News18 Rising Bharat Summit South Edition: Decoding India's AI Agent Era

Three years ago, artificial intelligence was a line item in innovation budgets, tested cautiously in sandboxes, kept at a careful distance from live decisions. That caution has today given way to scale. Reports project that 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from under 5% in 2025, a trajectory that places agentic AI systems capable of planning and acting with limited human oversight at the centre of enterprise transformation.

Behind this pace of adoption lies an imperative: building robust governance, security, and accountability frameworks.

Banking sits at the heart of this transformation, its evolution offering a precise measure of how deeply intelligent systems are being woven into institutions

built on trust and continuity.

The adoption of AI in production processes by Indian firms climbed from 8% in 2023 to 25% in 2024, and a Reserve Bank of India study finds private sector banks at the forefront of deploying AI across fraud detection, customer segmentation, and chat automation.

Generative AI alone is projected to add between $359 billion and $438 billion to India’s GDP by 2029-30. For an industry defined by ledgers, memory, and measured risk, this represents a structural shift, lending decisions, fraud detection, and customer engagement now increasingly run through systems built to act, not merely to advise.

Within this shift, HDFC Bank has approached artificial intelligence through a lens it has long embraced: a nation-first philosophy shaped by the scale, diversity, and evolving needs of Indian banking rather than global market playbooks. That perspective has guided the bank’s move into the intelligence era, where growing competition for customer trust and technological leadership demands a new architecture of decision-making without compromising the discipline of a traditional institution.

It is this discipline that will anchor a defining conversation at HDFC Bank presents the News18 Rising Bharat Summit – South Regional Edition, on July 24, 2026, in Bengaluru, titled ‘From Foundation Models to AI Agents: Decoding the Intelligence Era’.

Leading the banking perspective is Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, Group Head – IT & CIO, HDFC Bank, who will explore how trust is being upheld as intelligent systems assume greater roles in customer-facing and operational decisions, how governance is being keenly observed and embedded into these systems by design, and how principles of accountability, refined over decades of banking, are being extended into an era where machines increasingly initiate action.

Bringing an industry and tech perspective to the forefront is Sandhya Ramachandran Arun, Global CTO of Wipro, who will examine how enterprises are progressing from isolated AI deployments to coordinated, outcome-driven systems.

Addressing the demands of securing autonomous systems granted access to sensitive data and workflows will be Swapna Bapat, MD & VP, India & SAARC, Palo Alto Networks, and Nikhil Mittal, CTO of Zepto, who will bring the conversation to consumer-scale reality, tracing how AI-led operations proven in metro India are extending into Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets.

As agentic AI settles permanently into the architecture of enterprise, the questions raised in Bengaluru — of trust, governance, and accountability will come to define the terms on which intelligence is allowed to operate at scale.

It is a defining moment for India’s intelligence era, and a conversation worth being part of.

Join the dialogue at HDFC Bank presents the News18 Rising Bharat Summit – South Regional Edition in Bengaluru on July 24, 2026. https://www.news18features.com/risingbharatsummit/