10 changemakers shaping the future.
From rethinking industries to creating new possibilities, these 10 individuals are shaping the ideas, businesses, and solutions that could define what comes next
1. Asish Kumar Pal: Where Food Science Meets Commercial Wisdom
The food industry often celebrates breakthrough products, but rarely the minds that make those breakthroughs commercially possible. For over three decades, Asish Kumar Pal has worked in that space between innovation and execution, where scientific ideas are tested not by theory, but by production lines, consumer expectations, and market realities.
His career has never followed the spotlight. Instead, it has followed complexity.
From managing manufacturing operations across India to leading large-scale food businesses in Nigeria, Ghana,Kenya, Zimbabwe,South Africa, and Mozambique, Asish has spent nearly four decades solving challenges that most consumers never see but every successful food brand depends upon. Whether commissioning greenfield facilities, developing products from the ground up, strengthening quality systems, or scaling operations across international markets, his work has consistently transformed technical expertise into commercial outcomes.
Today, as Chief Technology Officer at Beacon Global Food Consultancy, he brings that experience to businesses looking for more than technical advice. He works alongside entrepreneurs and established brands alike, helping them navigate the entire innovation journey, from formulation and process optimisation to regulatory readiness and successful market launches. The consultancy's focus on science-led, commercially viable food innovation mirrors the philosophy he has refined throughout his career.
What distinguishes Asish is his understanding that innovation succeeds only when it survives scale. A formulation must perform beyond the laboratory, a manufacturing process must remain efficient under pressure, and a product must earn consumer trust while meeting uncompromising quality standards. This balance between scientific discipline and business practicality has become the defining thread of his leadership.
In an era where influence is often measured by online visibility, Asish Kumar Pal represents a quieter but more enduring form of leadership. His legacy is not built on headlines or personal branding. It is reflected in the factories commissioned, the products commercialised, the businesses strengthened, and the entrepreneurs empowered through decades of technical excellence and currently running ,His own Confectionery company in Mozambique, Doces De Moz ,Lda. Some leaders build companies. Others build the capabilities that allow industries to move forward. Asish Kumar Pal has spent a lifetime doing precisely that.
2. Yash Thakker: Making AI Skills Accessible, Practical, and Immediately Usable
Yash Thakker built his career on one simple conviction: nobody should leave a learning session without having built something real. After 12 years leading products across media, fintech, regtech, and edtech, he turned that conviction into a teaching philosophy - hands-on, no-fluff, learn-by-building. It's worked: 350,000+ students across Udemy, Coursera, and Codecademy, and counting.
He's the founder of AISOLO Technologies Pvt Ltd, the engine behind bgblur.com & explainx.ai. Its flagship, explainx.ai, has become a full-blown AI hub - tools, courses, news and now, sharp, one-to-two-day live workshops on themes like agentic AI, built live on screen with zero pre-recorded fallback.
"Make AI skills accessible, practical, and immediately usable, because learning should feel like discovery, not a chore."
- Yash Thakker, Founder, AISOLO Technologies
Yash debugs live, in front of students, in real time, turning theory into muscle memory. It's a habit that runs through everything he builds: just real, happening-now examples that make complex ideas feel obvious. That range across Udemy, Coursera, Codecademy, and now his own workshops is what sets his teaching apart. His newest chapter - focused live workshops through explainx.ai brings that philosophy full circle: the builder who once learned by shipping products is now teaching thousands to do the same.
3. Dr Alakananda Das - Building Sustainable Livelihoods Through Collective Action
_"What we think, we become." - Buddha_
For Dr. Alakananda Das, sustainability is not only about protecting the environment; it is also about creating livelihoods that allow communities to grow with dignity. She is a social entrepreneur who founded Looms Ecopreneurs Federation. It is a collaborative platform working at the intersection of sustainable enterprise, community development, and environmental innovation. Also, she is venturing into language and skills training for cross-border trade and other placement opportunities.
Through LOOMS, Dr. Das seeks to bridge rural and urban ecosystems and help eco-enterprises scale. Its work focuses on waste-to-resource models, renewable energy adoption, and community-led conservation, while creating opportunities for grassroots innovators and entrepreneurs.
Her leadership combines scientific thinking with inclusive governance. The federation brings together grassroots innovators, researchers, and policy advocates. This creates pathways for mentorship, funding, and knowledge-sharing.
