Suresh Sambandam, Founder and CEO of Kissflow
The widespread adoption of AI is causing significant shifts in work dynamics for both first-year and mid-level managers.
Speak with business line On the sidelines of the CTOtalk event here on Saturday, technology leaders said freshmen will no longer have the two-to-three year “learning buffer” after joining and should already be prepared with AI-assisted coding and real-world tools like GitHub and Claude.
They added that mid-level managers are the most vulnerable layer, as tasks typically performed by experienced engineers of 3 to 8 years will increasingly be automated and can be performed by AI-enabled juniors.
Suresh Sambandam, founder and CEO of Kissflow, said tech teams at his company use coding agents like Claude Code or GitHub more than relying on junior developers for basic tasks. “Senior engineers find it easier to work with AI-driven tools because they receive, review and fix them faster compared to the time-consuming process of getting them from junior developers,” he says.
Sambandam said the company stopped hiring on campus this year and also reduced its CRM and design teams from 12 to 14 employees to about 4 employees.
Sudheer Bandharu, CEO of hivel.ai said the other way to look at it is that senior engineers have to unlearn a lot these days. “People coming out of college have learned the AI through internships. While seniors have to unlearn and learn it. So the complexity of things juniors have to do will increase,” he added.
CTOtalk Summit in Chennai on Saturday
Data shows that senior engineers have the lowest AI usage, distrust AI-generated code and prefer manual methods, he added.
Deepak Dastrala, partner and CTO at Intellect Design Arena believes that AI-driven coding faces a twofold challenge. “Say you have to protect some software for customers, then the chance of errors is zero and so we can’t take any risks with fully AI-generated code. But at the same time, senior engineers trying to get everything sewn by hand is also a problem,” he added.
CTOtalk is an annual summit where more than 1,000 CTOs, technical leaders and innovators from a range of national and global companies discuss emerging technology trends, leadership insights and the future of enterprise technology.
This year’s summit featured sessions from industry leaders, including Gaurav Satija, Sr. Director of Engineering, Adobe, Prajakt Deshpande, Head of Engineering, Atlassian Natraj Choudhury, CTO, Lenskart and Sreedhar Gade, VP Engineering, Freshworks.
Published on October 25, 2025
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