AI

“And that is what is AI adding to the whole problem solution statement that you are trying to address? And how deeply does it address it? You know, and if I take out AI, what will the impact on that?”

“I have not read a single book on AI.”

“There are, in AI, we divide our companies into two buckets. What we call as AI first companies and AI second companies. AI second companies are companies which have a solution without AI, and with AI, it gets many, many fold better. But AI first companies are …”

“And the same thing is going to happen in India as well as we adopt technology more and more, as the transformation happens, as AI It takes, you know, deeper and deeper route across industries. People have to learn or you know, they will find themselves out of …”

“As we have more AI, more robotic interactions, I do think empathy, and we've seen a few companies in the space that are really on the cutting edge who will, Who are thinking about how to build empathy into technology? And I think it'll be a big change in the n…”

“We were living in a world where, you know, people are building AI for the sake of for the sake of the technology, pushing the boundaries on the underlying technology, the infrastructure, the hardware, the software, and there was entirely the human component of…”

“You're not selling AI to anyone. You're selling a value proposition that has to do with making their business better.”

“Especially in the space of AI we were strong believers that picking up off the shelf components was not necessarily very helpful all the time because, you know, they're built for scale, for generic problems. They don't necessarily solve specific problems very …”

“Because I see the world in the future being completely AI filled. And I think if we all don't figure out how to get people to be a part of that AI future, then you're just going to be, you know, having a handful of people who are going to be dictating what you…”

“I think when you look at all the analytical skills, whether, and all the analytical professions today, data science, statistics, AI, ML, Product management, for example, and so on. All of it has math thinking at its core. If this is a solar system of skills, t…”

“One of my theses, for example, is that in this century, one of the skills that will become really important is the ability to collaborate with each other. The ability to collaborate and solve complex problems, right? The future of work is all going to be about…”

“When we talk about hallucination, even human hallucinate, right? Hallucination is like, okay, you don't know the answer, but you try to like relate it to something else and try to go and answer something. And which simply means that, okay, it's not a precise a…”

“The thing is that when machine has the data and if machine is able to do the work, can you let machine do it? And when machine doesn't know how to do that work, can it call the human to do the work? So in that sense, human can act like a copilot to machine.”

“When we say there are going to be a billion developers, let's say that's what Mr. Vinod Khosla is saying. And that simply means that how do you really go and create a billion developer? The only way that can happen is when you make the interface so simple, rig…”

“If you're not producing something yourself, and most of the time that, okay, a question is being asked to you, and you have to go and look up for that information, search for that information, or you read about that information. That's what you are going on an…”

“Even like the jobs that what in the sales development trip that they do, in fact, take the information and they just have to go and speak to the customers, like do a lot of dial and a lot of email and a lot of campaign and so on. Many of these things that can …”

“The AI and generic AI and other things are essentially substituting not the manual labor, but even the intellectual labor. That imposes, that creates a situation in which the demand for human labor itself could go down.”

“One thing I can immediate, I think in the next few years, you will see people using AI to do their jobs better. At what level? So that is how it is going to be. People will transition to or use these tools to do their jobs better. And I think that'll be the ne…”

“So I feel the people, the problem with AI is it makes the people with the resources even more powerful, right? Because it automates the process that you used to do on an everyday basis. So if you have some leverage that is not directly related to your time”

“So, is it going to impact in two years Kirana store owners? Absolutely, because it's going to remove these small advantages. These are, this could be margin, right? We could call it margin. Faulty defective pieces.”

“Like my last 10 reels have been completely AI-generated. Audio is AI-generated. Video is AI-generated. Script is AI-generated. News is publicly available. The editing is manual, right?”

“I feel like AI will eventually help bring these people together where it'll be like, this is the, these are the 10 most ideal jobs you should apply for today. And even the application process will be automatic because you're applying on the merit of you, not o…”

“With AI, that's only going to reduce. And especially if you're willing to live on land that's slightly far away, that's probably going to go to 30 lakhs, 40 lakhs. So the true, and coming back to AI, right? The true value of AI is it reduces your cost of livin…”

“It'll be very difficult to transform the judiciary without the use of artificial intelligence.”

