TCS Summit North America Live blog
TCS Summit North America 2025 is getting underway, with business leaders from across the region converging for three days of collaboration, insight, and innovation. The invite-only gathering is a forum for C-suite executives to connect with thinkers from politics, sports, business, and technology.
This year’s theme is “Turning complexity into competitive advantage” and Summit is set to explore how forward-looking enterprises can thrive amid geopolitical shifts, technological disruption, and societal transformation. Delegates will explore how to reimagine business ecosystems, harness human and machine intelligence, and transform their organizations into perpetually adaptive enterprises.
You can follow all the action here on this live blog as we bring you the latest updates, standout moments, and insights direct from the event stage.
Game, set, and match. The TCS Summit North America 2025 has drawn to a close, and what an incredible and insightful few days it has been. Throughout the day, speakers drew on their vast and varied experience to offer us profound and actionable insights into the future. It was a masterclass in turning complexity into a competitive advantage.
Here are the key takeaways from today’s speakers:
Opening proceedings, Honeywell’s Chairman and CEO, Vimal Kapur shared how his organization has set out a clearly defined purpose, building on decades of innovation and automation expertise, to transform Honeywell into a simpler, more focused company to deliver growth.
Ian Beacraft, Founder and Chief Futurist, Signal and Cipher, shone a light on the AI-powered future of work. His impassioned address spurred leaders to take specific, concrete actions to redesign organizational architectures, and drive new ways of working.
Our expert panel had a riveting discussion on how their organizations are negotiating a constantly evolving threat landscape.
The one and only Venus Williams then took the stage. She tempered her awe-inspiring arc of success with lessons from her failures, which have shaped both her sporting and business careers. Perpetual adaptability, experimentation, and taking control were the resonant themes of her fireside chat.
To close out Summit, Amit Bajaj, President North America TCS, thanked all the speakers and attendees for their invaluable contributions over the past three days. He encouraged everyone to continue to harness opportunities and explore what lies ahead together. He acknowledged that we are already at a juncture where AI and other technologies are having a real impact, and that it’s in our power to continue the conversation and convert our collective insights into concrete change.
For the last full session of the TCS Summit North America 2025, all-time sporting great Venus Williams took center court.
In the span of her tennis career, Venus Williams has won 21 majors and four Olympic gold medals. Her wins, however, are not confined to the court. She runs multiple successful business ventures in the world of fashion, nutrition, interior design, and beyond.
Here are highlights from an exhilarating fireside chat.
Get beyond the fear of failure
Williams faced many challenges in her tennis career, from injuries to changes in racket string technology. She said that while feeling fear is inevitable, success depends on moving past it and finding the courage to take necessary risks.
Control what you can, let go of what you can’t
In sport and in life, there will always be uncontrollable elements to contend with. Or as Williams put it, "some days the wind blows, and some days it doesn’t."
It’s vital to lead your mind, rather than let your mind lead you. Accepting unpredictability means you can focus on the areas within your control. For her, that meant relentless preparation. Finding a process and perfecting it is her key to performing under extreme pressure.
Adapt and thrive
Williams says that honest reflections on her weaknesses were integral to her success. She also had to handle feedback and critiques and be ready to change her approach—even if it meant relinquishing strength. She recalled a match where an opponent was able to stand up to her big serve—usually an asset in her game—resulting in a loss. Coincidentally, she was matched against the same player the next week. By switching her strategy and reducing the pace of her serve, she was able to adapt to her game and come away with the win.
Experimentation builds success
While building her interior design business, V Starr, was a steep learning curve; it was constant experimentation that served up success. She started out with a B2C approach and found that pivoting to a B2B model yielded better results. Being open to change, leaning into new technologies, and embracing vulnerability have been foundational to her business career.
Learning never stops
Talent is important, but Williams says it can only take you so far. Being ‘coachable’ is one of the greatest traits athletes and leaders can have. Those who are open to learning opportunities can create success where others fail.
In our final panel session of Summit, participants discussed the evolving threat landscape. They also talked about ways they are safeguarding their organizations, such as building resilience.
Ian Beacraft, Founder and Chief Futurist of Signal and Cipher, took delegates on a whirlwind tour of the future. He lifted the veil to reveal what workforces might look like if enterprises are willing to make bold choices and redesign organizational architectures.
Beacraft focused on four areas he believes will unlock change:
Practicing adaptability
As AI automates more work, the shelf life of skills is falling. How can we ensure that we keep up with change?
Beacraft reinforced that adaptability is a practice, rather than a trait. Learn to recognize the discomfort often felt during times of flux and lean into the change. This will set us on the path to effective transformation.
