There is a certain kind of technology conversation that is everywhere in 2026: louder, faster, more theatrical by the week. Then there is the kind Par Chadha prefers.
Spend time with Par Chadha, Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Investment Officer of HGM, and a different picture of the year comes into focus. He is not especially interested in AI as spectacle. He is interested in AI as an operating model.
In our conversation, Par Chadha returned again and again to a handful of ideas that feel especially relevant right now: productivity, underserved markets, compliance pressure, and the growing divide between companies that deploy automation as a practical tool and those that still talk about it as a future concept.
Par Chadha put it plainly: “There’s a big debate going on as to what the impact of AI, agentic AI, the loss of jobs, and the American workforce is.” For him, that is the central economic question of this moment. He sees 2026 not as the year AI becomes unavoidable.
What makes Par Chadha’s view distinctive is that he resists both the utopian and apocalyptic versions of the AI story. He is neither dismissive nor blindly celebratory. Instead, he describes a market under pressure to get more productive, more compliant, and more realistic about what automation will actually do inside a business.
“If we get it right,” Par Chadha told me, “it is the American, the new start of a New American Century, in a way, because productivity—without productivity, we are not going to be able to compete.” It is a striking and revealing phrase.
For Par Chadha, AI is about whether the U.S. can preserve an economic edge in a world where scale, labor, and technology are colliding in new ways.
That is also why Par Chadha’s thinking keeps circling back to who gets served by innovation and who gets left out. Long before AI became the boardroom’s favorite talking point, he was talking about automation in more grounded terms. In his words, “The small businesses have been pretty much ignored by the large tech companies.”
He argues that the biggest platforms often aim at the largest contracts, the largest enterprises, and the fewest customers with the highest dollar value. Meanwhile, the “smallest million” businesses are forced to operate with thin bandwidth, thin staffing, and almost no margin for inefficiency.
This is where Par Chadha’s view becomes especially sharp. He talks about automation as flex capacity. He talks about it as the difference between hiring another accountant, another AP processor, another operations hand, and instead giving a small company the ability to survive and grow without adding costs it cannot comfortably bear.
In one of the clearest formulations of his philosophy, Par Chadha said automation is “a very essential part of increasing the value of the business, cash flow of the business, and then leading to a better work-life balance.”
That line matters because it shows how Par Chadha links technology to lived outcomes. He is not separating AI from management, family life, or organizational design. He sees them as connected.
Better tools, in his framework, reduce frustration. They create room. They give people back time. The point is not simply to do more with less; it is to build a business that is less brittle.
The same thinking appears in his view of enterprise cybersecurity, another area where Par Chadha believes 2026 is exposing an uncomfortable truth: regulation is accelerating faster than most companies’ ability to respond.
He described the current disclosure environment as “a bad poker game,” because organizations are being forced to speak publicly about cyber incidents before they fully understand what has happened. As Par Chadha put it, “Nobody knows everything. It’s too soon to know everything.”
That observation goes directly to one of the most consequential intersections in tech right now: AI, cybersecurity, and compliance. Par Chadha’s answer is that companies need “security as a service.”
He called it “a big deal,” especially because boards, regulators, and management teams are increasingly being forced to sign off on matters that are technically complex, fast-moving, and often still unfolding. He argues that AI becomes valuable here when it helps establish a baseline, consolidate findings, and create something management can actually rely upon.
Again, Par Chadha’s emphasis is practical. He is describing AI as a way to bring together tools, findings, and workflows in a format that can support real decisions. That same practicality shapes his view of labor. He does not believe disruption will be evenly distributed.
“I’m of the opinion it’s the mid-layer of the jobs that are at risk,” he said, pointing specifically to roles in the roughly $50,000 to $150,000 range.
In his telling, the danger is that productive engines can now “insource” work that once required a layer of management, analysis, testing, and coordination.
That does not make Par Chadha anti-technology. Quite the opposite. It makes him impatient with lazy thinking about technology. He believes leaders have to adapt, and fast.
The message is unmistakable: AI is no longer a side conversation. It is becoming the infrastructure of competitiveness.
And yet, for all his focus on systems and scale, Par Chadha keeps returning to people. He talks often about making the people around you successful.
In his management philosophy, the best leaders are not the loudest ones, but the ones who remove friction, create buy-in, and turn work into a shared mission. That sensibility gives his technology thesis a different tone.
Progress, in Par Chadha’s vocabulary, is not just innovation. It is useful innovation. It is adoption that works under pressure. It is leadership that makes room for others to succeed.
That may be the most relevant lesson from Par Chadha in 2026. At a moment when the market is crowded with AI claims, he is asking a simpler question: Does the tool increase productivity, reduce friction, improve compliance, and help real businesses operate better? If the answer is yes, he is interested. If not, the hype can wait.
