2026 CEO Strategy Roundtable

India's strategic landscape is shifting faster than most boardrooms can track. As geopolitical fault lines redraw trade relationships, credit conditions tighten and organisational models are tested, the demands on those at the helm have never been more complex. IMA India takes its Annual CEO Strategy Roundtable to the regal city of Jodhpur this July: a deliberate retreat from the noise, designed for the candid, future-facing conversations that rarely happen in formal settings. In an era where clarity is scarce and peer counsel is invaluable, this is where India's most thoughtful CEOs come to think out loud.

Seats are intentionally limited and allocated on a first-confirmed basis.

. Star Speakers

. Suhasini Haidar, Ajay Shah, Ananth Narayan

. Cultural Immersion

. Tour Umaid Bhawan Palace Museum, the kind of history you can't find in a textbook

. Unforgettable Experiences

. Guided tour of Mehrangarh Fort and and authentic Rajasthani Thali lunch at Gypsy

. Breathtaking views

. A luxurious stay at the regal Taj Hari Mahal, Jodhpur

. 16 July, Thursday

Early Arrivals and Registration

. 4:00 PM Onwards

. Arriving early? Explore Jodhpur with us on 16th July

Step into the grandeur of Mehrangarh Fort , where centuries of history, architecture, and royal legacy come alive through a guided exploration.

. 17 July, Friday

Excursion and Sessions

. 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM

. Discover the legacy of Jodhpur's royal family at Umaid Bhawan Palace Museum , through an impressive collection of vintage clocks, photographs, memorabilia and royal artefacts housed within one of India's last great palaces. The museum offers a fascinating glimpse into the history, architecture and grandeur of the erstwhile Marwar kingdom.

. 12:00 PM

. Experience an authentic Rajasthani Thali lunch at Gypsy , showcasing the rich flavours and culinary traditions of Marwar.

. 3:00 PM - 3:30 PM

. Kick off the 2026 CEO Strategy Roundtable with a vibrant evening of connection and celebration. Set against the elegant backdrop of Jodhpur, this welcome evening will bring together peers from across the country for relaxed conversations, good cheer and the perfect start to a weekend of insight, reflection and lasting camaraderie.

. 3:30 PM - 4:45 PM

. India's capital markets have deepened considerably over the past decade but deepening is not the same as readiness. In this session, Ananth Narayan, who recently completed a three-year term as Whole-Time Member of SEBI, will examine the regulatory architecture that governs how capital is raised, deployed and protected in India and what it needs to look like for the country to sustain its growth ambitions. Drawing on his experience at the frontline of market regulation, he will explore the tension between two types of regulatory failure: over-permissiveness that allows fraud and manipulation to erode investor confidence, and over-caution that stifles legitimate enterprise and drives capital elsewhere. For CEOs, the relevance is direct: the quality of India's regulatory environment shapes the cost and availability of capital, the appetite of foreign investors and the competitive conditions within which businesses operate.

. 4:45 PM - 5:00 PM

. 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

. India's AI Mission has generated considerable interest, but ambition and operational reality do not always move in tandem. In this session, leaders from Microsoft and Wipro will examine what the Mission might actually change for businesses, and who will need to act on it. The discussion will address where AI liability actually sits along the value chain when something goes wrong, and how data localisation requirements and infrastructure choices are reshaping the geopolitical calculus behind vendor decisions. The goal is to give CEOs a clearer view of which parts of the Mission are likely to affect business decisions, and which part may remain mere statements of intent.

. 6:00 PM - 6:30 PM

. Antara operates as a comprehensive, integrated senior-care platform. It runs independent living communities, assisted care facilities, memory care homes, home healthcare services and a self-care products line called AGEasy, all under a continuum-of-care model. The conversation would examine the organisational challenges of running what is, in effect, several businesses simultaneously, and how a CEO holds together a multi-vertical enterprise where the product is care, the asset is real estate and the promise is hospitality.

. 7:30 PM

. 18 July, Saturday

Sessions

. 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM

. The global economic order has reorganised faster than most corporate strategies have been able to absorb. In this session, Adit Jain will examine what India's positioning within that reorganised world actually means for the businesses in the room not as a question of financial risk management, but as a question of strategic opportunity and long-term competitive advantage. He will assess which structural tailwinds are genuinely durable and which are policy ambition dressed up as business reality: the consumption story, the manufacturing push, the energy transition, the digital infrastructure buildout. The session will be direct about the constraints that sit alongside the opportunities. The goal is to help CEOs distinguish between the India that is and the India that is being projected, and to build strategy on the former.

. 10:15 AM - 10:30 AM

. IMA India has launched its new website, and this short presentation is designed to make sure members get full value from it. The team will walk through what content exists on the platform: research papers, session recordings, forum briefs and the wider publication archive and where to find it.

