected to expand from $13 Bn to $55 Bn over the same period. India is already among the world’s leading adopters of AI, while government-led initiatives such as the IndiaAI Mission and subsidised access to GPU infrastructure are lowering the innovation tax.
Taken together, these factors are creating an ecosystem that is not merely consuming global AI trends but also increasingly adapting, deploying, and commercialising them at scale.
For India’s startup ecosystem, this is shaping up to be less a technology cycle and more an infrastructure moment, one that could redefine how businesses are built, how consumers interact with services, and where the next wave of digital value creation originates.
To take stock of this fast-evolving phase of India’s AI journey, Inc42 is proud to present the third edition of the Inc42 AI Summit 2026, set to take place on May 28, 2026, at Sheraton Grand Bengaluru Whitefield Hotel & Convention Center.
Presented by Inc42 and IDFC First Bank and co-presented by Skyflow and Loti AI, the Summit 2026 will host 600+ handpicked founders, CXOs, investors, and builders to decode what’s actually working in India’s AI landscape.
Inc42 has tracked the evolution of AI since its early days, chronicling how startups have progressed from experimental ideas to industry-defining breakthroughs. Now, the conversation shifts to what comes next.
What To Expect At Inc42 AI Summit 2026
Powered by Vobiz.ai, kAIgentic, Intellemo.ai, Avalara, StockGro, and Rubrik, the Inc42 AI Summit 2026 will reflect where India’s AI ecosystem stands today, moving beyond broad conversations around AI hype to focus on what companies are actually building, deploying, and scaling.
The Summit will feature two parallel stages. The Main Stage will focus on strategy and scale, bringing together some of India’s leading AI-native founders and enterprise leaders to share how they moved from early AI experiments to real-world production systems.
The stage will host keynotes, fireside chats, and panel discussions featuring leaders such as V Vaidyanathan, MD and CEO, IDFC First Bank; Rahul Chari, cofounder and CTO, PhonePe; Khilan Haria, CPO, Razorpay; Mohit Saxena, cofounder and CTO, InMobi; Divesh Sawhney, chief growth officer, Zepto; Rishikesh SR, cofounder, Rapido; Anish Achuthan, cofounder and CEO, Open Financial Technologies; Ankush Sabharwal, founder and CEO, CoRover.ai; Vaibhav Khandelwal, cofounder and CTO, Shadowfax; Karthik Rajaram, general manager and country head India, ElevenLabs; Rohan Nayak, cofounder and CEO, Pocket FM, among others.
The second stage, the Build Stage, will take a more hands-on, practitioner-focused approach. It will host workshops designed to give teams practical frameworks and tools they can apply immediately. Sessions will include topics such as Shipping AI Agents To Production, Designing AI-Native Products, The AI Marketing Stack, among others.
With over 600 curated passes and an invite-only format, the Summit is designed to cut through the clutter often associated with large tech events. Most attendees will be founders, CXOs, investors, and operators actively building, backing, or deploying AI in India. And often, the conversations happening off-stage and in the hallways end up being just as valuable as the sessions themselves.
The day will also host AmplifAI, spotlighting five AI innovations focussing on solving uniquely Indian problems.
Attendees will also gain access to ecosystem insights, emerging trends, and collaboration opportunities through curated interactions, partnerships, and broader ecosystem participation. Apply To Attend
Conversations That Will Define India’s AI Moment
With a stellar lineup of 60+ speakers, the 20+ sessions at the Summit are designed to move beyond surface-level discussions around AI and focus instead on what is materially changing across businesses and industries. Here are some of the key conversations lined up for the summit:
Building & Shipping Products Faster In AI-Led Development Stack
This discussion will explore how companies are redesigning workflows to ship faster across coding, testing, and deployment; where measurable gains are emerging across cycle time, release velocity, and build success rates; and which tools and stacks are gaining traction across development pipelines.
The panel will feature Palash Somani, head of product at Seekho; Vaibhav Khandelwal, cofounder and CTO of Shadowfax; and Ish Babbar, cofounder and CTO of InsuranceDekho. The speakers will share their first-hand experiences with AI-led development.
The conversation will also tackle tougher questions, including how teams are measuring ROI across developer productivity, cost per sprint, output quality, and what a responsible playbook for scaling AI in development looks like without compounding rework, bugs, or system instability.
How AI Is Rewiring The Ecommerce Conversion Funnel
Search, discovery, pricing, checkout, and post-purchase support have traditionally been optimised in isolation, each with separate tools, teams, and metrics. AI is now collapsing these silos. For ecommerce operators, the question is no longer where AI can help, but where to begin, how to measure impact, and when to scale.
In this session, Karthik Rajaram, general manager and country leader at ElevenLabs, and Pramod Adiddam, SVP and CTO of Myntra, will examine how ecommerce teams are identifying the precise funnel drop-offs where AI intervention creates the most value, and how conversational and voice interfaces are reshaping search and discovery to drive higher intent and average order value.
The discussion will also explore what it takes to deploy conversational and voice AI agents that reduce friction across product discovery, customer support, and purchase journeys without introducing new points of failure.
Algorithms, Attention & Distribution In The AI Era
For years, scale was the moat. Platforms and creators that could produce more, distribute faster, and iterate quicker tended to dominate algorithms. AI has now democratised much of that capability, shifting the moat in ways the industry is still trying to understand.
In this session, operators from across the content and creator economy, including Rohan Nayak, cofounder and CEO, Pocket FM; Hirak Chhatbar, cofounder and CTO, Loti AI; Siddhant Goswami, cofounder and CTO, 100xEngineers; and Shally Modi, cofounder and business head, Pratilipi, will examine how AI-driven distribution actually looks in practice. The panel will be moderated by Karthik Prabhakar, managing partner, PeerCapital.
The discussion will cover how creators and content platforms are using AI to scale output without proportionately scaling teams or costs, and how algorithms are increasingly determining winners across formats and platforms in an AI-led discovery environment.
What AI Investors Look For & What Kills Deals Before IC
Getting a meeting with an AI investor in 2026 is no longer the hard part. Getting through diligence is. This session will bring together Anant Vidur Puri of Bessemer Venture Partners, Archana Jahagirdar of Rukam Capital, and Ashwin Raguraman of Bharat Innovation Fund to unpack what is actually getting funded in AI today.
The conversation, moderated by Bala Srinivasa of Arkam Ventures, will focus on why many AI metrics fail under diligence scrutiny, what metrics are replacing them, and what an investor-ready AI data room should contain. The panel will also address the build-versus-wrap-versus-fine-tune debate directly — examining what truly creates a defensible moat in AI and what merely appears defensible until tougher questions are asked.
The discussion will also cover the signals that move deals forward and the red flags that kill them before they even reach the investment committee (IC) stage.
Be Where India’s AI Future Is Being Built
The Inc42 AI Summit 2026 is set to become a defining moment for India’s AI ecosystem, featuring exclusive insights from industry pioneers, networking opportunities with investors and entrepreneurs, and showcases of cutting-edge AI technologies.
The Summit will also host multiple other sessions, including The Operator Playbook For Building And Scaling Agentic AI Systems, How AI Is Breaking ROAS And Forcing New Ways To Measure Marketing, The Playbook For Turning Enterprise Interest Into Signed AI Contracts, and How Consumer AI Products Are Winning Distribution And Retention In India.
Stay ahead of the AI curve and be a part of the conversations shaping the future of GenAI in India. Get your access now!
AI Summit is supported by Peak XV, Mobavenue, Gupshup, CloudKeeper, WeWork, Rocketlane and Rukam Capital.
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