Becoming creative generalists
AI has the power to move us beyond the confines of our job titles and skill sets, with access to new capabilities and the automation of tedious tasks. By seeing and connecting the dots across different domains, organizations gain a new perspective on their workforce capabilities.
Recognizing these patterns takes time and diligence, and organizations need to clarify how technology can augment individuals. Automating chores and mapping skills to this defined goal will re-engineer teams and their capabilities.
Defining new metrics
With new technologies being introduced, Beacraft encouraged attendees to reconfigure metrics of success. AI is now capable of supporting consistency and reliability. Defining yardsticks for innovation, adaptability, novelty, and adoption will better determine business success.
He provided instances of idea generation, integration indexes, and diversity of prompts as a lens to understand how well workforces are adapting to new ways of working.
Creating new architecture
Beacraft closed his address by calling on individuals, organizations, and institutions to work together. He said we all must play the part of pioneers on a new frontier. The mainstay of success is collaboration. By creating collectively, we have the opportunity to design the future we want.
Vimal Kapur, Chairman and CEO of Honeywell, began the day with a crackling fireside conversation. In a time of flux, Honeywell is espousing the principle of perpetual adaptivity under his helm. Here are some of the key takeaways from his session.
Defining purpose
In a complex world, Kapur discussed the benefits of simplifying focus. Honeywell is in the process of separating into three independent publicly traded companies: Honeywell, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials.
By defining individual strategies and setting clear objectives and goals, each business has the opportunity to move faster, innovate more effectively, and unlock significant value.
History can power the future
Kapur articulated his strong belief that large-scale transformation provides the greatest opportunities for value creation. The vision and road map for this change, however, must be powered by existing knowledge and experience.
The company has spent many years investing in quality data, digitizing records to ensure information is available and accessible. With the power of AI, Honeywell has used data to speed up functional specification developments for their products. This has clear and present value, helping the company stay agile and deliver faster for customers.
Overcoming friction
Transformation cannot solely be driven by technology professionals. Overcoming resistance to change is a collaborative undertaking.
As an analogy, Kapur cited cell phones. Even as technology became commonplace, there was a long overlap where users held on to landline phones in their homes. It took time, tremendous tech penetration, as well as wide adoption for trust to grow, and for the largely redundant landline to become obsolete.
He keeps his finger on the pulse of innovation, working closely with colleagues to understand how customers are adopting technologies. This allows the organization to communicate change effectively, support adoption, and make meaningful and measured bets on new products and services.
Growth is not the sole criteria for success
When deploying new technologies, Kapur reiterated the need to consider benefits beyond ROI. The benefits different innovations provide need to be weighed up and clearly stated. Some investments, such as cybersecurity, are simply the cost of business. Others can drive and enhance workforce productivity.
Elements contributing to growth, though, can be harder to identify due to overlapping factors that influence improving numbers. The key is to clearly outline the benefits you believe new technologies will bring and measure their success against those benchmarks.
It’s the third and final day of the TCS Summit North America 2025, and since we’re not ready to say goodbye yet, we’re taking a page from our speakers’ playbook and giving you a glimpse into the future.
We will begin the day with a CEO keynote on redefining leadership for a new era.
We’ll then hear from Ian Beacraft, Founder and Chief Futurist of Signal and Cipher. He’ll be sharing his perspective and vision for an AI-powered workforce.
After a short break, a panel featuring TCS Clients will engage with the knotty problems of navigating an ever-evolving threat landscape.
As we draw to a close, the spotlight will be on one of the greatest tennis players of all time, Venus Williams. She’s won 21 major tournaments and four Olympic gold medals across singles and doubles competitions, and if that wasn’t enough she has also had significant success as an entrepreneur. She’ll be sharing her firsthand experience in cultivating excellence and innovation.
To wrap up, Amit Bajaj, President North America at TCS, will reflect on all of the brilliant ideas, opinions, and insights that emerged from the TCS Summit North America 2025.
The second day at the Summit saw changemakers from across industries having frank and forthright discussions on complex issues of how leadership and talent must work in concert with technology to shape the future.
Tomorrow, the TCS Summit North America 2025 in Nashville draws to a close. It promises to be as action- and insight-packed as the preceding days, with an extra special finale – tennis legend and AI advocate Venus Williams takes center stage!
We’ll start with a session exploring how leadership is being redefined. Later, Ian Beacraft, Founder and Chief Futurist of Signal and Cipher, will explore what an AI-powered future of work could look like.
In the afternoon leaders will tackle how business leaders can face up to an evolving threat landscape. Venus Williams will then hold court on her journey as a founder of several successful and innovative businesses.
Finally, Amit Bajaj, President TCS North America will deliver the closing address.
Join us again for live updates and key takeaways, and see the full agenda here.