. 10:30 AM - 11:00 AM

. 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

. India aspires to grow at 8 to 9% over a sustained period but the financial system that would need to fund that growth has some structural questions to answer. In this session, Rajeswari Sengupta will examine the credit landscape that Indian businesses are actually operating within, as distinct from the one that policy rhetoric describes. She will show that India remains credit-underpenetrated relative to its growth ambitions, that the composition of credit has shifted away from productive investment toward consumption, and that the household savings pool that underpins lending is itself changing in ways that tighten the system's capacity. The session will move from diagnosis to prescription: what specifically needs to change (in monetary policy design, in bond market architecture, in how institutional savings are deployed) for India to have the financial plumbing that a high-growth economy requires.

. 12:15 PM - 12:45 PM

. 1.5 Billion animals are used as a commodity in efficiency-driven modern supply chains. This invisible cruelty is an ethical concern, with equally serious public health & environment consequences.

India Karuna Collaborative is shifting the narratives from individual diets, religion, caste et al to the core issue of finding solutions to the invisible cruelty by changing system design through collaboration. The session will explore the linkages to ESG & Sustainability, and the role of leaders in driving change.

. 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM

. 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM

. India's growth narrative has rarely sounded more confident but confidence and reality do not always move in step. In this session, Ajay Shah will examine what firm-level revenue data, private investment flows and capital formation numbers actually reveal about where the economy stands, as distinct from what the headline GDP figures suggest. He will argue that the structural constraints holding India back (weak state capacity, institutional fragility, regulatory unpredictability) are decade-long challenges that no single budget cycle can resolve. Against that backdrop, the session will assess what the US tariff shock, the sluggishness in foreign capital flows and the still-incomplete private capex recovery mean for India's near-term trajectory. The purpose is not pessimism but precision: CEOs building five and ten-year strategies deserve an honest foundation.

. 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

. India's infrastructure ambition is well documented. The more useful question, the one that matters for business strategy, is where capital is actually going, on what terms, and why. Join us for a fireside chat with Sanjiv Aggarwal, CEO and MD of the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund and formerly a partner at Actis where he led energy investments across Asia, will offer a practitioner's account of how sovereign and private capital approaches India's infrastructure and energy markets. He will examine which sectors are generating genuine risk-adjusted returns, how foreign and institutional investors assess the Indian opportunity relative to competing markets, and where the bottlenecks that inhibit faster deployment remain. The session will give CEOs a grounded understanding of the infrastructure buildout that is reshaping India's operating environment, from energy costs to logistics to digital connectivity, and what it means for their own capital planning.

. 4:00 PM - 4:30 PM

. 4:30 PM - 5:15 PM

. Critical minerals and rare-earth magnets are embedded deep within the supply chains of automobiles, electronics, defence systems and renewable energy infrastructure. Most companies do not discover their exposure until supplies are interrupted. In this session, Rajat Verma, whose company processes the majority of India's domestically refined lithium and cobalt and is building India's first integrated rare-earth magnet manufacturing facility, will examine where the real chokepoints lie: the concentration of mining, refining and processing capacity across a handful of countries, and the geopolitical tensions that could sever access to materials with no immediate substitutes. He will assess India's specific vulnerabilities, the gaps in domestic refining capability and the policy initiatives now being considered to address them. Where hidden dependencies exist several tiers below immediate suppliers, how can CEOs map that exposure and where can recycling and circular supply chains can meaningfully reduce risk.

. 6:30 PM - 7:45 PM

. The geopolitical environment that businesses must plan within is shifting more rapidly and less predictably than at any point in recent decades. In this dinner session, Suhasini Haidar, Diplomatic Editor of The Hindu, will offer a practitioner's reading of where the world is heading and what India's strategic position within it looks like, not only as foreign policy analysis, but also as business-relevant intelligence. By July 2025, the contours of a post-conflict Middle East, a reshaped US-India relationship under the second Trump administration and a cautiously normalising India-China dynamic will all have had time to clarify. Suhasini will offer her assessment of which of these shifts are durable and which are tactical and what they mean for Indian companies managing global supply chains, overseas investments and multi-jurisdictional operations.

. 7:45 PM

. 19 July, Sunday

Session and Close

. 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM

. Most corporate transformation programs fail. Not because the strategy is wrong, not because the resources are insufficient, and not because the leadership lacks commitment — but because they are designed for the conscious, rational mind, while organisations actually run on something else entirely. In this session, Biju Dominic, Chief Evangelist at Fractal Analytics, will make the case, drawn from cognitive neuroscience and two decades of applied behavioural work, that nearly all human decision-making, including the decisions that determine whether a transformation succeeds or fails, happens below conscious awareness. The implication for CEOs is direct and uncomfortable: if your transformation program is built on information, incentives and exhortation, it is operating on a flawed model of how people actually behave. The session will show what a more accurate model looks like, and what it means for how leaders design the environments, cues and conditions that actually shift organisational behaviour.

. 11:30 AM

. 7:30 PM

. As the sun sets, join us for dinner at the majestic Ajit Bhawan. Set amid beautifully landscaped courtyards and timeless architecture, this promises to be more than just a meal, it’s an evening of relaxed conversations, meaningful connections, and timeless ambience.

Agenda