YourStory’s DevSparks Chennai 2025 brought together artificial intelligence experts, developers and enthusiasts to discuss the role of artificial intelligence in building and scaling software, skilling developers in AI, and more.
The opening session by Praveen Jayakumar, Head of AI/ML Solutions Architecture at AWS India, discussed building and scaling agents with AWS and how to go beyond copilots to build truly intelligent production-ready AI agents.
“By 2028, 15% of all work decisions will be made by agentic AI,” Jayakumar said at the event.
Agentic AI was a keyword at the session, with multiple speakers drawing real-world use cases and explaining how this advanced AI system is capable of autonomous decision-making and action.
Developers at the event also got to experience a masterclass from Zoho’s Director of Technology, Rajendran Dandapani, who insisted that in today’s AI race, it is important for developers to stop, take a breath, and look beyond the code.
Dandapani stressed eight lessons during the session that can act as a guiding compass for developers to equip themselves as we steer towards an AI-first future.
“In hindsight, the technology that runs the world today was never taught to us; instead, the human race learnt it with time, and this can be replicated when it comes to AI skilling,” Dandapani noted during the session.
The event also hosted a lightning talk with Dinesh Varadharajan, Chief Product Officer at Kissflow. This session explored how to preserve intent, cut delays and reconfigure software development life cycles (SDLC) to become faster and outcome-driven.
“Programmers shouldn’t be translators of code..we want them to be problem solvers and let AI become the translator,” Varadharajan said during the talk.
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DevSparks Chennai also featured a panel discussion on understanding the innovation that happens within Indian GCCs and how AI and data are creating impact in the real world. The talk also touched upon how developers can play a role in leveraging these technologies to drive outcomes.
Moderated by Shubhangi Mishra, Senior Creative Lead at YourStory, the panel included Archana Dixit, Global Head of Data Science and AI – Mobilisights Division, Stellantis; Avinash Karn, Senior Director of AI & Productivity, PayPal; Prasuj Loganathan, Director – GCC Solution Engineering, Snowflake; and Shivapriya S, Senior Director, Enterprise Data Platform, Ford Motor Company.
The panel discussed their thoughts on making oneself relevant in the age of AI and how we need to revisit basic foundations and principles to move forward in today’s world.
Today, GCCs in India are becoming innovation hubs and are working towards incubating the next period of revenue-generating ideas. To foster this growth, one needs to understand what problems these industries face. Snowflake’s Loganathan said, “The key is understanding the top industry use cases that all companies in that space are trying to solve.”
The panel also highlighted that in the age of AI, developers are moving from being executors of requirements to product thinkers. “Every line of code should ask: How does this improve customer experience?” Shivapriya noted.
The panel discussion was followed by a tech deep dive session from NVIDIA’s Director of Solutions Architecture and Engineering, Jigar Halani, who spoke about building and deploying scalable and economical GenAI Solutions for all industries.
During the talk, Halani drew examples from a series of real-life examples to support his statement. As a case study, Halani pointed out that India’s biometric identity system Aadhaar, which covers nearly 1.4 billion citizens, has started using large language models (LLMs) to respond to citizen grievances automatically.
This was followed by another panel discussion moderated by Koot founder Sankara Srinivasan Aiyyathurai, which delved into how GCCs are driving scale and impact in India.
The panel included top GCC leaders such as Anand Mohanram, Managing Director, Mr Cooper Group India, Balaji Narasimhan, Head of Operations – GCC India, TransUnion, Dinesh Kumar Murugesan, GCC Leader, Geetha Ramamoorthi, VP & Managing Director, KBR India, and Indira Vidyaprakash, Vice President, Software Development, Site Leader, Workday.
The discussion decoded the investments, technology and infrastructure the panellists’ companies have made and the kind of opportunities these developments create in the developer ecosystem.
During the discussion, the panellists weighed in on the current hype around AI. Mohanram said, “AI is only as good as the data behind it; bad data will always give you bad output.”
Edited by Jyoti Narayan