From circular economy initiatives and green jobs to climate-resilience programs, LOOMS aims to demonstrate how environmental responsibility can go hand in hand with stronger livelihoods.
For Dr. Das, the larger vision is to build an ecosystem where innovation is not concentrated in a few places or voices. It is about ensuring that communities most affected by environmental and economic challenges are part of creating the solutions.
Her work reflects a belief that sustainable change becomes stronger when people are given the opportunity to participate, innovate, and lead.
4. Ameet Gandhi - Reimagining Wealth as a Tool for Social Impact
_"Money is not simply a measure of personal success. It is a means to create opportunities, solve problems and change lives." - Ameet Gandhi_
A chairman with interests across property, technology and finance, Gandhi is associated with Able Properties Limited, Boon Infotech Systems Limited and Blue Point Credit Capital Pvt. Limited. His work reflects an interest in looking beyond conventional business models and exploring how wealth and technology can contribute to wider economic participation.
One idea he is currently exploring is the concept of a digital economy built around digital currency and new forms of value exchange through banking systems. His thinking goes beyond transactions: can emerging financial models help create employment, strengthen local economic activity, and connect resources with people who need them?
His second idea comes from a story about a mountain in Raigad, Ratnagiri. Tribal communities there earn by cutting wood from the mountain. Gandhi's approach is to buy the mountain and grow organic mangoes instead. He can then employ the same workers, provide them with regular salaries, and help them meet basic needs, including housing, via Ameet Gandhi Foundation.
For Gandhi, this represents a broader understanding of entrepreneurship-where economic growth and social contribution can exist together.
His philosophy is simple: "Money is not just what fulfills your needs, but what can change other people's lives."
It raises a larger question: What can wealth create beyond wealth itself?
5. Dinkar Rao - Coach with a Midas Touch
Some coaches build skills. The rare ones transform the people behind those skills.
Dinkar Rao brings that rare quality to leadership and business growth. With over two decades of experience, he has worked with 300+ organisations and developed more than 14,000 professionals across diverse sectors.
His approach connects strategy with execution, leadership with culture, and performance with purpose. Through Groval Euler's and Groval Selectia, he strengthens business capabilities and cross-functional leadership. Through the Kabir Learning Foundation, he adds reflection, empathy, and timeless wisdom to leadership.
That is what makes him a coach with a Midas touch, turning potential into capability, and capability into lasting impact.
â 6. Monika Ahirwal: From Breaking Stereotypes to Building Technology Solutions
_"A woman with no business background cannot succeed in business."_
For Monika Ahirwal, those words did not become a limitation. They became a challenge.
After years in the corporate and MNC environment, she stepped into entrepreneurship by entering an industry completely different from her professional background: commercial LPG distribution in Indore. She learned the business from scratch, managed operations, and built relationships. With this, she went on to establish MR Group of Companies as a prominent commercial LPG distributor serving hotels, schools, hospitals, and other institutions.
But Ahirwal's entrepreneurial journey did not stop there.
Her growing interest in technology led her to become a Certified AI Engineer from IIT Roorkee and identify another challenge: many Indian MSMEs struggle to find technology solutions that are practical, accessible, and aligned with their business needs.
This led to ITSoftLab Consultancy Services Pvt. Ltd., where she serves as CEO. Today, the company is building a 100+ member team focused on helping businesses use technology to solve real-world problems.
For Monika, technology is not about building software for its own sake. It begins with understanding the problem.
Her journey across two vastly different industries has shaped a simple philosophy: your background may define where you start, but it does not have to define how far you can go.
And that is the message she hopes her journey leaves for the next woman ready to take the first step.
âÂÂ7. Rahul Ahirwal - Building Technology Businesses, Not Just Software
_What if building an IT business did not require you to build the technology from scratch?_
That question sits at the heart of Rahul Ahirwal's vision for ITSoftLab Consultancy Services Pvt. Ltd. An IIT Roorkee alumnus and technology professional, Ahirwal spent years working with IT and MNC organizations, where he closely observed the challenges businesses faced while adopting technology.
He noticed that companies often depended on multiple software systems for HR, CRM, accounting, sales, and operations, yet these platforms frequently operated in silos. At the same time, aspiring entrepreneurs faced the high costs and risks associated with building a technology business from the ground up.
These observations became the foundation for ITSoftLab.
