TIS 2026: SaaS Founders Playbook: Scaling in the AI Era

What is next for India’s multi-billion dollar SaaS sector, especially with AI coming into the picture? 

Entrepreneur India’s annual Tech & Innovation Summit, held in Bengaluru last month, saw industry’s key stakeholders coming together to dive deeper into the state of SaaS in India. 

Led by Swati Murarka, Principal at BII, the panel saw participation from Abhishek Prasad (Managing Partner, Cornerstone Ventures), Kartik Raja (Founder Mozark AI), Naresh Agarwal (SVP & Head of Engineering, Application Security Platform, Harness), and Adhipen Bose Nandhiji (Founder & Visionary, CNESS Inc). 

The evolution of business model

The conversation opened with the reflection on how the SaaS industry has evolved over the years, what’s next, and what should SaaS founders focus on in the AI era? 

Prasad of Cornerstone Ventures recalled that a lot of people did not fully understand the concept of SaaS initially. Later it picked up globally and in India. During the Covid years, people began to more understand the concept. It also led to a lot of funds jumping into the business which further led to crazy valuations. Though, it cooled down as the world came out of the pandemic. And in the last couple of years, AI began to show up with several people writing obituaries of the SaaS space. 

Using a vivid agriculture metaphor, Prasad explains the rapport between the AI and SaaS: “If I’m a farmer, I grow apples, oranges… SaaS is the soil on which I grow this. Now, AI becomes your fertilizer. Your soil becomes far more productive in order for you to create better, rapid, faster growth.”

“I think the most important thing is that your moats cannot stay primarily in tech. Your moats need to move into verticalization, your moats need to move into data, your moats need to move into an ability of using that data to create better, faster, quicker, smarter decisions in order for you to deliver better value and therefore, you know, bring better value to you as a SaaS founder,” he added. 

Bridging the Physical and Digital Divide

Even as enterprises are fast adopting AI agents in order to achieve superior efficiency, Raja of Mozark AI noted that there are still some challenges at this point. 

For instance, he says, “From an architectural layer: if I have a contract with you and you have taken some agents from me and the agent has been learning, and once the contract is over, what happens? I mean the learned agent, is it your property, is it my property? What is the right to forget?”

He also pointed out that there is an element of friction from the software world to the physical world. 

“I’ll just give an example of some of the areas we address, which would be in terms of the software DevOps cycle, right? So you have a lot of development and development gets more and more efficient as we all know, you’re able to come up with releases much faster. But then you’ve got to test it. And the challenge for testing is it has to happen in the physical world. This is just an example, right? It has to happen on a real device, it has to happen in a real location. You’ve got to see whether an OTP is happening or whatever, right? Some kind of examples. So that is still hitting the physical world and that’s still causing friction there and it becomes a bottleneck,” he explained.

Restructure

The AI era is also making a lot of conventional sets to be restructured, changed, and redefined. 

Murarka poses the question: “if AI is making software cheaper to build, where does the value migrate?”

Agarwal of Harness answers that the ability to code is now becoming a commodity, and that the value is now moving towards problem discovery and rich customer context. 

“I think the value is going to move a little bit up in the stack starting from figuring out the right problem where you really understand the pain points deeply, you really understand the customer use case, the domain context deeply. So that the value of finding the right problem where there is a demand goes up substantially…,” he said. 

Agarwal highlighted that the coding is done more and more by agents and verticals like testing, production, deployment, and parts of customer support are getting automated. But still those companies are slow, they don’t see the right level of outcome, even though the coding speed has gone up 10x, the business outcome is not gone 10x. So fundamentally the large companies need to revisit their org structures. 

“The bulk of time is still spent in alignment, decision making, and back and forth, and that has not changed with AI and I don’t think AI can solve that. So fundamentally all the large legacy businesses have to simplify their hierarchy, their structure, their org structure, so that the speed of decision making can match the speed of coding through agents, right? And that’s a very fundamental need and I think the companies who can drive this change faster will continue to win in the age of AI,” he explained.

AI & Beyond 

Nandhiji of CNESS talked about the purpose and impact of building brands from India. 

“We are a Californian-based company and we see things from a global level. Our consciousness super app has been registered in 130 countries. So now when we are dealing with business, we do need to scale it up to the international global needs and it begins with what we can do in terms of… when a company, when you ask a company, why do you exist? What is it that you do as greater good? What is it that you and how you operate?,” he said. 

“…The impact is what is the change we could make. All of this rests through building the credibility of each other and especially of the companies. And when the company builds its credibility by way of enhancement, then it sort of comes into the newer paradigm. The newer paradigm of wealth is brand. Is engagement. Is connectivity. Is interaction. Is crowdsourcing. And content. All of this is that which will be the success of companies moving forward from today to the next,” he added. 

Nandhiji also hailed India’s progress in the technology space and sought the need to showcase the local talents to the world. 

“So we would invite each of us to be the first and the pioneer members of the Consciousness social media super app and CNESS Works as a company with your company organization and allow ourselves to come together to usher the newer paradigm where consciousness is the success of any company and individually we all are able to maximize our potential in life as in our experience, in our engagement with each other, in uplifting each other,” he said.

“It might sound philosophical, but in practical terms today companies are able to reach their audience based on who they are. With the age of information and technology, it’s now pretty clear as to what a company stands for and that is where customer loyalty comes in. That is where trust comes in. And if we look into quality, that which we wish to redefine the word quality with consciousness. So this is what we do and I would invite each of you to join the movement as in your participation to allow ourselves to be greater,” he added.

Stay tuned to this space to watch the full conversation.  Also read our top picks from the TIS 2026: 

Transforming a Nation: How Emerging Technologies Will Define India’s Next Decade

AI 2030: Future Skills, Public Good & the Next Leap in Human Development

The Promise, Potential & Impact of AI: Redefining the Future of Innovation and Society