What startup and technology leaders expect in 2026

SiMa.ai

Krishna Rangasayee, CEO and Founder, SiMa.ai: The Leapfrog Developments That Will Accelerate Physical AI Adoption in 2026

General-purpose physical AI models, tuned for ultra-low power, will soon let GPT-level and cutting-edge perception models run on hardware drawing under 10W. That completely reshapes the deployment landscape. At the same time, plug-and-play model deployment that removes the need for MLOps or model engineering will turn AI adoption into something as straightforward as installing a sensor. Parallel to this, more governments are expected to insist that sensitive perception data stays on the device, adding regulatory pressure in favour of on-device privacy. Taken together, these shifts create a genuine leapfrog moment: organizations that move early on physical AI will pull ahead of those still locked into cloud-only architectures.

Pantherun Technologies

Mr. Srinivas Shekar, CEO and Co-Founder, Pantherun Technologies: Cybersecurity in 2026 will be all about keeping data safe every second. Attacks are getting faster because criminals now use AI, and most businesses are exposed through the many apps they rely on. Instead of trying to stop every attack, companies will focus on protecting data in real time, so even if someone breaks in, what they steal is useless.

Ransomware will also get more personal. It will not just lock systems but try to damage reputation and trust. This will force organisations to secure data at every point, from devices to cloud apps.

We will also see more risks from trusted partners and insiders, which means protection can’t stop at the network. Security must follow the data wherever it goes. With stolen passwords and user sessions becoming common, identity alone will not be enough. Data-centric protection will take the lead. And as quantum computing grows, old encryption will not hold. Companies will start preparing for stronger, future-ready methods

Rob Newell, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific & Japan at New Relic

“Only 16 months after Crowdstrike brought the digital world to a standstill, and a month after the global AWS outage, this week another key player in the Cybersecurity space, Cloudflare, suffered a global outage causing error messages to plague websites across the globe, including Spotify, ChatGPT, X, and Open AI.

Outages of this size can have significant impacts on an organisation’s bottom line. The 2025 Observability forecast found that high-impact outages can cost Indian organisations between $1M-$3M USD in lost revenue per hour. In the case of the recent global AWS outage, New Relic’s engineers were able to flag the issue 27 minutes before AWS informed their customers of the outage, enabling New Relic’s customers to identify the impacted services of their stack so they could address issues efficiently, and monitor golden signals within the failover environment to ensure its stability and performance. With global outages becoming more common, observability is no longer an engineering tool––it is business-critical practice.”

Raj K Gopalakrishnan, Co-founder & CEO, KOGO AI

“2026 is when enterprise AI separates into two categories: those who own their advantage, and those who rent it. The winners won’t be running the most AI tools—they’ll own their complete AI process IP. Every prompt refined, every workflow optimized, every fine-tune deployed—that’s compound interest on your competitive advantage, and you can’t build it on borrowed infrastructure.

We’re past the co-pilot era. Enterprises are waking up to a hard truth: sovereign deployment isn’t a compliance checkbox, it’s your moat. The moment your AI logic, your data, your improvement cycles live in someone else’s environment, you’re training their models and funding your competitor’s advantage. By 2026, Chairmen won’t ask ‘should we do AI’—they’ll ask ‘do we own the OS, own the agent, own the outcome, or are we just licensing our future from someone else’s cloud?’ Private AI isn’t a trend. It’s the control plane for building an advantage that actually compounds.”

Praveer Kochhar, Co-founder & CPO, KOGO AI

“2026 marks the death of context switching in the enterprise. The tool sprawl era—15 co-pilots, 30 browser tabs, swivel-chair between systems—ends when unified agentic systems prove they can execute work across ERP, CRM, ITSM, and data lakes without human glue.

But autonomy without governance is chaos. The technical shift isn’t just agents that can act—it’s architectures where policy enforcement, human-in-the-loop gates, drift detection, and audit trails are built into the runtime, not bolted on after deployment. We designed KOGO OS around this principle before we wrote a single line of agent code: Responsible AI as the foundation, not the afterthought.

By 2026, enterprises demand agentic meshes—cross-functional agents with shared memory, coordinated handoffs, and measurable SLAs—running inside their walls. The architecture question shifts from ‘can AI do this task’ to ‘can our OS govern agents that plan, act, verify, and learn autonomously while respecting our policy at runtime?’ That’s not a co-pilot. That’s an operating system for AI-native work.”

Anand Sampath, EVP, CEO of BPS and Head of India Delivery Center, Visionet Systems

“GenAI is set to transform BPS and the technology landscape by reshaping how enterprises operate, make decisions, and deliver value. By automating routine, document-heavy work and enabling self-optimizing workflows, GenAI will accelerate intake, summarization, quality checks, compliance reviews, and exception handling, cutting operational cycle times by 30–50% while improving accuracy and consistency. This shift allows human talent to focus on higher-value, judgment-intensive activities, strengthening overall operational resilience.

In the mortgage lifecycle, GenAI is expected to deliver major efficiency gains across Origination, Underwriting, Title, Settlement, and Servicing. AI will automate ingestion and validation of income, asset, title, and closing documents, predict conditions, flag discrepancies, and streamline compliance checks reducing cycle times by 25-40% and enabling teams to handle exceptions rather than routine tasks.

AI-powered IDP platforms like DocVu.AI will be central to this transformation. By intelligently extracting, classifying, validating, and summarizing data across all loan documents, DocVu.AI improves decision-making, enhances QC, and ensures audit readiness at scale. With continuous learning and real-time insights, it reduces manual review significantly while elevating underwriting and post-close precision.

Together, GenAI, BPS expertise, and platforms like DocVu.AI will create a semi-autonomous, exception-driven mortgage ecosystem that delivers faster, higher-quality, and scalable operations.”

Vishal Rajani, Founder & CEO, Synergos

“As the founder of a digital marketing company that’s empowered hundreds of brands to connect with their customers, here’s my unfiltered take on what actually wins in 2026.

India is catapulting towards digital dominance, and it is set to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2027. The upcoming year (2026) demands a major shift in digital marketing strategies as AI is suddenly everyone’s new best friend. 2026 won’t be about “using AI.” It will be about leveraging AI that knows your customer and anticipates their needs like a sixth sense. Cookie-cutter campaigns are dead. We’re talking hyper-personalized experiences at scale: dynamic creatives, pricing, even product recommendations that shift in real-time based on mood, weather, and wallet thickness.

Here’s where the world will move from SEO to GEO or Generative Engine Optimization: the new sheriff in town. With AI-powered search engines like Gemini and Perplexity, brands will have to optimize for conversational queries, not merely keywords. This means creating digital marketing content that answers the “whys” and “hows” in real-time, capturing voice and visual searches. If content in 2026 isn’t written to be quoted, summarized, and cited by Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, brands will have a tough time existing in an AI-driven market. Brands that master conversational, citation-worthy content will own the marketing funnel.

And yet, the biggest paradox is already playing out. The more advanced the technology, the more desperately people crave the human touch. We expect to see digital marketing moving towards raw, community-fueled storytelling. For example, Zomato’s user-generated victory feasts during cricket matches, where fans post mukbangs of samosas and biryani, turned meals into community celebrations of national pride. Combine this with transparent data practices, and brands won’t just earn attention, they’ll grab devotion and amplify genuine human connections over scripted perfection.

In India, 2026 belongs to digital marketers and brands brave enough to use AI as a megaphone to tell authentic stories that resonate with the common man. For Indian marketers, the era of shouting into the void is dead. Build trust, own your data, speak with empathy, build genuine connections and let AI amplify the magic.”