ET WLF 2026: AI growth needs governance, financial discipline to stay sustainable

While artificial intelligence represents one of the biggest technological shifts happening globally, it is crucial to focus on governance and financial sustainability and failing to do so could lead to AI systems breaking down, industry executives said at a panel discussion. There are two challenges as AI scales up, Krishna Rangasayee, founder and chief executive of SiMa.ai, a US-based semiconductor startup, said during the discussion moderated by ET's Swathi Moorthy.

"About 87% of all AI usage doesn't have a revenue incremental or a profit pool. We are investing in AI for the sake of AI. At some point, making money will be important," said Rangasayee, whose company has raised $355 million in funding and counts Fidelity Investments and Micron as investors. The second is, "We are rushing into certain areas without safety and regulation. It's scary that one company could snoop another company and break through without oversight and safety."

According to Dipanwita Das, cofounder and CEO of Sorcero, an AI and data intelligence platform for the life sciences sector, unit economics matters. "You can take a loss for a little bit, but you do need to design a system that is going to eventually get a profit at a respectable margin," she added.

Sudip Roy, cofounder and chief technology officer at Adaption, a San Francisco-based startup building adaptive intelligence that raised $50 million early this year, said there were two different places where unit economics must be discussed. "In enterprise applications, you should be conscious of unit economics when you are using AI. But when it comes to frontier labs, we are still in the capacity building phase of AI, where we just need to make that investment," he said.

He likened this to self-driving cars, where billions in investments have gone in for years and results are only now to show.

Technology is also changing the talent landscape, where we are seeing job losses as AI becomes more capable. There are repetitive processes that can be replaced with AI and are already being replaced, Roy said. But at the same time, frontier labs were hiring aggressively. "We are now able to do a lot more, and that doesn't necessarily mean that we need less people. We need more people to do those more things," he said.

Neha Mittal, cofounder and CEO at agentic marketing platform JustAI, said they were seeing a wave of not upskilling, but reskilling, where one is needed to rethink the entire workflow. "That's a very big mindset switch that's happening pretty much at the top level and how all the conversations trickle down in terms of hiring, and how big the team should be," she said.

Sorcero's Das said in the age of AI, one needed mental flexibility. Senior people, who are unable to embrace a new way of working entirely, are falling behind, whereas the ones dependent on their decision making will leave a company if there is no flexibility, she said.