For our final session today, Aarthi Subramanian, Executive Director, President, and COO, TCS, had a warm and wide-ranging conversation with host Stephanie Mehta. With 36 years at TCS under her belt, Ms. Subramanian is well-versed in technological transformation. Her take on the tectonic AI shift is a lesson in longevity and leadership. Here are four key takeaways from the conversation:
Know where you’re going, and where you’ve come from
When setting out on a transformation journey, Subramanian said it is vital to set a north star. At TCS, the ‘Human+AI’ model is applied across operations, ensuring that ways of working and end-to-end processes are taken into consideration. This allows colleagues to tap into and harvest the benefits of new capabilities offered by AI. The path forward however, can only be found by understanding the baseline from where you start. Charting the course from that vantage to your desired endpoint, allows you to plot the right course.
Provide opportunities for all
Reflecting on her own career, Subramanian said that new opportunities have been a key source of personal motivation. Her experience has given her a strong belief in the importance of democratizing access to technologies, to foster a sense of curiosity, experimentation, and play. TCS has made AI accessible to all 600,000 colleagues worldwide and driven innovation by engaging with colleagues. Our recent AI Hackathon, the world’s largest, brought together 280,000 employees who generated half a million ideas over four weeks. Generative AI was used to evaluate suggestions, showing just how deeply TCS’ ‘AI-first’ culture is ingrained.
Responsible implementation
The confluence of predictive AI, generative AI, and agentic AI will create incredible opportunities, says Subramanian. The reasoning and comprehension capabilities of technology will allow industries to create solutions that weren’t previously possible. The implementation of this tremendous potential lies with leaders who must put in place guardrails to ensure responsible, safe, and secure implementation.
Strong partnerships drive change
The importance of partnership was a thread that wove through Subramanian’s fireside chat. Working with enterprises, industry-specific organizations and AI developers are core to developing strong solutions. TCS’ deep connection with customers has been essential in driving innovation and solving problems, with a joint commitment to powering the future together.
Businesses are looking to reinvent themselves for the AI era, but doing so effectively is challenging. Our last panel of the day brought technology leaders across various industries together to unearth tried and tested strategies for building businesses equipped to adapt and thrive through constant change.
No two business transformations will ever look quite the same, and in a riveting cross-industry panel discussion, leaders shared the inspiring journeys of change their organizations have embarked on.
Poochie, the AI-enhanced robot dog, accompanied by hosts David Pogue and Stephanie Mehta, set the stage for day two of TCS Summit North America 2025.
K. Krithivasan (Krithi), TCS CEO and MD, then delivered a keynote speech focused on integrating AI strategically to build agile organizations that can thrive through uncertainty.
He emphasized that the speed, scope, and scale of AI’s impact on businesses is fundamentally different from the many previous iterations of technological change. To stay adaptive, organizations must adopt technology at speed if they hope to retain their competitive edge. The call for adoption came with a caution: organizations have been struggling to use AI in an impactful way.
While many initiatives have been launched, 95% of generative AI pilots do not deliver any measurable returns and 42% of AI initiatives are scrapped. Many enterprises are solely using AI for transactional processes and productivity gains, foregoing the larger benefits of deploying it as a cornerstone of their strategic efforts.
With next-generation agentic AI on the near horizon, organizations must be ready to build the right platforms and operating models, as well as develop a culture of rapid adoption, to adapt as technology evolves. To progress from the current transactional use of AI, building intelligent choice architectures is the essential next step. Krithi shared how TCS’ research with MIT Sloan Management Review highlights how AI can enhance strategic thinking and democratize decision-making.
Hello and welcome back to the TCS Summit North America 2025, live from Nashville.
We’re leaning further into our theme of turning complexity into competitive advantage, and today we’ll look at it through the lens of leadership and technology.
K. Krithivasan, TCS CEO and Managing Director, will open the day with his keynote address, where we expect to hear more on how enterprises can stay perpetually adaptive.
A panel discussion featuring perspectives on maneuvering through change with AI, technology, talent, and business strategies will follow.
Later, CIOs will discuss reinventing business impact.
To close the day, Aarthi Subramanian, TCS Executive Director, President, and COO sits down for a fireside chat on leadership in the age of AI.
Attendees will then break off for networking before reconvening for a gala dinner. Stay up to date with the key developments on this blog or check out the full agenda and list of speakers here.
Today’s discussions centered on the concept of adaptivity.
Throughout these sessions, several messages were clear. To be truly adaptive, it’s vital to empower people, foster collaboration, embrace experimentation, and leverage technology.
Tomorrow, we move our focus to leadership and technology in a changing world. K Krithivasan, CEO and Managing Director, TCS, will deliver his keynote address, followed by panel discussions. Aarthi Subramanian, TCS COO, will then close the day’s discussions with a fireside chat.
