For over fifteen years, XConf has been our flagship technology event — created by technologists, for those passionate about technology and its impact on the world. XConf offers a space where professionals can connect, share experiences, and explore their love for tech in a relaxed and engaging atmosphere.
This year, we returned to Bengaluru for a one-day, three-track event that brought together inspiring talks, engaging discussions, and a vibrant community of technologists at ITC Gardenia.
Recordings will follow — watch this space.
What is XConf?
At XConf, we provide a platform for technologists and business leaders who are driving meaningful change to share their stories. From demos of emerging tech to hands-on workshops, every part of the XConf experience is designed to spark innovation and create real-world impact. It’s a celebration of technologists coming together to drive progress — not just for their clients, but for the tech industry as a whole.
Keynote speakers
Meet the keynote speakers for XConf 2025
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., instructional professor at the University of Houston, and creator of the dev2next conference.
He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers across the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients successfully apply sustainable agile practices in their software projects.
He is the (co)author of multiple technical books, including Practices of an Agile Developer, which won the 2007 Jolt Productivity Award.
Vanya Seth
Head of Technology, IME
An experienced technologist with a demonstrated history of working in the IT services industry, Vanya is a strategic consultant specializing in platforms, delivery infrastructure, evolutionary architecture and cloud native applications.
In her current role as Head of Technology for Thoughtworks in India, Vanya shapes new pursuits, strategically advises on client projects, and formulates meaningful and resilient technology strategies.
She is a passionate technologist with a knack for solving complex problems, at scale. She is also deeply involved in with open source communities.
Bharani Subramaniam
Chief Technology Officer, IME
Bharani, with 25+ years of experience has been building applications since the late nineties, when he started his career as a VC++ win32 programmer. He is a connoisseur of various technologies but his passion lies in simplifying system designs. He also indulges in building strategies around data engineering and making the most of real time analytics for Thoughtworks’ clients.
Bharani in his current role as the Chief Technology Officer, India & Middle east devotes most of his time to shaping new pursuits, actively participating in client projects, while also crafting blueprints that eliminate projects’ SOS calls for rescue. He collaborates with the Thoughtworks' Technology Advisory Board that puts together thoughts on emerging technology trends in the industry, resulting in the much sought after Technology Radar.
Agenda
8:30 am – 9:00 am
9:00 am – 9:10 am
9:10 – 10:10 am
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam
Innovations have transformed human lives, in ways that we can't imagine how people survived before. Yet, we do not embrace innovations readily and we shouldn't in most cases. Our time in this world is juxtaposed with yet another major innovation in our field. Is AI going to take over the world, our jobs, our way of life...and more are questions that are asked frequently these days. Come to this keynote to learn how to ride the new wave instead of being swept under.
10:15 am – 11:15 am
Bharani Subramaniam and Vanya Seth
AI is reshaping the way we build software—but mastering it takes more than chasing the latest model. In this keynote, we’ll explore eight essential tech trends shaping the emerging AI stack. From building AI-ready data platforms and tackling threats like Context Poisoning, to rethinking metrics for fair and safe systems, this talk covers the foundations of resilient and trustworthy AI. We’ll also dive into performance breakthroughs like Prefill and Decode Disaggregation, which are making real-time, large-scale AI possible. Join us for a practical, forward-looking take on what it means to build AI with skill, responsibility and impact.
11:20 am – 12:10 pm
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, Bharani Subramaniam and Vanya Seth
12:00 pm – 12:10 pm
12:15 pm – 1:15 pm
1:30 pm – 3:40 pm
Three tracks, live in parallel
AI-first software delivery
1:30 pm – 2:10 pm
AI assisted legacy modernisation : From UX to code
by Pranjal Ranka and Rahul Ramesh
Bahmni, an open-source electronic health record system serving healthcare providers for over a decade, faces the challenges of a complex legacy architecture and outdated user experience. This session explores how the team leveraged Generative AI to reimagine its UX and employed coding agents to seamlessly migrate the codebase to a modern technology stack
2:15 pm – 2:55 pm
Blackbox reverse engineering: Rebuilding without source code
by Thiyagu Palanisamy and Chandirasekar Thiagarajan
This talk shows how a decades-old retail system was rebuilt without source code or a live instance. Using only static UI files, database schema, recordings, and DLLs, the team used decompiled assembly, schema mapping, and AI-powered flow extraction to recover core functionality in one week. Learn how Gen AI enabled black-box reverse engineering and rapid modernization.
3:00 pm – 3:40 pm
Rethinking legacy modernisation with automated reasoning and comprehension models
by Avishek Sen Gupta
This talk redefines legacy modernization by combining Gen AI with deterministic methods from compiler engineering. Learn how verified facts like control flow and data dependencies can anchor AI-generated outputs, enabling explainable, trustworthy, and precise modernization insights that augment human expertise.
