SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome everyone to another episode of Beyond the Case. It's been two months since I recorded the last episode. I've taken a personal break and I'm excited to kickstart another episode here with Jay Shah. He is from OPM68, just finished Unit 1. Jay, it's a pleasure to have you here on uh Beyond the Case.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

How are you? Thanks so much. Thanks so much, Sohin. As as I was saying, I think uh what I I just first want to start with what an incredible idea to do this. And uh I would have been one of the people voting for you at OPM Idol. I I think you know you always think back to all of the amazing conversations that we had when we were there, and how do you kind of go deeper with, you know, one-on-one time? And I think this is such a great idea to actually do this to make it open to a wider audience.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

So I'm very happy you're doing this. Thank you. Appreciate that. And Jay, how would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners, yourself, your business, your journey?

SPEAKER_01 0:57

So I'm I'm I'm an architect by trading. I spend most of my time now on a platform called Kaisen AI that does real estate optimization using AI. And I I've I I think I've spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, what impact this technology will have on life in general and society also. And have done a few things to kind of take advantage of the positive, kind of make people aware of the negative, et cetera.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

What is Kaizen AI? Can you elaborate a little more?

SPEAKER_01 1:28

So it is pre-construction design optimization. So as you can imagine, anything that gets built, you know, a design is created, it's costed out and it gets built. As it gets designed, more and more constraints start coming in with different uh, you know, structural consultant, MEP consultant, land concerns, etc. And often, you know, drill state is a set of decisions that actually take place through that process. What we in essence do is in general, you'll end up starting with three or four options, pick one, go to another five, six options, et cetera. What we've done is that we actually have been able to come in and run anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 iterations on a baseline to, in essence, optimize for certain things. So, for example, profitability is a big thing that people want to optimize for. So, what is if if one would call value engineering in design, which typically, I mean, if you talk to some of the top human value engineering consultants, you typically look at a 1.5% to 2.5% reduction in cost. What we've often been able to do is close to a 15% to 25% reduction in cost without diluting vision, quality, design intent, etc. So we've been able to use technology to, I would say, change what is possible or change what was otherwise done at a completely different scale just by widening the solution scope quite large.

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Thank you. I'll come back to the business in a bit, but let's talk about your early years. Did you always think of yourself growing up as being a business owner and entrepreneur? Um, what was your family situation like? You know, talk about your parents. Were they in business? Were they working, etc.? What is the mindset like when you were growing up?

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Sure. So uh I come from a very uh humble background. My my uh dad uh started literally from scratch. Uh he's an architect and uh has built uh quite an institution. Um so he's still very active. Uh one of the more well-known architecture firms uh in in this city.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

Sorry, would you mind mentioning his firm name as well? Of course.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

So uh his name is Atul Shah. Uh Access Architects is the name of the company. And we I I saw that growth as I grew up. So as with anybody who's in a sort of a family business, every weekend I would uh every Sunday we would basically spend in his office while he would be working and we would basically be doing homework and kind of playing around in his office and or we would be at construction sites, etc. So very, very technically uh deep was never about business. In fact, business was kind of a bad word. It would really was about how to do the best possible work you can do, how do you make sure you're continually improving the work that you're doing and things like that. And I I saw uh you know that being particularly successful because he grew from, of course, being an office of uh, you know, maybe 20 square feet, I think, when he first started, was his entire office. And I think it was basically just a desk in a room. And to now we've got a much larger office. And so I've seen that ascendancy and I've seen that success uh up close.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

What were the kind of conversations that he brought home at the dinner table once he came back from work? It was I I I think that's that's kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

