On the ground, the guest programme ran campus by campus. At Delhi NCR, Mayank Agarwal, VP/Head of Marketing at The Man Company (a part of Emami Group), spoke in a fireside conversation on building a D2C brand from scratch, including which parts of brand-building AI has already taken over. Aditya Malhotra, DGM Product at Airtel Digital, ran a masterclass on how product teams decide whether to pursue or kill an idea.
Pune’s fireside conversation, “The Face of Business and Entrepreneurship Changing with the Evolution of AI,” featured Sudarshan Mahabal, AI and Technology Leader at Xoriant, and Prayag Dwivedi, Community Manager at Emergent. Girish Chhabra, VP and Global Practice Head for Data and AI at Atos, led a masterclass on agentic AI and set students an assignment to complete afterward. Jayesh Atal, Strategy, Marketing and Operations at KPIT, made the case for why AI won’t replace them, and walked through the practical reasoning behind it.
Bangalore brought together Aastha Shree, Vice President at Goldman Sachs, and Laveena Lobo, Partner at Insist Consulting, for a fireside chat on AI, careers, leadership and the changing nature of work in a world of AI. Uttaran Nayak, Co-Founder & CEO of Alchemyst AI, led a masterclass asking “What does a business look like when AI is built into everything?” And Gaurav Ranjan, Principal at Prime Venture Partners, joined a fireside chat on entrepreneurship and why investors and venture capital matter to the companies students may one day build.
At Jaipur, Radhesh Sirohiya, Co-Founder of Shyle, joined a fireside conversation on entrepreneurship and e-commerce, fielding questions on the practical challenges of building a business.
The four campuses sit at HiTech Group of Institutions (Delhi NCR), Rathinam School of Business (Bangalore), Ajeenkya DY Patil University (Pune) and Jagannath University (Jaipur). Students earn their BBA from the partner institution at each campus, while the programme, curriculum and learning model belong to Stride School of Business.
Every student received a personal Apple MacBook in their welcome kit on day one. Each campus carries an identical set of spaces: AI Launchpad, Collab Zone, Podcast Studio, Pitch Tank, AI Forum and Smart Classrooms, used for classes, project work, presentations and collaboration.
Piyush Nangru, Founder, Stride School of Business, said, “A school’s first batch usually takes years to build. Ours came together in four cities at the same time, around a straightforward argument: business education should now be taught with AI inside the work, not alongside it. The appetite for that has moved faster than the sector has. ASCENT ’26 was built to match it, which is why the same programme ran in all four cities in the same week rather than as four separate welcomes.”
Anmol Jain, Founding Director, Stride School of Business, said, “We could have spent three days telling this batch what Stride School of Business is. We decided to show them instead. They sat with people whose own jobs are being changed by AI and then we put them in front of the same tools and asked them to make something. By the third day every student had built something of their own. For a first batch, in a first week, that is exactly the beginning we wanted them to have.”
With ASCENT ’26 behind them, the Class of 2029 begins a three-year programme where AI runs alongside business fundamentals, practical projects and industry exposure, as part of how students learn concepts, develop ideas and solve problems, not a layer on top of it.
About Stride School of Business
Stride School of Business is an AI-first undergraduate business school with campuses in Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Pune and Jaipur. Its three-year programme is built around a learning-by-doing model combining business fundamentals, AI, practical projects and industry exposure. Students earn an AICTE-approved and UGC-recognised BBA degree from the partner institution at their campus.
