Mumbai, May 20–21, 2026 | Radisson Blu Mumbai International Airport | GRC India Summit Two days. Three leadership sessions. Hundreds of conversations. One clear message: GRC is no long...
Mumbai, May 20–21, 2026 | Radisson Blu Mumbai International Airport | GRC India Summit
Two days. Three leadership sessions. Hundreds of conversations. One clear message: GRC is no longer a compliance checkbox, rather, it’s India’s next growth infrastructure.
The 2nd Annual Governance, Risk & Compliance GRC India Summit 2026 brought together some of the sharpest minds in enterprise risk, cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, and digital transformation. For Ascent, this wasn’t just an event to attend it was a platform to lead, collaborate, and contribute. We contributed to conversations that will define how Indian enterprises build resilience in an era of unprecedented disruption.
As an Associate Partner and Sponsor, Ascent showed up with purpose. Three leadership sessions, a live booth, and a team committed to demonstrating how AI-powered integrated GRC is transforming the way organizations manage risk, ensure compliance, and sustain growth.
India is at a pivotal inflection point. As the country accelerates its ambitions as a global economic powerhouse, enterprises face mounting pressure from evolving regulatory frameworks, rising cyber threats, supply chain vulnerabilities, and growing board-level expectations around governance and accountability.
The GRC India Summit 2026 was convened to address these pressures head-on bringing together CROs, CISOs, CFOs, compliance officers, and technology leaders to exchange insights, challenge assumptions, and chart a course for smarter, more resilient enterprise operations.
autoResilience.ai is built specifically to help enterprises move from reactive continuity planning to AI-driven resilience orchestration. For us, this summit represented exactly the right room to be in.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking session of the summit came from Ascent’s own Founder and CEO, Mr. Kundan Shekhawat. He challenged the audience to fundamentally rethink how they view governance, risk, and compliance.
For too long, GRC has been treated as a back-office function something organizations do to satisfy auditors and regulators, not something that drives value. Kundan’s session dismantled that perception entirely.
His core argument: in a world defined by global chaos, strong GRC is not a constraint on growth, it is the infrastructure of growth.
GRC as a boardroom priority. Indian enterprises are rapidly waking up to the fact that governance failures don’t just attract regulatory penalties. Rather, they destroy shareholder value, erode customer trust, and permanently damage brand reputation. Board-level GRC accountability is no longer optional.
From months to days: the AI transformation. One of the most striking points Kundan raised was the dramatic compression of GRC implementation timelines. This compression is made possible by AI and modern technology platforms. What once took six to twelve months to implement can now be deployed in days making resilience accessible to a far broader segment of Indian enterprises.
India’s GRC maturity gap and opportunity. Compared to global peers in North America and Europe, Indian enterprises still have ground to cover on GRC maturity. But that gap is also an opportunity. Organizations that invest now in governance infrastructure will gain a durable competitive advantage as regulatory expectations continue to tighten.
The CFO and Board conversation. Kundan walked attendees through how GRC leaders can build a compelling business case for investment framing resilience. Not as a cost center, but as a strategic asset that reduces risk-adjusted cost of capital and enables faster, more confident growth decisions.
The session resonated deeply with an audience grappling with exactly these questions, sparking animated discussion and follow-up conversations throughout the summit.
On the morning of May 20 at 11:10 AM IST, Parth Chauhan, Ascent’s Lead Product Architect, joined a high-calibre panel. He explored how organizations can strengthen governance frameworks while navigating a rapidly shifting regulatory environment.
The discussion was expertly moderated by Pankaj Kumar, Chief Risk Officer at CEAT Limited. It featured fellow panelist Venkatesh S, Head of Risk & Internal Control at Siemens Limited bringing together perspectives from across India’s industrial and financial landscape.
Parth’s contribution to the session centred on the architectural and technological dimensions of modern governance. How compliance platforms need to be designed not just for today’s regulatory requirements, but for the evolving expectations of tomorrow. With India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) reshaping data governance obligations and digital transformation accelerating across sectors, the session explored how enterprises can build governance frameworks that are simultaneously robust, adaptable, and audit-ready.
