Zero Shot (Private)

If you've bought anything online in India in the last ten years, you've seen the checkout page. You search, scroll, filter, add to cart, and eventually pay.  UPI simplified the payment part. But you still had to do everything else yourself. That's about to change with agentic commerce, says Harshil Mathur, the CEO of Razorpay.  Not just change but disappear entirely.  Imagine this. Let’s say you w...

How many AI models can you name? Not how many you use… but how many you can actually name. That question sets the ball rolling for this episode. In the next hour, Rohin puts Brady and Praveen—two people who use AI every single day for a living—through a cold read. There is no prep or script. What they couldn't answer is the whole point. Over the course of an hour, three daily AI users discover the...

First came hesitation. Naturally, given both guests are filmmakers. But once the threshold was crossed, there was no looking back. For Shakun Batra — director of Kapoor & Sons, Gehraiyaan, and Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu — the tipping point was a traffic jam shot that cost one-tenth of what they'd built on set. For Kobayashi, it was a car commercial that he hadn’t attempted before. Shakun went on to bu...

If you have been paying attention, something has been happening within tech companies. And it has to do with tokens. But not what you think. After killing its AI leaderboard, Meta announced a new platform to track AI usage and spending. Microsoft has started cancelling the Claude Code licenses of its employees. Uber said it ran out of its token budget for 2026. And then came the latest news of Ant...

Think of an action or crime film. At some point, when all of the different threads and plots converge, you witness a high-stakes scene. Three characters are locked in a fight. You don’t know who emerges a winner. This is what is loosely called a Mexican standoff.  Apply this analogy to physical AI. There are currently three players in the game. America has BigTech and big models that only seem to...

After 15 years of building Wingify, Paras Chopra spent some time deliberating about his next stint. For years, he had chased the 0 to 1 journey of building something from the ground up and watching it grow. He wanted to chase that in his next stint too. But he knew it had to be different. There would be no product. Forget that, he decided the next project would barely have any commercial inclinati...

For decades, Indian IT grew and grew some more based on the labor arbitrage model: deploy engineers from Bangalore at one-sixth the cost of an American engineer, bill, repeat. The industry perfected the art of selling "services" instead of building and owning technology. But AI has quickly made the engineer a commodity. The big question now is how IT services will pivot and reinvent. A step in tha...

Another day and another Anthropic announcement has spurred conversation.  This time, it is Claude for Legal services. On May 12, Anthropic unveiled 20+ new "MCP connectors that link Claude to the software the legal industry runs on". Think Westlaw, LexisNexis, DocuSign. Alongside this, it announced 12 "new plugins tailored to specific legal work".  With every new Anthropic announcement, we typical...

On May 5, Anthropic released 10 financial services agents. The company said they “pair best” with Claude Opus 4.7, a “state-of-the-art” model that leads the industry on financial agent benchmarks. And the hype followed. The media called the agents a threat to Wall Street. The reality is more complicated. In today’s episode of Zero Shot , hosts Brady Ng and Praveen Gopal Krishnan are joined by Mush...

What is the market for AI wearables? And what do they do that a phone already doesn’t? These were the two main questions we asked Dhananjay Yadav, the co-founder and CEO of NeoSapien, a startup that makes an AI-powered pendant that “transcribes in real time, summarises what matters, and reminds you to follow through”. He calls it a “productivity tool” that will change how we interact with devices....

Most AI startup success stories start in November 2022. For the story of Presentations. AI, however, we have to go back to 2005. That year, Sumanth Raghavendra, who is also the co-founder of The Ken , started his first venture. It was called InstaCall. The idea was to build an online office suite in Bangalore with a team of six engineers. They ended up cracking the product, but had no way to marke...

"People in Silicon Valley and in China often have assumptions about each other. And their assumptions about each other are extremely self-centered." Our guest today is Afra Wang,  a fellow at the Centre for the Governance of AI and the writer behind Concurrent, a Substack that translates the tech culture of Silicon Valley and China from angels you wouldn’t typically expect.  Afra understands both...

Today is not regular programming for Zero Shot . We present to you a glimpse of our first live event, which we dramatically titled “The Great Unbundling”.  It had a simple premise: agentic AI is coming. Soon. Hard. Fast. For India's consumer internet companies. Who will survive it?  We posed this question to Muralikrishnan B, former President of Xiaomi India; Amod Malviya, co-founder of Udaan and...