“And I think arc four will probably happen in the next, I'm gonna call it three, five years, where you start seeing these new companies that are leveraging actual software that's been around for 20 years machine learning, AI, and then AGI on top of it, which sh…”

“If you look at radiology, suddenly the requirement for radiologists can actually go down with the way AI can machine learning can use, can be used to just interpret the X-rays and interpret all different kinds of radio radiology outputs that come. CT scans and…”

“So if you can, so therefore new category is going to emerge, in my opinion, which is now we said software service, service as a software, right? You would automate 50% of your workforce to software and then start selling as a service, which is AI and services.”

“And you know, one of the things I think is really important to understand about where AI is today and why I think it's you know, some people say it's overhyped. I actually think if anything, it's still underhyped.”

“At least in the West, I really do think it's San Francisco and London.”

“We've chosen not to regulate AI like the Europeans have, and, you know, we generally have had a more permissive regulatory system than in Europe.”

“Each country is going to want some sort of technological sovereignty in, in AI. They're not going to want to be dependent on a small number of US companies to provide everything.”

“I think there will be AI decacons built in India, and I think now's the time to start.”

“In AI, anytime somebody uses, if there's a high velocity or high performance user, he's basically taking your gross margins down because you have a cost of LN.”

“See two years down the line, we'll not even say AI first. Like, nobody says cloud first. It's the default. Yeah. So AI will be the default first in most of these SaaS and BtoB workflows at all.”

“Bay Area doesn't care so much about as much as revenue as opposed to what sexy thing are you doing today? This is more, let's say Midwest or like more like you go to Chicago or probably even in New York Bay Area. Like today, if you talk SaaS and not AI, what i…”

“In the imminent future, the next few years, I think it, it's an advantage for us for a bunch of reasons. First of all, it's a major threat for a lot of businesses, and if you are a single product business it makes you more willing, I believe, to sell. Because …”

“AI makes capable people more capable. I, unfortunately, perhaps It increases all sorts of divides, bearing governments spreading, you know, opportunity and wealth. But in the wild, it increases divides. It makes a great engineer better by 10 times. And the med…”

“I think that whole, you know, visionary, that expression is thrown around a little bit too loosely, but Sonsan is the real deal, I should say, because I mean, take AI, for example. It's all hype right now. Everyone's talking about it. He was talking about it i…”

“I think Trump will bulldoze the big technology platforms in, into India, right? Because that's part of his thesis. I think Modi will allow him to do that, and I think that will create new ecosystems, especially in the world of AI.”

“One of the stats that I heard was, you know, less than single digit percentage of deep tech founders People working on AI blockchain are women.”

“If AI was not there, you know, NVIDIA would not have been able to survive in the long term, right?”

“So it enables business models that did not exist before, or that were unviable before, because of that, because that delivery cost is crunched massively.”

“I think one of the big changes, one of the things that is going to change the way you invest as an investor as you move ahead is going to be AI, right? The fact that you know, if AI, Is able to kind of converse or help you know, ask converse in say a vernacula…”

“Big tech had a well known, although they won't admit it, but the fact is that they had an organized effort to restrict AI. To their own set of people. They said, let's erect entry barriers so that , right? This is they will never accept it, but this was a real…”

“Indian Enterprises are not still not using AI as much as I would love them to have. So it's mostly the most of the AI spends are in the US market where the cost of employee is very high and they want to have higher efficiency with AI.”

“Or for example in India, in video is another example they are fifty million plus in revenue in a very short span. I mean, it's an old company, but they pivoted to AI and they're growing.”

“Data centers are already growing at very high rates, you know, anywhere from 25 to 30% as per industry standards. They're expecting the data center Total turnover or total revenue of the data centers to, you know, literally quadruple in a few years, right?”

“Now what's happening because of AI is one more business model innovation or change, not software as a service, but service as a software. That is the latest thing that's happening.”

“AI will, you know, unlock a lot of capacity and capabilities. So more smaller companies which got struck at 5000, few hundred people, today can actually grow, become Few hundred to few thousand people. I think they will create a lot of jobs while big companies…”

“18 to 24 months back when I used to speak to a lot of CIOs, one thing people which came out which very common was... Okay, I want to know what you guys are doing in AI... But do not roll out. If you roll out, I'm switching off your software today because they …”

“I think we will have like this individual managers who are doing IC work, managing lot of this AI.”