Key takeaways from the panel included the growing importance of data lineage and accountability in compliance architecture. The need for integrated GRC platforms that connect risk, compliance, and continuity in a single source of truth. And how digital transformation initiatives must have governance embedded from the start not retrofitted at the end.
The GRC technology market is crowded. Dozens of platforms promise to simplify compliance, automate risk management, and deliver operational resilience but how do enterprise leaders cut through the noise and make decisions they can defend to the CFO?
That’s exactly the question Vivek Pratap Singh Rathore, Ascent’s Chief Growth Officer, tackled on the summit’s main stage. The session was moderated by Ashish Jain, Chief Internal Audit Officer at Nayara Energy, and featured a distinguished panel including Satyendra Biswas, CISO at YES Securities, and Bipin Lokegaonkar, Cybersecurity Product Management Head at Tata Communications.
Vivek’s perspective was grounded in the practical realities that enterprise buyers face. Budget constraints, integration complexity, change management challenges, and the pressure to demonstrate ROI within a defined timeframe. His session offered a structured framework for GRC technology evaluation one that prioritizes measurable outcomes over feature checklists.
The panel highlighted that the most successful GRC implementations share three characteristics. They start with a clear problem statement tied to business risk, they integrate with existing enterprise systems rather than creating new silos, and they are designed for the people who will actually use them not just the teams that procure them.
The energy in the room during this session reflected a market that is actively, urgently looking for answers. GRC technology investment in India is accelerating, and enterprise leaders want to make the right bets.
Beyond the stage, the Ascent booth became a hub for meaningful conversations across both days of the summit. Visitors explored live demonstrations of autoResilience.ai, Ascent’s AI-powered platform that enables enterprises to move from fragmented, manual continuity planning to intelligent, connected resilience orchestration.
The conversations at the booth reflected the themes echoing through the summit’s sessions: how do we make GRC faster to implement? How do we connect risk data across silos? How does AI change what’s possible?
For every organization asking those questions, Ascent had answers and the proof points to back them up.
Stepping back from two intensive days in Mumbai, several macro-themes emerged from the summit that will shape India’s GRC landscape in the months and years ahead:
Resilience is becoming proactive. The era of reactive business continuity building plans in response to incidents is giving way to a model of continuous, AI-driven resilience monitoring and orchestration. Organizations that make this shift will recover faster, lose less, and earn greater stakeholder confidence.
Regulation is accelerating. From DPDPA to RBI operational resilience guidelines to SEBI’s growing compliance expectations, Indian enterprises face an expanding regulatory surface area. Integrated GRC platforms are no longer a luxury they’re a compliance necessity.
AI is compressing timelines. The productivity gains from AI in GRC are real and measurable. Implementation timelines, audit preparation cycles, and risk assessment workflows are all being compressed dramatically, making resilience accessible to organizations that previously couldn’t afford the time or cost of comprehensive GRC programs.
GRC is becoming a growth story. Perhaps the most significant shift on display at the summit: the conversation has moved from risk avoidance to growth enablement. Organizations with mature GRC programs aren’t just avoiding failures they’re using governance and resilience as a competitive differentiator.
The 2nd Annual GRC India Summit 2026 reinforced what Ascent has believed from the beginning: that intelligent resilience, proactive, connected, AI-driven is the defining enterprise capability of this decade.
Through three leadership sessions, hundreds of booth conversations, and the ongoing work of the autoResilience platform, Ascent is committed to helping Indian enterprises build that capability, not someday, but now.
A sincere thank you to the organizers at Inventicon Business Intelligence for curating such a high-quality event, to every speaker and panelist who contributed their expertise, and to every attendee who engaged with the Ascent team across both days.
The future of resilience is intelligent, connected, and proactive. And Ascent is here to help you build it.
Want to explore how autoResilience.ai can accelerate your GRC program? Book a free consultancy to see how AI-driven resilience orchestration is changing what’s possible for enterprises across India and beyond.