Uh it was always actually about continually doing better. It it was always how uh, you know, can we kind of look at, you know, we could do something before, how do we do something better? It was almost never about the business side, it was never about the money side at all. But there was a very strong sense of self, and there was a very strong sense of uh, you know, making sure that you're continually improving what you are able to create. And uh, you know, looking back, even like when we would travel, when I was very, very young, I when I when we look through the albums, we'll have more photographs of buildings than of people. And that was even for me, even before I really understood any of these things. It for me was just normal that we would go to these spaces and I would, you know, experience what that building was like, or, you know, experience that almost the aura of a building as you are in it. And it was, I I I think it was one of those things which excellence was was something that was, you know, almost as a no-compromise kind of thought process. I think that was kind of built in. And he he also was somebody who had an incredible work ethic and and touch wood continues to have one. So he would often be working seven days a week, often felt 14-hour days. Like I wouldn't usually see him on weekdays. He would be traveling a lot. It it I think all of these things were very ingrained as you grew up.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

And did that make you want to follow his footsteps now that you're an architect yourself, or did life just lead you on the same trajectory as your father?

SPEAKER_01 6:16

So exactly the opposite, actually. When when I graduated the 10th, the the one thing I knew was I never want to be an architect. I I didn't know what I wanted to do, I knew what I didn't want to do. And I think that that was to do with, you know, you're a teenager and you've in essence spent all that time, you know, while he was working, and you know, you kind of felt that uh sort of rebellion almost towards this profession almost. And I, you know, happened to go through a, you know, this career counseling is something that is quite common here. And I just got really, really lucky where I went to a career counselor who in the 11th standard, because I was like, you know, I'm in science, I'm interested in doing, but I'm not sure what to do. I was really interested in sharks. So I I really wanted to do marine biology, which, you know, as as an Indian as something where there's no real scope, and I'm a giant, and so vegetarianism, etc. So it was a it was a very interesting uh kind of take. And uh, you know, my mom was absolutely like, no, no problem, but just have a look. And uh the career counselor, of course, you did a whole host of tests. And uh I'll, you know, I remember when he gave the results, uh, he, you know, you got that option one, option two, option three at the conclusion of this. And he had kind of bracketed all three and he'd written architect. And and at the results, my my mom had come and I I was sure that she had bribed him in some way. Like, how can you, how can I get this result? It's it's something I absolutely don't want to do. And uh he, I mean, the sweetest man, he he took me through the results and he, in essence, said the same thing that listen, if you're a fish and you can choose you want to become a better swimmer, or you want to, you choose you want to learn how to climb a tree better. And you can probably learn how to climb the tree at some point in your life. But, you know, the my sort of 3D cognition skills and all of those things were, you know, near the hundredth percentile, et cetera. So he said, you know, inherently there is something that you're good at. So you can choose whether you want to do that or you choose you don't want to do that. And he had a very, very large impact on my life. And so literally the next day I I the next grade I switched out of biology and sort of, you know, started looking very seriously at being an architect.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 8:21

And then you moved to the US for higher education? Yeah, so I did my bachelor's in in India. I uh and then I I I I was somebody who was generally if I get into something, I really want to go deep. So I used to go work for a lot of different firms. So even if I had a month, two months in the middle, I would try and go work for somebody who didn't know who my father was, and you know, so I could really kind of get in there. And I was very proud of the fact that, you know, I'm I'm kind of building this on my own in some sense. And I was I was always very interested in computers from very young. Dad was similar, where he was one of the earlier proponents of using CADCAM, which computers in architecture. So he had got a computer home when I was like in fifth grade, where, you know, even our school didn't really have computers, and I had a computer at home. So I was one of those people who would be swapping our hard drives. And even when I was quite young, I was, you know, I just kind of got computers. And there was a certain aversion to computers in in the Indian context where they felt, you know, you gotta master the hand, etc. And to me, this was something where uh, you know, if something can do it better, can do things I can't do otherwise, why would one not use it? And so it there was that was something that was always inherent. And uh I as as I sort of graduated, one of the things I really wanted to do was really look at how computers could help. And uh that was one of my reasons to actually do a master's. And I I was very specific about you know, these two or three colleges where I wanted to do masters because they were, you know, kind of wanting to do what is it's like a laboratory, right? So you want to do something that is not available outside, but you want to see what the future is like. So that was kind of the intent. And so you worked a few years out there or you came back? I graduated in possibly the best possible time. So I graduated in New York City in 2009. So I was very lucky to actually have a job with this really well-known architect, but I realized all of the work that we're doing is work that was happening in China and India. And of course, when you're just starting out there, the kind of work you get obviously is quite basic. And, you know, by then the company here was doing really well, where we're doing some very large projects with some very well-known international architects as collaborators. So it just made sense to come back. And then it allowed me to kind of sit in rooms where there could be real understanding on what's happening behind uh what's actually getting built. So all of the decision making, all of that, uh, you could actually sit in rooms where you understood that, which was great.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

