Talks and speaking engagements on Dr. Hitesh Sarda

Monetizing AI in SaaS: an empirical study of pricing and packaging models for AI features

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An alumni talk for IIBM Institute of Business Management, where I reflected on my Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) journey with IIBM and SIMA and presented a summary of my dissertation.

The research looks at how B2B SaaS companies with $1M to $100M in annual recurring revenue price and package AI features. I reviewed the pricing pages of 371 companies and interviewed nine senior executives.

Traditional subscription pricing still dominates: 51.5% of the companies use pure subscription, and 18.1% combine a subscription with usage charges, a share that grows as companies get larger. Purely usage-based pricing is rare at every size. On packaging, 42.3% spread AI capabilities across their plan tiers. The dissertation ends with a five-stage path for AI monetization and a five-step framework for pricing AI features.

The AI revolution: navigating your career

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I spoke to students at IIM Udaipur in its Industry Captain Series, then as CTO of OptCulture, about what AI means for the careers they are about to start. The short version: entry-level “doer” jobs are shrinking, and the edge goes to people who move up to reviewer and then partner faster than the people around them.

From doer to reviewer to partner

Generative AI turned capabilities that once needed a data science team into plug-and-play APIs, available to everyone much like electricity. That makes repetitive, task-oriented work easy to automate. What stays valuable is reviewing, validating and refining what AI produces, and then working as a strategic partner who decides what it should be used for. AI is not magic, and it is not a replacement for thinking.

The smart store revolution: how digital and AI are rewriting the rules of retail

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At the Retailers Association of India’s Visakhapatnam Retail Summit, speaking for OptCulture, I gave store owners a 90-day plan for using digital tools and AI in three places: reaching customers, selling to them in the store, and bringing them back.

Know and reach your customer

Mass marketing is expensive, dilutes the brand and does not build loyalty. The alternative starts with the sales data a retailer already has: AI can find customer groups hidden in it, and it can work as an early warning system for customers who are about to stop coming. Location helps too. With real-time geofencing, you can reach a customer when they are 500 meters from the store rather than five hours later.

Inside the ISV journey: lessons from the front lines

Tue, 27 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A fireside chat at AWS ISV Ignite 2025, where I joined the panel as CTO of OptCulture, on how Indian independent software vendors (ISVs) can use AWS to build, scale and grow their businesses.

We talked about startup journeys and why companies choose AWS, the challenges of the early stage, and the lessons that matter most for SaaS founders. The discussion covered what an AWS partnership is worth, the go-to-market opportunities it opens, and how to expand into international markets.

Creating and capitalizing on opportunities

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A talk at my alma mater for students about to start their careers. I built it around Seneca’s definition of luck: “Luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation.”

The first half was about creating opportunities: building a network by helping people with their goals, pushing yourself out of the comfort zone, staying open to change, and giving back. The second half was about being prepared to take them, through discipline with time, hard work and skills, and then about being selective with what you take on and being known for something.

How blockchain is transforming the future of financial services infrastructure

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I was one of six panelists at the Fintech Valley Vizag Spring Conference on 9 March 2017, speaking as a Director at ValueLabs, on how blockchain could transform the infrastructure that financial services run on. Fintech Valley Vizag is the Andhra Pradesh government’s initiative to build a fintech hub in Visakhapatnam, and the Spring Conference was one of its flagship events.

The panel was:

Akshay Dhanak, Vice President, Business System and Technology, HDFC Life
Sudin Baraokar, Head of Innovation, SBI
Rachna Nath, Partner, KPMG
Vinay Agarwal, CEO, Angel Broking
Paul Kitti, Co-founder, TenX
Hitesh Sarda, Director, ValueLabs

We discussed what established financial institutions could do to reinvent themselves, and agreed that the disruption would come from start-ups that manage to build trust. The session closed with questions from the audience and a look ahead to the Fintech Valley hackathon planned for later that year.