Haiintel Appoints Former TCS Business Unit Head Karthik Sukumaran as CEO

• 16 Oct 2026
• TM Team
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Haiintel  named Karthik Sukumaran its first chief executive officer. Sukumaran joins from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), where he spent 26 years and most recently served as Vice President and Business Unit Head.

Shadman Zafar, CEO of Vibrant Capital, said Sukumaran built his reputation with C-suite executives by being direct about what it takes to deliver and staying accountable for the result. “AI is changing how enterprises buy technology services. For decades, they have paid by the hour. Now software can do the work, so they can pay for the outcome. That is Services as Software, and Haiintel is building its business on it. Karthik has seen this shift firsthand and knows how to lead it.”

Haiintel modernizes legacy enterprise applications, moving monolithic systems to microservices and the cloud, and builds new systems with its Hai agents. Large technology programs once mobilized hundreds of people, and Agile methods and Amazon’s “two-pizza” rule later brought teams under ten. Haiintel’s 2H+AI Pod brings that to two humans leading a fleet of agents. Agents get first right of execution on every task, while the two people make the judgment calls and answer for the results.

Under its Outcome-as-a-Service model, clients pay for agreed outcomes measured by technology or business KPIs. In modernization work, that means technical debt retired: services running in production, workloads moved to the cloud and cutovers completed with no downtime. Haiintel says its early engagements in fintech, retail and healthcare have delivered software in about half the time and at about half the cost of a conventional Agile team working on the same scope.

At TCS, Sukumaran wrote transformation blueprints for Fortune 50 enterprises through every platform shift from mobile to AI and built multimillion-dollar client businesses across automotive, banking, financial services and insurance. He began his career as an R&D engineer at Lucas TVS.

“I’ve spent my career inside large enterprise transformations, and the size of the delivery team has always set the cost and the pace,” said Sukumaran. “At Haiintel, two people and their agents do that work, and clients pay for results. I joined to bring that model to many more enterprises.”