At TechSparks 2026, Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu delivered one of the event's sharpest warnings and most pragmatic prescriptions for India's technology sector: artificial intelligence may soon outperform the vast majority of coders, but the real issue is not job loss alone. The deeper challenge, he argued, is whether India can build and own the technological stack that will define the next era of economic power.
Vembu said AI systems could outperform 90% of coders within six months, underscoring the speed at which software development is being reshaped by automation. Yet he pushed back against alarmist readings of that shift. In his view, the rise of AI should not be framed primarily as a crisis for programmers or startups. Instead, it should be seen as a signal that the country must move beyond dependence on imported tools, foreign platforms and external intellectual property.
Automation Is Not The Crisis
Vembu's remarks reflect a broader debate now confronting India's startup and venture capital ecosystem: whether AI will simply compress software engineering jobs or fundamentally alter the basis of value creation. His answer was that automation itself is not the central threat. The more consequential risk, he suggested, is strategic dependence.
For India, a country with a large software services industry but relatively limited ownership of core hardware, semiconductor infrastructure and foundational IP, the AI transition could widen existing gaps if policy and capital remain focused only on application-layer software. Vembu's message was that national resilience will not come from defending every coding role, but from building the underlying capabilities that determine who controls the future technology stack.
That argument carries particular weight in India's startup landscape, where much of the venture-backed innovation has historically clustered around consumer internet services, SaaS products and software exports. AI is now forcing investors and founders to reassess where durable advantage will lie. If models can generate code faster and cheaper than human teams, then the premium may shift toward proprietary data, compute access, hardware integration and distribution control.
Ownership Over Dependency
Vembu has long argued that India must think beyond software consumption and toward technological self-reliance. At TechSparks 2026, that theme was central to his remarks. He urged the country to focus on ownership of technology rather than overreliance on foreign IP, a point that resonates as global competition intensifies around chips, cloud infrastructure, AI models and advanced manufacturing.
His comments also speak to a structural vulnerability in India's innovation economy. While the country has produced globally competitive engineers and software talent, much of the value in the digital economy still accrues to firms that own platforms, patents, infrastructure and compute. In an AI-driven environment, that imbalance could become more pronounced unless India builds stronger hardware foundations and deeper research capacity.
For startups, this means the next wave of opportunity may not come from simply adding AI features to existing products. It may come from rethinking the stack entirely: from chips and edge devices to enterprise systems, industrial automation and sovereign digital infrastructure. Venture capital, too, may need to adapt, backing longer-horizon bets that are less dependent on foreign technology layers.
India's Next Technology Test
Vembu's intervention arrives at a moment when Indian policymakers and founders are increasingly debating how to balance growth with strategic autonomy. The country's software sector remains a major export engine, but AI is changing the economics of code creation, maintenance and deployment. If machines can write large portions of software, the competitive edge will increasingly depend on who owns the models, the data, the compute and the hardware.
That is why his warning was not a rejection of AI, but a call to prepare for it on India's own terms. The country, he suggested, should not treat automation as a reason for panic. It should treat it as a reason to invest in foundations that cannot be outsourced.
For India's startup ecosystem, the message is clear: the AI revolution will reward speed, but it will reward ownership even more. The firms and nations that control the infrastructure beneath the software layer are likely to capture the most durable gains. Vembu's remarks at TechSparks 2026 placed that strategic question at the center of the conversation, shifting attention from whether AI will replace coders to whether India can build the systems that AI itself depends on.