So at what point did you get the inspiration for Kaiser? Sorry, Kaiser in AI.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

So I it's actually something that a professor at uh my university actually took us through. And and so I I I went to this, I went to Columbia University, and and the the Dean was particularly interesting where you know he would always talk about this program as a laboratory. So he's like, I'm not interested in teaching you something that you can go out and learn from another architecture firm. I'm interested that what is gonna happen 25 years from now, because that's when you will be able to take real decisions about what you build. And a gentleman called Dean Wigley, and and this was in 2009, and just think about you know the thought process that he had. So, in in the fall semester, I I happened to take a course uh with with this professor who was talking about AI and stuff like that in 2009. And, you know, the computers weren't strong enough to handle any of this. So we would leave our computers on for a couple of weeks on the side and come back to a null set. And of course, I didn't know coding, I didn't know so. That's the other thing you learn in the US that in India you feel like you're the big dog, like you, you know, you often know a lot more than people around. But when you go there, you realize, listen, there's so many people who are so much better, know so much more, and that learning was something that was actually really humbling and nice. And this was another cost where I felt completely out of my depth because it's, you know, you would kind of come back to null sets all of the time. And it it was a particularly hard semester for me. Like, but it it really stayed with me. Of course, we were looking at it in a very different way, in a very academic setting. But the baseline of what it was doing was something that was quite interesting. And so in 2015 is when compute started getting strong enough, and you started getting some of these companies doing cloud compute, et cetera. And uh I started actually building this out around 2018. So, you know, it's one of those things where you learned something so early on and you kind of realize that you're not able to actually implement any of it. And I was very much working as a uh, you know, as a proper architect for the 10, 12 years before kind of starting to move towards building this out. Right.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

And uh once you started to build it out, you moved back to India at that point?

SPEAKER_01 12:54

So I moved back to India in 20 uh 2010. So I I I spent only about a year in the US after the degree. Like I said, the the work that was happening in India was just far more interesting and you could sit in rooms that were more interesting. So I moved back to India in 2010. I I was very much practicing here uh till you know, or like kind of started building this out. I've very much done this from India rather than kind of do it from there, and now obviously we're working uh in different countries also.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Okay. When you had the conviction to go ahead with Kaisen AI, did you end up recruiting a co-founder, a business partner? You went out by yourself? Did you raise any money? If you're comfortable talking about all that?

SPEAKER_01 13:37

So I that it's a world I didn't know, by the way. So I knew that there is something of real value here, and it it was something which one had to kind of iterate to plate to kind of build this out. It wasn't thought of as a startup, it was actually about solving a problem. And so there's this thing that I'd learned like 10 years ago, and I was like, you know, maybe, you know, if you apply this in this way and do this like this, maybe there's something of that that could be kind of valuable happening. And and we we did our first project in in 2018 only, and uh completely self-funded. Uh, you know, literally built it out myself at night, and I would kind of try playing around with it, et cetera. And the first project we did was we were able to make an impact of about, I think on that project was about 480 crores or something like that, which at in 2018 for a single project, like that difference of profitability. That's like at that time, I think that would be about 50 million US dollars, right? On a single project of about a million square foot. Like it was a it was a big deal. And and uh, you know, any technical founder will be like, oh, I've cracked it, I've got the golden goose. And of course, it was really challenging because then you realize that, you know, the the technology was only one part of it. There was so much else to solve for beyond the technology, which actually was really the challenging side for me.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

And looking back today, you know, now that you've scaled Kaizen AI, the fact that uh you're a part of OPM, which we'll touch on shortly as well. Um, can you talk about a few moments in your journey as an entrepreneur where you feel like you took decisions which in retrospect you would have tackled differently?