Through ITSoftLab360, the company is building an integrated technology ecosystem spanning HRMS, CRM, ERP, supply chain, POS, sales force automation, vendor management, and AI-powered marketing.
However, Ahirwal's larger vision goes beyond software. ITSoftLab is developing a franchise model that enables entrepreneurs to build local IT businesses using its technology ecosystem, while the company manages product development, maintenance and technical support.
"Our goal is not to create customers for an IT company; our goal is to create more IT company owners," says Ahirwal.
His ambition is to take technology entrepreneurship beyond traditional IT hubs and create opportunities for people across cities and smaller towns to build businesses around technology.
8. Anurag Sarkar - Making the Cloud Simpler for Businesses
After spending a decade working in infrastructure, including at Amazon, Anurag Sarkar noticed a recurring problem: companies were spending months fixing the way they built and deployed on the cloud instead of focusing on what they actually wanted to build.
That observation became the foundation for Spring Winter.
The company is creating a simpler way for teams to build on AWS while keeping their infrastructure within the cloud account they already own. Servers, workers, sites, previews, caches, and databases can be brought up through the platform, while the infrastructure and associated costs remain within the company's AWS account.
The idea addresses a gap between two common approaches. Traditional platforms can make deployment easier but keep control of the underlying infrastructure. Building directly within your own cloud account offers control, but often involves lengthy setup and technical complexity.
Spring Winter aims to bring simplicity into that second model.
Its approach allows companies to connect their existing cloud environment, choose the access they want to provide and have that access checked before infrastructure is created. What they build remains in their own cloud.
For Sarkar, the larger vision is straightforward: "I want to bring the best of what modern infrastructure can offer to the world, so that companies focus on building while Spring Winter focuses on making sure your software runs across the world."
His goal is to make the cloud an enabler-not another problem companies have to spend months solving.
9. Shaibaz Shaikh: Building the Infrastructure Behind Every Customer Conversation
_"Every message has a journey."_
For Shaibaz Shaikh, that journey goes far beyond sending a message. As a leader behind FirstConnectt, a global Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) company, he is helping businesses build meaningful customer conversations across the channels they use every day.
FirstConnectt brings WhatsApp, SMS, RCS, Voice, Conversational AI and Agentic AI together through one communication infrastructure. Its platform enables enterprises to manage these channels through a unified API while supporting the reliability and scale required for mission-critical communication. Today, it reaches 120+ countries through 750+ telco connections and powers 100B+ conversations annually.
Also, its ecosystem integrates with platforms such as Salesforce, Zoho, Shopify, CleverTap, and WebEngage. This allows businesses to connect communication with the tools they already use.
The platform serves sectors including BFSI, fintech, e-commerce, retail, logistics, healthcare, travel and hospitality, and D2C brands. Its solutions support marketing and commerce, customer experience, product and engineering, and business-critical communication.
Besides this, Shaibaz's vision via FirstConnectt is to help enterprises make communication more connected, reliable, and intelligent. By bringing multiple channels and technologies together, he aims to help businesses create seamless customer experiences at scale.
For Shaibaz, the future of business communication is not about sending more messages. It is about making every interaction more relevant, intelligent and connected.
10. Saleha Ahmad is the Founder of GPS Goal Squad and a Communication and Leadership Coach who works with corporate leaders and professionals on communication, leadership and personal effectiveness.
A practitioner with more than three decades of industry experience, Ahmad holds a Doctorate in Organizational Behaviour from MDI, Gurgaon, and is a TEDx Speaker. She has coached more than 11,000 professionals and worked with leaders and organisations across sectors, including Ernst & Young, PwC, ANZ Grindlays, HSBC Bank, State Bank of India, Salesforce and Tata companies. The community of leaders learning from her includes top and senior professional from different countries across the globe. She is an internationally published author in her field.
Her own transition into coaching began during her years at SBI, when she was nominated for a self-awareness programme. The experience became a turning point. It helped her recognise how profoundly guided self-awareness can influence the way people think, make choices and lead. It also made her recognise the difference a coach can make in an individual's life. She subsequently chose to make that impact her life's work.
Today, Ahmad focuses on helping leaders communicate with greater clarity, confidence and consciousness. She believes that while technology may transform the workplace, human communication will remain central to leadership.
She says, "As a leader communication is the superpower you need-and in the age of AI, you need it even more."