“So we had this typical eight to 10 people thing. So recently we broke that and said no pod can be more than three people. One really senior engineer, one senior engineer, one junior. That's it. Everybody else has to be in AI.”

“The criteria is that if there are other human beings involved in the actions, I mean, consequences of an action, then you would need a human being.”

“It's just safe to say that in the next couple of years, this is going to be, I don't think a job role will become obsolete per se.”

“Fundamental energy is the currency of AI. If you have energy, then I think a lot of other things may still be solved later.”

“I think there is going to be a company in the future which generates, you know, media content, hyper-personalized to the person, hyper-dynamic, based upon the context of the viewer.”

“Because someone is going to pay you a million dollars, and at least for next 10 years, that trust can only be built by humans, because you can't jail an AI, but you definitely can jail a person. So a lot of these things which require this human trust, for lack…”

“I would say too slow. I think there is a lot of risk of issue. And also more around what's possible and what's feasible.”

“Talking to general population, I would say less, maybe one third of it understand what's possible in AI.”

“So this idea of trying to put you know, levels of risk badges on AI is, in my view, a waste of time at hundred percent going to fail.”

“In financial systems we create, no, between subsidiaries, between group companies, we create all kinds of walls. We don't allow industries to own banks, for example. So we have to allow these kinds of walls. We have to create between different kinds of AI so t…”

“I also think that if you're building CRM, if you're building SaaS, if you're building software, you should go to the US. In fact, one could also argue that if you're building AI, you should go to the US as well.”

“Almost if I'm not wrong, about 20 to 25% of our code is now, even today is actually being written by AI.”

“So broadly, I think the total number of contact center seats will come down. My estimation is that it will come down by about 80% over the course of three to five years. By the way, timeframes are actually anybody's guess. As you know, in AI, things are changi…”

“But some of these older processes, I don't ever think they will become hundred percent replaced by AI. You will have people who will be needed for complicated questions, for overseeing the bots, for teaching the bots, for compliance purposes sometimes to take …”

“I anticipate that over the next five years, we will see the same level of progress that we saw over a decade in the internet.”

“Certainly I think the value of experience Has diminished in the value of intensity and curiosity has exploded.”

“So here this vulnerability management AI is going to play a huge role where it will actually validate a vulnerability against your infrastructure and tell you out of these thousand vulnerabilities, which three are actually Able to cause a breach within the nex…”

“You can, if you've got the correct processes in place, you can actually get a half decent engineer and train them on your processes because AI is very great at even reviewing your entire code base and infrastructure and giving context to a new person and make …”

“In a world where agent tech is taking decisions, or even AI is trying to, if someone's asking AI, boss please tell me some let's say pen testing tools which fit in this budget, then you have no indicator of pricing, neither to your customers, nor agent tech, w…”

“I mean, we've always built Astra in a very lean way in terms of hiring people. Ah, but, ah, I think this would have, we would have done at one fifth of the cost and even one fifth of people along the way that we hired, ah, in a, ah, AI first world.”

“I still believe that products are no more the moat with AI first world, but in, in, but really hard, in really hard startups, which were, which go beyond just products, I feel still, I mean, the problem itself becomes a moat if you are trying to solve somethin…”

“Since the cost of building a product have gone so down because it's becoming commoditized because of AI, the expectations of consumers have changed quite a bit. They expect a great quality product even at day zero, because in a free market, they don't, a custo…”

“So I think, I personally believe in a future world, we will hire for soft skills and train for hard skills. In the past, we hired for hard skills and trained for soft skills.”

“With AI, there is a macro tailwind also on small businesses in India. I've built a company trying to help small retailers, and it was very hard, but now if I have to build the same company again with AI available, it is actually easier, because you can actuall…”

“I think the AI opportunity, however, having said all that, I have never ever seen something take hold And disrupt and force people to rethink business strategy, investment strategy, positioning, et cetera, as fast as this last two and a half years.”

“In this AI world, People who work with their hands will be valued even more. And that's where there's an opportunity to dramatically transform how construction industry operates.”