Follow this page in the coming days for live updates and key takeaways throughout the TCS Summit North America 2025. See the full agenda here.
Dr. Pippa Malmgren, CEO of the Geopolitica Institute and former Presidential Economic Advisor, delved deep into her substantive and wide-ranging expertise at the frontiers of the shifting landscape of the world economy before sitting down with Stephanie Mehta for a Q&A session.
An early analogy set the stage: growing up surfing shaped her conviction that waves of change are opportunities rather than challenges, and waves’ changeable nature demands an adaptive mindset. She sees the relentless pace of disruption as a chance for the most nimble and agile, offering sharp and pragmatic insights and direction on how to navigate change successfully.
Embracing the unknown
Fixating on certainty is a trap that can limit imagination, Dr. Malmgren cautioned, and singular certitude can lead to organizations missing out on innovations and new solutions. She encouraged attendees to take a preparedness stance over a prediction stance. Doing so will allow them to create enterprises that are truly perpetually adaptive.
Unlocking change
Dr. Malmgren talked about how humans are being turbocharged and augmented by innovations in technology. Rapid developments across AI, space, medicine, and energy are shaping our future. The challenge, she noted, is withdrawing from the immediacy of each new advancement, seeking the patterns that emerge, and examining how they impact different sectors holistically. The step back allows us to comprehend the complexity of our environment more fully.
Collaborating and connecting
Underscoring her hard-won insights was Dr. Malmgren’s commitment to collaboration. Her belief is that the success of future endeavors rests on connection and co-creation efforts. She highlighted the benefits she has seen from mentorship and reverse mentorship, emphasizing that knowledge sharing between generations in the workplace must be a two-way street.
Accepting failure
A core message from Dr. Malmgren was that true innovation requires a failure rate—and that to succeed, organizations must accept that all their gambits will not have the expected outcome. She encouraged leaders to ensure that their workforce has the confidence to face setbacks as a chance to learn.
Human and AI, not human or AI
Finding the right balance between the strengths of people and of technology is where Dr. Malmgren believes we will discover the greatest opportunities for advancement.
By combining human and artificial intelligence, she believes it’s now possible to find solutions that were previously out of reach.
We’re up and running in Nashville for the TCS Summit North America 2025. After a short and energetic introduction from our hosts, Amit Bajaj, President of TCS North America, kicked off proceedings by extending a warm welcome to everyone attending.
He opened by reflecting on what an enriching year it’s been for TCS. For our workplace, societal, and community efforts, we’ve been recognized by Fortune, Newsweek, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.
It has also been a notable year for partnerships. In academia, TCS has worked with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of California, Berkley; University of California, San Francisco; Carnegie Mellon University; and Purdue University, to explore human-AI collaboration, and to enhance disease prediction through deep learning and new immersive technologies.
TCS’ collaborations with startups and established players such as Google, Nvidia, IBM, and Salesforce are accelerating and scaling innovation for workforces across the United States and Canada.
In addition to our focus on innovation, Mr. Bajaj put the spotlight on our strong emphasis on talent and our significant investments in developing opportunities and job creation.
He acknowledged the challenging geopolitical, economic, and technological climate organizations are now operating in. However, with simple adaptive strategies he outlined incredible opportunities for exponential outcomes.
An illustrative historical anecdote drove home his point of competitive advantages: Henry Ford’s switch to assembly line production resulted in the time it took to assemble a car falling by 85%, the cost to consumers falling by 75%, and wages doubling.
Through agentic AI and other technology, businesses and institutions have the chance to maximize efficiency and reduce costs. Yet as he cautioned, data and knowledge are integral to success and need to become the fabric of organizations. Over the next two days, speakers will offer outside-in leadership and cross-industry perspectives to provide attendees with the inspiration they need to orchestrate change.
In closing, Mr. Bajaj encouraged attendees to collaborate and connect throughout Summit, work together, and explore the journey towards becoming perpetually adaptive.
Before the main stage lights up at TCS Summit North America 2025, a select group of leaders gathered for an exclusive pre-summit session hosted by Amit Bajaj, President of TCS North America. The focus was on how AI is reshaping the future of enterprise work. Through four scenario-driven demos spanning customer service, IT operations, finance, and software engineering, participants explored the shift from AI copilots to fully agentic systems.
The finance demo, which showcased how autonomous AI agents can orchestrate complex IT workflows and deliver outputs with minimal human intervention was a definite highlight. The discussion emphasized the importance of integrating human validation into an ‘AI+Human’ operating model, revealing how this hybrid approach can drive both cost efficiency and productivity.
This session set the stage for Summit’s deep dive into AI’s transformative power–a curtain raiser on how enterprise work is moving beyond AI assistance, and is instead increasingly driven by it.