FUTURE LEADERS: THE TECH INSIDE THE MACHINE, Kunal Maheshwari

Kunal Maheshwari is the Chief Growth Officer at Softlink Global, the company behind Logi-Sys — a cloud-based ERP platform trusted by over 5,000 freight forwarders across 50+countries. Educated at the University of Exeter, he returned to India to build on the 35-year foundation his father, Softlink CEO Amit Maheshwari, had laid — and has since driven the company’s expansion across the Americas, Africa, and South-East Asia.

“Show your team just 10 per cent of the road. Let them figure out the 90 per cent — because that is when they take ownership of it.”

Kunal Maheshwari occupies a peculiar vantage point in Indian logistics. He is not a freight forwarder, not a customs broker, not a shipper. He is the technology that sits inside all of them. As Chief Growth Officer of Softlink Global, he sees every pain point, every inefficiency, every reluctant adoption decision before it reaches the industry’s surface. That perspective, he says, is both a privilege and a responsibility he takes seriously.

He grew up watching his father build Softlink from a simple idea — digitising customs operations in the late 1980s — into a platform now powering thousands of logistics businesses worldwide. But inheriting that story came with a condition: earn it separately first. His father, he says, is a strong personality — the alpha in every room he enters. Rather than work in his shadow, Kunal spent two years winning the trust of his own team, one person at a time. Then, for nearly 250 days in a single year, he travelled the country meeting customers face to face — an initiative his colleagues half-jokingly named Bharat Jodo Abhiyan. He wanted people to know him as Kunal, not as the boss’s son.

The strategy reflects how he thinks about growth more broadly. Softlink, for all its scale, still operates with the urgency of a start-up. At 300 people across more than 50 countries, it adds 50 to 60 staff annually. But the culture, Kunal insists, is built before the headcount and protected more carefully than any product feature. Ownership, customer-centricity, and the freedom to make decisions are not aspirational values; they are the operating system. “If my people are happy,” he says plainly, “I can provide better tech.”

On AI, his position cuts through the noise. AI will not eliminate jobs — it will realign them. A person handling ten repetitive tasks will be freed to handle twenty, enabling freight forwarders to scale volume without scaling headcount proportionally. Softlink has already beta-tested what Kunal calls the “digital employee” — an agentic AI working 24 hours a day across every repetitive workflow in the logistics stack, without lunch breaks, sick days, or weekends. Process acceleration, smart data analytics, and predictive visibility complete his transformation agenda. The industry, he notes, sits on enormous amounts of data it has never properly interrogated. That is the next frontier, and the firms that move first will pull ahead in ways that are very difficult to reverse.

His three demands of the sector are equally clear: equal AI adoption across the entire logistics ecosystem, not just at one node while others lag; a shift from owner-driven to people-driven businesses, because legacy without succession planning is legacy on a timer; and a reframing of technology from cost line to investment. “If you don’t have the vision to do it,” he says, “God save you.” Beyond the platform, Kunal shapes the next generation through Softlink Academy and LogiTALK, his podcast for unscripted industry conversations. Both reflect the same instinct: the future belongs to the prepared, not the frightened. His own advice, offered without hesitation, is simply to be honest about your work — and let everything else follow from that.