India's Top Leaders Gather to Tackle Future of Work Challenges

Tomorrow, India's most senior enterprise leaders stop talking about the future of work and start examining it. This piece looks at why the questions on the table at the ET Future of Knowledge Work Summit, around AI, talent, and organisational change, are no longer abstract, and why the room in Bengaluru on 17 June may be the most significant gathering Indian enterprise sees this year.

Five years ago, the question of whether organisations would need employees in the same way they do today would have seemed like a far-fetched proposition. The kind of question reserved for futurists and academics, not for the CEOs, CIOs, and CHROs responsible for running large organisations in the present.

Tomorrow, it is on the agenda in Bengaluru. That may be the most telling sign of how quickly the workplace is changing.

The ET Future of Knowledge Work Summit arrives at a moment when Indian enterprises are confronting questions that would have seemed far less urgent only a few years ago. Will professional roles look fundamentally different over the next decade? Who creates the most value in an economy being reshaped by intelligent systems? How do organisations prepare people for work that continues to evolve even after they are hired?

These are not distant concerns. They are already influencing hiring decisions, leadership priorities, and long-term business strategy across industries.

What makes tomorrow's gathering significant is not that it focuses on a single trend. It is that it brings together the full range of questions that enterprises are grappling with simultaneously, and the leaders responsible for answering them. Swadesh Behera, Chief People Officer of Titan. Vijay Balakrishnan, CDIO of Godrej Enterprises Group. Arushee Aggarwal, CEO of upGrad Enterprise. Akshay Wadhwa, and CEO of Jio-bp. Indy Banerjee, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company are among other senior leaders from across business, technology, human resources, and strategy, who will take forward the discussion.

The conversations they are walking into carry real weight. Because many of the assumptions that shaped the workplace for decades are being re-examined simultaneously. Workforce planning built around stable roles and predictable career paths. Leadership development following established models. Productivity measured through familiar frameworks. Today, those assumptions appear far less certain.

Organisations are being forced to rethink how expertise is developed, how teams are structured, how leadership is identified, and how knowledge moves through an enterprise. Questions that once belonged to individual functions are becoming organisation-wide concerns, and the leaders best positioned to examine them are gathering in one room tomorrow.

The significance of the summit does not lie in the promise of easy answers. Many of the questions being discussed remain genuinely unresolved. What it offers is something arguably more valuable, an understanding of how the most senior enterprise minds in India are approaching challenges that have no established playbook.

On 17 June, more than 300+ leaders from across business, technology, human resources, and strategy will spend a day examining the issues that are already reshaping how organisations work, lead, and compete.

Because the most important enterprise questions being asked today are not about what happened last quarter. They are about what happens next, and who is prepared when it does.

Tomorrow, the conversation begins. Register today.