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B Swaminathan
PUNE — The Emerging Tech Leaders (ETL) Pune Chapter held its launch event on Saturday evening at the Hyatt Pune, Kalyani Nagar, drawing emerging CIOs, CISOs, CTOs, entrepreneurs, and innovators for an evening that delivered on its theme — Lead Beyond Technology. Sponsored by IBM as Title Partner and InfoWorld Total IT Solutions as Gold Partner, the event featured three speakers whose expertise spanned preventive genomics, software entrepreneurship, and leadership development.
Your Genome Is Your Most Valuable Asset
Featured Speaker Dr. Anup, founder of Sahaj Genetics Clinic, opened the evening with a session on the convergence of genomics, wellness, and technology. Drawing on research published in The Lancet, he walked the audience through how polygenic risk scores can predict and preemptively manage conditions such as coronary heart disease, atrial fibrillation, hypercholesterolemia, and cancer — anchoring the science firmly in an Indian context, where population-specific genomic variants differ significantly from those in Western studies.
Among his most striking findings: participants who followed a targeted nutritional and lifestyle protocol for six to nine months achieved a biological age reversal of 3.23 years relative to a control group. Anup also highlighted the long-term impact of maternal nutrition on the epigenome of the unborn child, with disease predisposition effects that can persist for decades.
He closed with a call for pre-symptomatic genomic screening integrated with AI-driven predictive algorithms, enabling intervention before symptoms emerge. He also drew an important distinction for the audience: genetic counselors are science graduates, while medical geneticists hold MBBS and MD qualifications — a clinical depth that matters when interpreting complex genomic data.
Three Decades, One Honest Reckoning With AI
Keynote speaker Arun, Founder and CEO of Soft Corner, delivered a talk spanning thirty-plus years of technology leadership — from mainframe computing to the present age of AI. His central argument: leadership, not technology, has always been the harder problem. Communication became the critical skill as teams moved from solo programming to collaborative development. Managing burnout became a priority as India’s software sector globalised. And today, the challenge is navigating the gap between what AI promises and what it actually delivers.
Arun was candid that most organisations claiming AI-driven efficiency have no objective metric to prove it. He identified areas where AI is genuinely working — document processing, fraud detection in banking, and AI-assisted code generation — while flagging persistent issues around data privacy, hallucination, governance accountability, and the gap between a polished demo and a scalable deployment.
He also shared Soft Corner’s product journey: from a survey tool built in 1999 that anticipated Google Forms but proved hard to sell, to Emerge, their financial consolidation platform now used by over 150 enterprises. He spoke candidly about scrapping and rewriting their codebase when it became unmanageable. “Don’t be afraid to rewrite the whole thing,” he told the audience. “Today it is far easier with AI.” On success, Arun measured it simply: annual Himalayan treks, long-distance cycling, and a firm rule that the office closes at 7 PM every evening.
10 Faces of CIO
Dr. Pradeep Pendse, Dean and CTO of WeSchool Mumbai, closed the speaker sessions with an interactive framework built around twelve roles the modern CIO must inhabit. Attendees rated themselves from zero to ten on each dimension as Pradeep spoke: Tech Wizard, Backbone, Hurdler, Mediator, Anthropologist, Visudhan (risk sentinel), Change Catalyst, Evangelist and Storyteller, Visionary, Value Architect, Innovation Champion, and Sustainability Steward.
Among his most resonant points was the concept of the CIO as organisational anthropologist — someone whose immersive understanding of culture and evolving user needs gives them a strategic edge often underestimated by the business. He urged leaders to frame technology investments in terms of financial outcomes rather than operational metrics, and to measure the value of innovation portfolios on a continuous basis.
ETL committed to sharing the aggregate self-rating data with the Pune community — turning the session into a practical diagnostic for the city’s tech leadership cohort.
A Chapter Begins
As the evening closed with its Innovation Showcase and Tech Booths, the energy in the room reflected what ETL’s Pune Chapter is setting out to build: a genuine community of practice. Three sessions spanning health technology, AI adoption realities, and the expanding mandate of the modern CIO offered something rare — intellectual depth paired with practical relevance.