- Jacob built Experion into a 1,800-strong product engineering company across five countries.
- The company once came close to shutting down during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
- Jacob now expects AI to reduce traditional software development teams and timelines by as much as 30 per cent.
Binu Jacob has spent years doing what technology companies traditionally do when they want to grow: build teams, hire engineers and take on increasingly complex projects.
His company, Experion Technologies, now has 1,800 employees and operations across India, the UK, the US, Australia and Japan.
Yet Jacob believes the next generation of technology companies may need considerably fewer engineers to achieve the same kind of scale.
That is not a theoretical argument for him. It comes from building a business that followed the traditional route and then watching artificial intelligence begin to change the economics of software development.
“If you ask me whether I would start a traditional technology firm today in 2026, the simple answer is no,” Jacob told India Weekly.
His argument is that AI is making routine coding, testing and documentation increasingly automated. That could weaken the old model of growing an IT business by continuously adding large numbers of engineers.
“The old playbook of scaling a company by adding thousands of entry-level coders is completely dead,” Jacob said. “The future belongs to small, highly agile teams who are native with AI and understand business logic deeply.”
Jacob estimates that AI could eventually reduce traditional software workforces and development timelines by as much as 30 per cent.
For a company that has built its own scale through engineering talent, that is a significant shift.
The bet that made Experion different
Jacob did not originally set out to build another large IT services company.
Before entering the software industry, he spent six years in the Indian Air Force, working with radar systems and advanced missile hardware. The work demanded extensive testing and precision, with little room for error.
As the technology industry changed around the late 1990s and the Y2K period approached, Jacob moved into software testing. He later co-founded Experion around 2008, taking the engineering discipline he had developed in defence into commercial technology.
From the beginning, he says the company wanted to avoid the conventional staffing model.
“We never wanted to be an IT staffing company,” Jacob said. “We wanted to build products that solve real-world engineering problems for major global industries.”
That approach has taken Experion into projects across transport, infrastructure, energy and electric vehicles.
In the UK, the company works with the Transport Research Laboratory and National Highways on crash data management and road safety software. In Australia and New Zealand, its platforms monitor smart electric grids.
One of its most notable projects has been in electric vehicles, where Experion worked with Stellantis, the automotive group behind brands including Jeep, Fiat, Maserati and Chrysler.
The company developed a smart EV charging platform designed to help drivers manage charging while also dealing with the wider demands of energy distribution across Europe.
Jacob says the platform produced an unexpected result when compared with one of the biggest names in electric vehicles.
“The software platform we built actually came above the Tesla app in user satisfaction ratings,” he said.
“When you build software for brands like Jeep and Maserati, the bar is exceptionally high. Outperforming an industry benchmark like Tesla proved that our product engineering approach was world-class.”
But Experion's path to becoming a 1,800-person business was far from straightforward.
The company almost ran out of road
Around 15 months after starting the business, the global financial crisis left Experion under severe financial pressure as it tried to establish itself in Europe.
Jacob recalls his CTO telling him that the company might have to close.
“My CTO came to me and said we had to shut down,” Jacob said. “We were running out of capital, and the market conditions were brutally tough.”
Instead of shutting the company, Jacob restructured its operations and shifted towards higher-value enterprise work.
Within three months, Experion secured key contracts and reached a million-pound milestone, according to Jacob.
That experience later helped shape how the company responded to the Covid-19 pandemic. As offices closed and businesses moved online, Experion shifted its engineering operations to remote working without losing its momentum, he said.
Now the challenge is different. AI is not simply creating another disruption that companies need to work around. It is changing the nature of the work itself.
Experion has been incorporating AI into its software development process, including code generation and predictive bug detection. The aim is to allow smaller teams to take on work that previously required larger engineering groups.
That is where Jacob sees the biggest change coming.
The technology industry may still need highly skilled engineers, but the number of people required to build a complex product could fall as AI handles more of the repetitive work.
For a co-founder who has already built a 1,800-person company, that raises an obvious question: if he were starting Experion from scratch now, would he need anything close to that number?
His answer appears to be no.
The irony is that Jacob's own story demonstrates both sides of the transition. He built Experion during an era when engineering scale meant people. He is now preparing the company for a period in which scale could increasingly mean what those people can achieve with AI.
The former Air Force engineer who spent years testing systems for failure is now watching a different kind of test unfold: whether established technology companies can adapt before the old rules of growth stop working.
