ET Under 40 2026: Leaders say businesses must change before it's too late

With businesses being reshaped by technology amid shifting consumer expectations and shorter cycles of relevance, the biggest risk may not be changing too much-it may be changing too late, agreed a panel of corporate leaders at The Economic Times 40 Under Forty awards ceremony in Mumbai on Friday evening.

Companies must be willing to disrupt themselves even when the business appears to be working well, said the panel, featuring Jay Kotak, co-head at Kotak811; Dhimaan Shah, founder, Isprava Group; Indraneel Chitale, managing partner at Chitale Bandhu Group; Rabitah Khara, advisory chief operating officer, PwC India; and Harman Dhillon, executive director, beauty and wellbeing, Hindustan Unilever.

For Kotak, the case for proactive reinvention is a compelling one. "Change has to come proactively from within the business, not necessarily because the market asks you to," he said. At Kotak811, that has meant reimagining banking as a digital-first experience. The task, Kotak said, was to move banking away from being centred on "the branch, the cheque book and the debit card" towards the mobile phone. This was a move that the market had not necessarily forced banks to pursue at speed.

In consumer businesses, the urge to take proactive action is equally crucial. Chitale said the food industry is undergoing a major shift, aided by stronger regulation and greater consumer awareness. But the onus is now on companies to understand what matters and act accordingly. Consumers are looking beyond traditional brand narrative, Chitale said. "That does not mean legacy businesses must discard their heritage. For Chitale Bandhu, whose name is closely associated with trust and quality, the challenge has been to preserve the core while evolving the proposition around it. Quality remains non-negotiable, but its meaning has changed with the times," he said.

Standards will keep rising

"At one time, if it was just about a safe product, now it is about something which is based on nutrition... it would be about some functionality as well," Chitale said, adding that the stakes are higher in an always-on social-media environment.

The best time to begin a reinvention journey is when an organisation is doing well, said Hindustan Unilever's Dhillon. HUL's formidable strengths are its scale and distribution, with access to 9 million outlets across India, but that advantage must be reworked for an evolving consumer. "We need to preserve the legacy that we have-a strong brand and large scale-but reinvent the execution of it," Dhillon said.

PwC's Khara pointed to her own firm's evolution as an example of adapting without losing institutional identity. PwC began as an audit company more than 150 years ago, but advisory today contributes 75% of its revenue.

The bigger danger, she argued, is using heritage and purpose as a reason not to change, and customers are often the ones who deliver the harshest reality check. "Companies need to keep their ears and eyes open and deliver accordingly, or else a jolt comes from customers if you don't," she said.

For Isprava's Shah, change is good, but not for the sake of change itself. There have to be clear business goals. "In our business of luxury real estate, our land acquisition-to-launch cycle was typically six-eight months. We have now cut that down to two-and-a-half months-that has huge effects internally, as well as for our clients. We don't adopt the latest trends simply for the sake of it."

The panel discussion also raised a crucial question in the age of AI: is the competitive edge about having more data or using it better?

Kotak said data will only gain in importance as AI tools absorb far greater volumes of information. "More bets get taken with data in the world of AI, where some of these tools can consume thousands of times the data that a human can," he said. Khara, however, differed on the diagnosis. "Most companies are data rich but insight poor," she said. The real gap, she argued, is the ability to connect information and extract the right story. "It is what we do with data that is the piece of the puzzle that's often missing."

Dhillon agreed that the solution does not lie in access to AI alone. "It is what happens around the technology and what you do with the data which is going to be the moat," she said.

The panel's final takeaway was that preparing for AI will involve far more than just training employees to use new tools. It will require organisations to redesign themselves on a large scale, remove bottlenecks, preserve agility and make room for human judgment. In an era of relentless disruption, the leaders concluded that the real test is not whether a company can use AI. It's whether the entity can reinvent itself quickly without losing the values that made it matter in the first place.