SPEAKER_01 15:13

So many, so many, and and uh, you know, it's it's been a hard journey. I I should say that it's not uh as you can imagine, the impact was known very early. And I think if I if I knew then what I know now, I would have obviously done a whole lot more uh in this period of time than what I did. But it was one of those things where you have something new and there's nobody else anywhere in the world who was doing something like this. So it was kind of completely fresh. So it it what people know now, but you know, compute was damn expensive even then. And we're not doing text-based, right? So we're doing 3D iterative modeling based. So it's particularly expensive to run these models. And if if you went to somebody and you said, you know, there's this amazing value that you can do, but you know, I'm gonna need, you know, half a million dollars to kind of run this on your project, you'd be like, no, and you'd be like, but you know, that's $50 million that you can possibly get. No, no, we know what we're doing. That guy doesn't know what we're doing, what he's doing. And you kind of had to almost put your money where your mouth was, which it took us many years to do, where we kind of went to an outcome-based model where we said, we'll take all the cost on our head because we trust the platform. And uh at the end of the day, whatever value you see, whatever tangible profitability is sort of technically feasible, we'll take a percentage of that. And that switch, given the background I came from from the technical side, et cetera, was very difficult to take because you're putting real money on the line. And it wasn't easy because in India sometimes you don't get paid, uh, especially with real estate, especially, you know, contracts aren't as strong as they should be, you know, all sorts of challenges. So it it was a particularly challenging time to actually grow this. And then, you know, as I think what people are going to realize as they start, you know, applying AI at scale, where you often will also have sort of inhibitions and restrictions from the other side where yes, there is somebody who owns the project and who's going to be like, of course, I want to have 10% more profitability or something like that. But the challenge is that they have a whole team and they have an external team that were involved in actually doing this in the first place. And so sometimes they'll be very open that, yes, we want to implement a better technology, we want to implement something that's more efficient. But sometimes, you know, there are people who are extremely well known all over the world. They're like, you spent a week away, I've been drawing plans for 40 years. You're telling me you're able to reduce 25% of construction area on my project. And of course, that is going to start having some human challenges attached to it. So we realized that we can't kind of take these more optimal kind of versions and hand it back. We actually had to go deeper in operations where we had to have a human validation happening at our end because of course some of the stuff that AI pulls out is not particularly valid. And you giving it back to the person who originally did it was sometimes not leading to any resolution, was only kind of you got a whole bunch of crosses, but nobody then looked at the ones that were doing everything right. And so we built out a full operating model where you had human validation done in every region that we worked in, in every country we worked in, we put a team together to make sure that the AI output is first validated independently by us before it is actually shared out. And how do you do it? Because at that time, usually somebody has already got all the money behind it. So we had projects where we did everything, and then, you know, the time was just a challenge where, you know, you can't spend three months at that time when all the financing and all is in place. So we kind of found a way to bring all of that down to 28 days. So it was one of those things where as I think with anything that is possibly not done before, you kind of go back to that mindset where like, okay, we're facing this problem a lot. How do you solve it? And so you kind of figure out different ways of solving it and then you solve it. And I think that's been particularly sort of interesting, where even today, you know, as you know, you kind of learn all these new things at OPM and you continue looking at, you know, I didn't think of that, and that could actually be particularly valid in this new scenario that we could look at this AJ. So I I think what I kind of call this at is one is the motor behind it, which is this technology. But then, um, and you can kind of put that as a refrigeration, right? But refrigeration could take the form of air conditioning, could take the form of refrigeration, like, you know, transferring of ice cream and cold drinks. And so I think all of those industries that can be changed basis this technology. I think that stuff is what we will see more and more in the future.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Amazing. What's your mindset like if you're going through a failure or low in your life or in a career? How do you um think through those situations to ensure you're not overwhelmed, you're not taking dash decisions, you keep the broader perspective in mind.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

