What we talked about
Karthik Krishnamurthy is the CEO and Founder of Ascendion, an AI-native engineering company operating across 12 countries, including teams in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. Before starting Ascendion, he spent nearly two decades at Cognizant in senior leadership roles across digital, analytics, and AI. He is also the author of “AI Arbitrage Is The Next Frontier.”
Show notes
Karthik Krishnamurthy has been working in AI for 25 years and has watched every wave of excitement run into the same wall: nobody can show the ROI. A machine learning project he ran in 2015 to identify patients at risk of opioid drug-seeking behavior saved a healthcare company $60 million and created proactive interventions for 85,000 people, and that result has driven everything he has built since.
What we covered
- Karthik draws a sharp line between AI-first and AI-native companies. An AI-first company still spends time debating why and what to use AI for. An AI-native company only thinks about the how, because the why and what are already settled, baked into how people are hired, how marketing campaigns are run by agents, and how almost all code is written through internal agents.
- The wrong question when starting an AI transformation is “how can I implement AI?” The right question is “how do I deliver four quarters of revenue acceleration?” or “how do I hit 400 basis points of EBITDA improvement?” The power of AI today, Karthik said, is that many of those ambitious goals can only be achieved by applying an AI lens.
- Enterprises cannot simply hand every developer an AI tool and tell them to go. Ascendion’s approach is to define a new end-to-end software engineering process, covering quality engineering, test management, business discovery, design, that is built from the ground up to support an agentic framework, then physicalize that process on a platform so agents and humans work together inside existing compliance and security constraints.
- A client came to Ascendion having thought about building a data marketplace for months but never starting. In one platform session, no business people in the room, they produced a lean business canvas, must-have and nice-to-have requirements, and epics broken into stories. The client’s reaction: “My Lord, this is crazy.” Karthik frames this as the difference between incremental improvement (10-20% sprint velocity gains) and AI arbitrage: orders-of-magnitude shifts that actually move revenue lines.
- The rarest job in the next year, Karthik predicted, will be agentic delivery management, project managers who have actually delivered projects where human labor and agent labor worked together successfully, at speeds three to four times faster than human-only teams. He compared it to the moment data scientists became the hottest role in tech, and said those holding this experience will be “the hottest thing in the market.”
- Karthik told listeners to take screenplay writing workshops. Storytelling, being able to define the outcome you want, articulate it clearly, and bring others along, is now one of the most important skills in an AI-native organization, because guiding an LLM to the right result and then selling that result to stakeholders require exactly the same capability.
About Karthik
Karthik Krishnamurthy is the CEO and Founder of Ascendion, an AI-native engineering company. He spent nearly two decades at Cognizant in senior leadership roles across digital, analytics, and AI before founding Ascendion to help large enterprises connect AI to measurable business outcomes. He is the author of “AI Arbitrage Is The Next Frontier.”
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthik-krishnamurthy-8117424
- Website: https://ascendion.com
Episode 124 of the PreVetted Podcast.