AI First Founders' Meetup — Chennai

Spoke at the AI First Founders' Meetup in Chennai — a founder-focused summit run by Microsoft's AI Partner Catalyst Digital Native team in partnership with MudhalVC and hosted by Idea Pattarai. The session met founders where the conversation has moved to: no longer whether AI belongs in the product, but how to get it right at scale, at speed, and without burning runway. Covered building AI-native products on Microsoft's AI ecosystem, agent design patterns, and the path from product to market with a defensible view of ROI.

Highlights

• Delivered a guest speaker session on building AI-native products and agentic systems with Microsoft's AI ecosystem
• Walked founders through the agent capability spectrum — retrieval, task, and autonomous — and where each one earns its place in a product roadmap
• Joined Microsoft Startups colleagues Shyam Sankaran (Account Director) and RamGanesh V J (Solutions Engineer) on the speaker lineup
• Addressed the implementation, scaling, and ROI questions specific to early-stage teams building under runway constraints

Photos