It's I I I think being around people where and and here I think there's two things. One is it's often a lonely road. You know, when you're trying to do something which people feel is just uh, you know, doesn't make sense and stuff like that. It is a lonely road. And I think more often than not, uh, when when we speak as entrepreneurs, you tend to feel that. And having people around. So I have my cousin who's also an architect from UCLA who's working with me. Of course, I have the entire company of my dads who are actually supporting, et cetera. So I think having people around you that are really in it with you is obviously very, very valuable. Having a life completely away and having a sort of personal life where people are supporting you no matter what's going on on the other side, I think is also just as valuable. For me, I think uh it was really, really important to sort of have people I could go and talk to who've been there, done that. And I I have somebody who's, you know, Nitan Mehta, who's this large VC out in Silicon Valley, and he's been so valuable with his time, et cetera, in kind of guiding us through a lot of these, you know, when we kind of run across these problems and having a completely different thought process, a completely different point of view to what you're doing, and uh, you know, giving it time, but also reaching out to enough people. Because I think one of the things we always have is that gumption, right? You're like, no, we're gonna, we're gonna find a way to make this work. And that's something which is is, I think, inborn, but being able to have a support system on all sides, whether it be on the business front, on the sort of personal front, on on the in the company itself, I I think that's been particularly helpful actually.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

So at this point in our journey, what what uh attracted you to the OPM program?

SPEAKER_01 21:42

Sure. So we we we spoke about it. So I I I mean, again, I come from a uh completely technical background. It's something which I think as the business really scaled, you often didn't know as and you appointed people who are very, very senior and uh you don't know what to tell them. You don't Know, you know, there's a certain language of business, which I I I think sometimes it's the confidence, sometimes it's something else. But as we scaled, I felt that uh there's that side missing where uh it would be helpful to have the business side also actually working along. And I uh actually did a program last year, which was like a week-long program uh at at Harvard called the Real Estate Management Program, which was just for me just testing the waters because I think spending three weeks away from the business, you know, for me was really, really, really difficult. So I kind of did that program. I realized that again, what you realize, right? There's so much you don't know, and there's so many people whose experiences are are particularly valuable. And that week actually kind of gave me a lot more sort of thought process to actually want to take on uh OPM also.

SPEAKER_00 22:53

You finished Unit 1 uh earlier this year. What is your experience like? Talk about some uh professors or maybe cases or some takeaways that you find yourself revisiting.