Data and Artificial Intelligence
1:30 pm – 2:10 pm
GenAI meets Data Mesh: From data product design to enterprise intelligence
by Balvinder Khurana, Sreerupa Dutta Auditto, Antony Prince J and Pallavi Sinha
Discover how a modular approach to data mesh, powered by Gen AI, accelerates enterprise intelligence with minimal disruption. This talk covers how AI streamlines data product design, standardization, and scale, with real-world use cases from manufacturing and pharma that show measurable business impact.
2:15 pm – 2:55 pm
Building Agentic AI Assistants: Lessons from productionising agents in Preclinical R&D
by Sarang Kulkarni, Priyalakshmi R and Bernice M
Learn how Bayer and Thoughtworks built PRINCE, an AI assistant that transforms preclinical R&D. Using retrieval-augmented generation, text-to-SQL, and agent orchestration, PRINCE unifies structured and unstructured data to cut search effort by 90% and automate compliance drafting, all while ensuring trust, traceability, and human oversight.
3:00 pm – 3:40 pm
Accessible products, experiences and partnerships
by Dipsi Kundal and Pooja Joshi
Explore how accessibility can be a driver of innovation. This talk shows how we are applying AI and inclusive design to build accessible-by-default products. Hear how Thoughtworks is developing an org-wide accessibility matrix and why our tech work earned us a spot as one of 16 global Valuable 500 iconic partners alongside Apple and EY.
Platforms and Infrastructure
1:30 pm – 2:10 pm
The elephant in the cloud: Strategies of cloud cost optimisation
Shakir Shakiel A and Ankit Adlakha
Cloud delivers agility, but costs can scale faster than value. This talk shares real-world strategies to optimize cloud spend—decoding billing reports, right-sizing resources, and building cost-aware engineering practices. Learn how teams achieved savings at scale without sacrificing performance or speed of delivery.
2:15 pm – 2:55 pm
Building better platforms: A capability maturity model for infrastructure engineering
Saptak Takalkar and Sunit Parekh
How mature is your infrastructure platform? This talk introduces a capability maturity model covering provisioning, observability, self-service, security, and more. Learn how to assess gaps, benchmark maturity, and build a roadmap to evolve platform engineering practices at any scale—with actionable insights for teams and architects.
3:00 pm – 3:40 pm
Breaking Boundaries: Multi-cluster with Cilium cluster mesh
Aditya Avanth Kaki and Sudhamsh Kandukuri
As multi-cluster Kubernetes adoption grows, cross-cluster networking remains complex. This talk dives into how Cilium Cluster Mesh, powered by eBPF and WireGuard, enables encrypted, high-performance pod-to-pod communication without ingress controllers. See real-world use cases, a live demo, and learnings from production-scale rollouts.
3:40 pm
4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Unmesh Joshi and Ayushi Dey
We use distributed systems every day. Cloud services like Amazon S3, Amazon EKS, and CosmosDB are all distributed systems. Products like Kafka, Kubernetes, Cassandra, Akka, and Blockchain are distributed systems as well.
Even if not everyone on a team is involved in building these kinds of systems, it is important to have some understanding of how distributed systems work.
What you will learn and how you can apply it?
By the end of this live online course, you will understand,
- What a distributed system is and why distributed systems are needed.
- Common problems in distributed systems and their solutions in the form of patterns.
- Consensus algorithms like Paxos and Raft, which are fundamental building blocks of most cloud services and products.
- Key concepts required to understand the implementation of a wide range of systems such as databases, in-memory data grids, message brokers, and various cloud services.
Recommended for: Developers with 3-6 years of experience
Pre-requisite for attendees: Familiarity with Java, JDK17+ and any IDE for Java programming
What to carry: Your laptop and charger
4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Sarang Sanjay Kulkarni, Vishal Karmalkar and Megha Agarwal
As AI agents become central to automating complex tasks and managing multi-step workflows, this hands-on session will equip you with the foundational skills to build and customize your own autonomous AI agents. Over the course of two hours, you’ll begin by creating a simple agent from scratch—without using any prebuilt frameworks—while exploring the core principles of agentic flows. Then, you'll transition the same logic into LangGraph, a modern framework for building stateful, multi-step AI agents. By the end of the workshop, you’ll have a functional agent prototype and a practical understanding of how to structure prompts and extend agent behavior for real-world applications.
Recommended for: Developers and AI enthusiasts familiar with coding and large language models
Pre-requisite for attendees: Basic understanding of Generative AI concepts (e.g., prompt/response workflows)
What to carry: Your laptop with charger; a Python 3.8+ environment setup, LangGraph setup
XConf across the globe
Top ten tech trends you need to know
XConf India: Bharani Subramaniam and Vanya Seth, Heads of Technology
How will evolutionary architecture evolve?
XConf Europe: Dr. Rebecca Parsons, Thoughtworks CTO Emerita
Unlock engineering effectiveness
XConf Singapore: Panel discussion with May Xu, Sowmya Ganapathi Krishnan, Aditi Agarwal and Nouman Memon