"We have 353 billion data points on user behaviour. Why wouldn't I use them to make a better story and get into newer businesses within content?" That's Kunj Sanghvi, the vice president and head of content at Kuku, explaining their next big bet on theatrical films.  Kuku has seen 10 million paid subscribers and 350 million downloads so far. This is precious data of “micro segments”, people’s consu...

Your next job offer might just come with a "token budget" line item.  The idea has been gaining steam in Silicon Valley. In February, a VC named Tomasz Tunguz dropped a blog post arguing that inference costs are becoming the fourth pillar of engineering compensation alongside salary, bonus, and equity. Here is the math: the 75th percentile software engineer in the US draws $375k. Add $100k in infe...

Ever wondered what happens when AI agents are adopted at scale? Look no further than China. Over the last two months, people — yes, ordinary citizens — have been installing OpenClaw on their devices. Local governments are incentivising OpenClaw projects. Grandparents are lining up to get the software installed. And a cottage industry of "influencers" is telling people how to optimise their agent u...

Say you want a chunk of plywood. Or a passenger lift. Or a power cable. Or a corrugated packaging box. Chances are you will find yourself on IndiaMART, the country’s largest B2B marketplace connecting buyers with suppliers. With 60% of market share and a 12,000 crore market cap, the company essentially commands this space.  There is one major problem though: ChatGPT. In December, IndiaMART filed a...

“We were so close to the finish line and boom ‘SaaS is dead’. We are restarting…. There is one more round to run.” That’s an honest admission from Avinash Raghava, the founding volunteer and CEO of the pay-it-forward community SaaSBoomi. As someone who has spent years building networks and communities — at Nasscom, Accel, and Together Fund previously — Avinash has a full view of the inflection poi...

As enterprises make sure their employees use AI, integrate it into their workflows, track productivity, and highlight AI usage in their investor calls, a new kind of tension is emerging within organisations.  Engineers are simply not happy with the tools they have been assigned. They want flexibility and deals with companies that make tools that actually work for them. Some are even ready to go ba...

Here’s a fresh take on the India AI Impact Summit that took place last week in New Delhi: it was two events stitched together, happening at the same time. There was the expo, where companies and nations showcased their products and services to 250,000 visitors. And then there was a conference where the geopolitical effects of AI were front and centre. Inderpal Singh, one of The Ken’s reporters, wa...

“It’s a land grab market…”   That’s how our guest Devyani Gupta, the founder of voice AI startup Arrowhead, describes the space she is operating in.    A simple fact illustrates the competition she is stressing on: VC funding for Indian voice AI startups went from seven crore in 2023 to 280 crore in 2025.    There is a lot to unpack in these figures. And Mrunmayee Kulkarni, The Ken’s AI reporter,...

"We have vibe coding and Biryani sessions on Fridays…” This is not a scene from a tech startup or a weekend hackathon. It is a statement by Nikhil Narendran, a partner at Trilegal who heads the firm’s digital innovation group. Naturally, our host Praveen Gopal Krishnan was taken aback. Lawyers who are coding away? Who could imagine? Praveen was even more surprised when Nikhil said he almost never...

Pick any conversation on AI in India, one project keeps coming up again and again: UPI. Every major stakeholder — across government and industry — seems to be interested in replicating the success story of the payments interface. Praveen Gopal Krishnan argues that Sarvam AI — the startup that is a VC darling and government favourite at once — is at the heart of this narrative. Here is the catch. T...

“Imagine the AI race is a giant F1 race where the biggest AI companies are driving in their souped-up racing vehicles around the track again and again…” Rohin Dharmakumar sets the scene. Who’s winning this? Google, he argues.  OpenAI and Anthropic are on the cusp of their IPOs and are doing whatever they can to generate revenue. Microsoft is trying to integrate Copilot into everything and is prima...

Welcome back to Zero Shot , where Brady, Praveen, and Rohin discuss and analyse major developments related to artificial intelligence every week. Praveen kicks off this episode with a look at Perplexity’s changes to its Pro plan’s free trial. Perplexity has changed its terms and conditions, and now requires users who signed up for a 12-month free subscription to put a credit card on file. The host...