SPEAKER_01 23:02

I mean, of course, it was I think it was mind-blowing. It there were so many things that I think was, you know, when I look back, of course, it I mean, what you learned from the cases and what you learned from the professors was really helpful. I think for me also what you ended up learning from the cohort and even my LG was just amazing. And, you know, having those late night conversations, having those conversations over dinner, etc., was so incredibly valuable. I I of course, one of the and and of course, when you leave, you have all these thoughts of, you know, how one will kind of implement a whole host of things and coming back after three weeks away, kind of just the all of the all of the pending things kind of have come to a pass. And so I'm still trying to kind of go over everything that you know you feel like I want to do better. But I I think Srut Das had a huge impact on on the way I looked at uh you know the business. And one thing that he mentioned specifically was this idea of adjacency and this intent of build to sell versus build to last. And I I think there's there's a very interesting thought process that he kind of brought to the classes. And I for me, I think more than anything else, you know, you you've kind of almost had blinders on, right? Where you feel like, you know, I've got to solve the technology. And as you kind of face challenges with as you go through projects, and you know, we'd done a fair amount of this. So we we'd done work in the Middle East, we'd done work in the US, and it's it it was something where you know that the technology worked and you had to solve for you know these challenges that happened because of the technology. But you know, when he spoke about adjacency and when you met with people who, of course, were raising money, who were actually had raised money or were in the private equity or venture capitalist field, you realize the power of, you know, the advice, the power of the capital. And uh so, you know, literally kind of came away with a completely new thought process where, you know, when we really think about AI, and I think we're all in that kind of line where everybody's kind of trying to adapt AI, right, in their companies. And typically what everybody is doing is that listen, this is what I'm doing today. How much AI can I use? And what I'm trying to do is that what originally took me X amount of time and Y amount of dollars, I want to really squeeze the time or the dollars, or I want to make it far, far shorter, right? And uh, that's just the first step. I I think the part that I think is really interesting is what's gonna happen next, where there's gonna be a whole host of new businesses that are gonna come up because of this. And to me, that's what's really interesting, that uh there is something that we're currently leaning on AI for. I think the real value is if we are able to actually start looking at opportunities where humans and AI kind of work together to create something that you couldn't do before. Or you do it in such a different level that you couldn't do it before. And, you know, much to that, you know, when when we kind of looked at it, we obviously saw that listen, if if you humans are doing it at whatever 2.5% cost reduction, we're doing it 20%, you know, if there's a 10x multiple, but we're still a product plus service model. And so we actually, in in the whatever, two months that we have, we've actually built out two completely different adjacencies where the idea is to move to a development model where real estate development as as a as a business has in essence not changed in the longest time. And and as it develops in a country, you start realizing that it's a very transparent business, right? The the land that's available or the opportunities that are available is often known to most of the good players. The feasibility is often transparent and known to most people. Somebody will say, I'll sell this for $1,000, and somebody will say, I'll sell it for $1,200. And that's really the differential. But you know, you start looking at design as a differentiator and those kinds of things. But there hasn't really been something that's inherently different or proprietary that any of these companies have. And so we actually did two things. We actually created a pure product as a software that we could actually sell, saying that, you know, you can buy Kaizen and you can actually get some of this value yourself. And then as I spoke to more people, I said, they said, no, no, why are you kind of selling this? Instead, make it proprietary to you and actually apply it as an early capture model where you reprice land. And now land that was otherwise valued at $40 million because there are these constraints on site. Now you're able to kind of solve for that and make that value to $50 million, $60 million. And that was something that was, you know, it was something that really blew the mind, right? Because you kind of started recognizing that that completely changes the business that on what, you know, the base that it's kind of predicated on. And have actually already done a few deals in that which were particularly successful. So I think just widening of scope more than anything else for me was really helpful. Because one, you spent time away from the program and sorry, away from what you were building on a day-to-day basis, and you had to do that because you couldn't really, you know, engage on a daily basis. And that allowed one to one get distance. And second, you know, as you had a whole host of these conversations and all these cases, and as you spoke to the professors, came away with these incredible ideas of how to actually take this and have a much wider impact with it. And I think that's where the real value of OPM really is, is that it it uh just putting you in a room with incredibly smart people is, you know, pro you know, produces some great things.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

Very well said, Jay. In closing, I wanted to check with you if there's been any book that you've read which uh might have influenced the way you think about life, about business.

SPEAKER_01 28:36

Yeah, there's there's this book called uh the innovation conundrum. I I may be getting the uh title wrong, but this was something that was really, really valuable because he speaks about, you know, sustainable innovation and disruptive innovation and how large businesses will often concentrate on sustainable innovation because you know you'll always try to get more efficient on what you already built. They'll always ask the customers, what do you want? And the customers will always obviously want better than what they already have. But very hard for large businesses to really do disruptive innovation because it often threatens what they are built on in the first place. And the way you build out these companies has to be completely different than those companies. One, it threatens the sort of the large companies often. And second, uh, you know, the type of people who build this are very different than the type of people who build this. And uh it's it's a book that I would definitely recommend uh uh people to read. It it it was something that uh, you know has been particularly helpful for me.

SPEAKER_00 29:36

Thank you, Jay. Final question. If you could do something different, you know, go back in time, maybe talk to yourself and say, hey, here are the learning curves from my life. What would you do different then?