“Every six months you're rediscovering product market fit, whether you're a startup or you're a large company.”

“Even when we take a typical SaaS application, it takes anywhere from two to four weeks for legal compliance, and we were okay with that, because we don't roll out a new SaaS application every month. Maybe every quarter we may roll out like two or three, net ne…”

“I think India will be the biggest winner in AI. India will be the biggest winner. For the same reasons, India was a very big winner in IT.”

“I think first time founders have a bigger advantage in AI waves. The reason is you're not carrying any bags from the SaaS era, and you are born into a AI native world.”

“And I think in the next five years, a lot of the value of AI is going to be most apparent and captured by the businesses that have the underlying data and tooling to do quote unquote deterministic things or perform tasks in the software world”

“Cybersecurity is an asymmetric problem. The hackers, all they need is one IP address to get into a enterprise and then spread from there and disrupt the company. Whereas the enterprises have to be protecting it a hundred percent and no one's going to protect i…”

“The way we see the future is you will separate memory from intelligence. So the memory will be captured by infinite layers and the intelligence will be captured by finite layers of, you know, intelligence and that small model that has those finite layers that …”

“80% of this work, I think can be automated with AI. I still believe you need the last 20%. So there still has to be a manager of these agents who's telling you, Okay. Do this. Don't do this. but outside of that, 80% of the work is still getting done fa…”

“There are so many companies coming out and saying, 80% of all of my code base today is written by AI, and that is truth, and that's what we're seeing everywhere as well.”

“I feel that today, even if all innovation were to stop, there is enough fuel in the AI space to see you can still continue to Pick up these Lego pieces and still keep building newer and better systems.”

“So the bubble might be on the valuations. The bubble is not on utility.”

“The two emotions people are very worried about in the AI world, especially larger enterprises, is I don't have visibility on what's happening. It's a black box. It goes wrong. It hallucinates. It can cause problems. My agents can break a lot of these things, r…”

“The technical inflection point was AlexNet, because AlexNet is what demonstrated that by scaling a neural net, you get disproportionate outcome.”

“But AI was a stroke of luck, because again, it happened over here and now it is again the heart of that, and for the next generation, it will be there, but it is not preordained that the generation after that has to be here, and so that is a risk”

“The second thing that has happened with AI is that for the first time, we have the entire technical stack being innovated on at the same time. This has never happened before. So, you know, in the PC era, all the innovation was the PC. In the mini era, all the …”

“These days I'm primarily focused on AI. Cybersecurity, data, and then I have a small practice in an area that I'm calling the depth of the x-ray six. So because the x-ray six architecture is now effectively dead that's going to create some opportunities, and I…”

“So that's why, you know, like, I know the narrative in the market is that AI is not doing what it's supposed to do, but I think it's not that, it's more that the people just have not taken the time to put the right tools and tooling in place.”

“In the AI world is you are not displacing spend. You're not displacing vendor, actually. All you are doing is telling them that we have built something which will allow you to either make your AI work investment Or AI is gonna may help you in either reduce you…”

“The volume of data required to coordinate all those things from the light fixtures to every other aspect of the project. There's so much volume and complexity and dependency there. And quite frankly, you know, AI is the only thing that can solve for that.”

“Unfortunately I feel, especially in the AI world now, that the average company you know, the average product or the average company, unfortunately will not make money. If you look at any US public markets, right? Every category has four, five companies that I'…”

“Customer facing or fast changing products, I think will continue to earn the value of a subscription. In the AI world, something you can build once and forget you know, I think we'll probably not, not make that bar.”

“We're not yet at a place where, you know, you can turn off the lights and just have player zero go nuts. To be honest, I don't think any AI is there yet. But it's pretty damn close.”

“Today AI is writing at least 25% of an enterprise code”

“Voice to me is still going to be the frontier through which people will interact with AI.”

“Today's AI you know, the problem of AI is not intelligence. But it's an integration problem, right? So you have to figure out how to integrate this into the right workflows, gain the right end users, and then sort of work with.”

“Today with AI, we are seeing companies. It's not impossible to see a company that gets to a hundred million ARR in two years with less than 50 people, right?”

