Anand Sahay is the CEO and co-founder of Xebia, a global AI-first digital transformation and engineering partner. Xebia partners with clients to apply emerging technologies and convert innovation into sustainable growth, combining strategy, software craftsmanship, and execution to deliver measurable business outcomes.
Headquartered in Atlanta, Xebia operates across more than 17 countries with 30 offices worldwide and a global team of over 6000 professionals, known as Xebians, who deliver high-impact digital and AI-led transformations at scale.
Anand is a seasoned technology strategist and business leader with extensive experience guiding Fortune 500 organizations through major technology and business shifts. Anand as Global CEO, is leading Xebia’s long-term strategy, international expansion, and evolution into an AI-first services and solutions company.
Anand works closely with C-suite executives to translate emerging technologies into operational advantage, faster time to value, and new digital revenue streams. A strong advocate for responsible and human-centric AI, he emphasizes trust, transparency, and governance as essential to enterprise adoption.
Every enterprise wants AI transformation. Almost none are structured to deliver it. This keynote challenges the conventional wisdom on enterprise technology delivery, arguing that the model most organizations still run on i.e. write the requirements, hand them off, and wait for the build, was built for a world that no longer exists. Enterprise customers have moved on. They want engineers who understand their business as well as their codebase, and outcomes at the speed of their competitors, not another statement of work.
Drawing on real enterprise deployments, this session shows that the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model succeeds not by adding more people or process, but by rebalancing what delivery has traditionally kept apart: talent density with execution discipline, proximity to the customer with speed to ship, bold ambition with the unglamorous work of making it repeatable. The result is a sharper, faster, more accountable model for enterprises racing to win in the age of agentic AI.