“The human identities, like in terms of the headcount of most companies will become half that. I don't know. I don't think it will be that drastic”

“I don't think most investors in the U S are like interested in India at the moment, given that the opportunity cost is high, not investing in AI and almost all AI companies are in SF, right? And anyone who starts here ends up moving there.”

“When I went this time, I was looking at it, wow, this is all going to become dinosauric, because content is going to be created by AI.”

“I think if I were to change one thing, I would have done that layoff a lot sooner and gone harder on AI a lot sooner. We build a good product, but I think we could have moved a lot faster.”

“I'm very bullish on Cvent because they are, they have their mooring in the physical world, right? If you go to conferences, there's a lot of hardware in the conference that's used. They are into hotels and everything else. So it's not, you cannot cloud code yo…”

“So we actually believe that artificial intelligence will not be something that consumers will pay for.”

“Say, for example, engineering and from very tier four or tier five sort of places, which are not going to get into an AI sort of the same world not going to prepare them for that. They are going to have an issue”

“Ever since ChatGPT, I've seen the adoption of AI in enterprises increase its velocity manifold. And the reason is because the niche skill has been commoditized. Now you have a black box and the whole point is how do you build a software and infrastructure laye…”

“If you're just a pure sort of application UI level company, I think it's very hard for you.”

“So a disproportionate amount of capital gets allocated towards a new trend. But then, you know, when the filtration happens, when things settle down, then only the serious long-term players, they are the ones who survive. And the rest, really, they get filtere…”

“Not participating because I think it's very hazy at this point in time.”

“When that implementation will happen, which my guess is over next 12 to 18 months, we'll start seeing some, the earliest signs about the validation of the efficacy of that. Right, that the, what ROI one is going to generate.”

“Yes, while this has done a lot to the execution part, it does not really seem to have speeded up the innovation and the invention part, because theoretically, imagine you speed up everything, then who cares? There are 10 times the number of venture-funded star…”

“When you're chatting to AI, if it responds too quickly, it actually feels like it hasn't done any thinking at all. So, it is actually not a, it's a feature, not a bug, that it can take a few seconds to respond to you.”

“So on one side, I believe that if you draw it out three to five years, more than 50% of the customer service interactions will be fully handled by AI very comfortably.”

“Everything is moving so fast that if you actually sit idle you will basically be you will lose your PMF within like a quarter, right? So I do feel that that velocity and that sense of urgency is one of the most important traits in AI as compared to, let's say,…”

“Sure, Silicon Valley is still ahead, you could argue, but if in the world of SaaS, Silicon Valley was five years, 10 years ahead, I mean, it's probably three to six months ahead.”

“And I think a lot of people think of education as a content play. But it is definitely not. Content is the easiest challenge to solve for. The biggest challenge to solve for is engagement and motivation.”

“And then there will be a time obviously for austerity and, you know, fixing, reducing these costs and there will be entire companies built in that category.”

“I think we will start seeing that in the next year or two. And the reason is, is that the adoption of AI was kind of, step one was get these tools into the physician's hands and get the productivity improvements and, you know, remove the need for them to be ty…”

“And now it's just, there's no option. You either adopt AI or you lose your physicians, you lose your nurses, you lose your admin staff.”

“The story of the late 20 twenties in healthcare is definitely one of language models and AI replacing standard labor or augmenting that labor to make it much more efficient.”

“So there's only one hindrance in today's world for AI is security. If there was not a security concern, security would be AI would be 10 X.”

“One of our biggest realizations has been that humans will always be the center of AI. And how humans expand their creativity and their thinking through this is what is going to actually drive the next wave of this.”

“Actually, as AI nativity increases on one side, like if you think about the axis of impact certain human skills also become much more important. So when AI raises the bar judgment, Taste. Being a force of nature. These are all human skills that actually become…”

“And in fact, the core purpose is there's right now a lot of AI theater going on. So people only share the good things about AI. Nobody shares the experiments that went wrong.”

“There's still AI is a very single player game. It's not a multiplayer game.”

“Every AI use case, if you want to go towards agentic outcomes is going to need context.”

“You have to like leveling structures, like you have to foundationally reimagine how you operate as a company to be truly AI native or on the frontier versus I think The other option of it is you could say, hey, this is how I do things today. I'm gonna go slap …”