SPEAKER_01 29:46

I think there's two ways, and I think there's two things I would kind of say. Uh one is I, of course, I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. And uh there's a lot of things that I regret having done after I did it, of course. And to that, you know, that's what I was thinking about that maybe I wouldn't be who I am today if I did not make those mistakes, that I didn't actually have those challenges as I went along. At the same time, if if I were to advise a younger self, I would very much say this that just broaden a broadened perspective is is something which is always helpful. Sometimes we're too sort of looking at things just one particular way, or you know, where we're there's this very interesting quote that uh I I think I'm I'm I'm gonna screw the quote up, but to to a to a worm in an apple, the world is an apple, which in essence means that we often confine ourselves to these artificial kind of worlds. And it it it you know, as as you learn more and as you uh kind of imbibe more and you kind of expose yourself to more things, you start realizing, you know, how much has actually changed. And and um I'm I'm gonna actually take a couple of minutes actually to talk a little bit about something that I'm particularly sort of passionate about. And this is not a question that you've asked, but I'm just it's something that for me is particularly it's something that, you know, for the couple of years I've been really thinking about is we're I I think we're dramatically sort of not recognizing the impact, the long-term impact of AI in in in business that we're doing. And and I think uh as somebody who is from India where we really export knowledge work out to the world, I think that it's going to be a challenging time as we process, as we kind of move forward. And, you know, I I I I now do one of these things where, you know, every time I'm speaking, you know, usually out of you know, three talks, we'll be talking about Kaizen and AXS and things that we've built, you know. But I try and make sure that one of those four is just from a point of view of just telling people, you know, where I see the world going and how they can adapt to it. And you you do see, and of course, there are people who are very excited about it and are kind of using a lot to do it. But I think currently we're in that first phase where what we're doing is that we're actually seeing how we can do what we're doing better with AI. But I think that the impact, the long-term impact of this technology on simple things. Like I feel knowledge work, like what, you know, the company that my uh dad heads, right? We've got people who've been with us for 30, 35 years. I know that there is some part of it that they're they're gonna be just as valuable tomorrow as they are today. But there is so much of it that won't be. And to me, if you ask me, about 80% of the man hours spent on a project today will not be needed in the next five years. Think of what that means at scale and what does that do to society at at large. And these are not things that are uh, and I've I've I've written a sort of a large kind of thought uh league article on this, but I'll kind of just speak a little bit towards, you know, the impact that is coming with this technology is possibly unlike any of the old technologies that have happened, right? More often than not, when you talk to people who own 1,000, 200, 2,000 person firms in the knowledge work phase, we're like, listen, you know, we had this technology, we had computers, we had that, and we always adapted. I feel this is quite different, where, you know, often a change in technology led to jobs with more jobs with higher productivity. I feel here, jobs that are going to go away are the higher paying jobs. And we're gonna go from higher paying jobs to task-based jobs. And uh I think we all need to be aware of what that means from an education standpoint, from a business standpoint, from a society standpoint, and how every country, every city, every business will be impacted completely different by the same thing. It will not, some people will have a far, far more positive impact, some people will have a far more negative impact. But there will be impact at scale. And uh, I think this is something which I I wish people sort of know more and more. I think there is this current kind of madness that's going on with the markets, right? Where everybody's into AI and you see the data centers and you see the compute. And I think what people are seeing is that there is, and whether it happens now or it happens later, there is going to be a crash there. There is going to be all of those things. But the the business impact that this technology has is not changing. All of those things in the markets will change, all of that will change. But I only look at it from a point of view that whatever business you're in, start thinking a little bit deeply about. Of course, how do you adapt to it? But what may completely change bases that? And uh, that would mean a completely new business model that may need a mean mean a completely new business, that may mean a host of things. And I think at least having those conversations or thinking about that earlier on, I think uh will will hold us in good stead as as we move forward.

SPEAKER_00 34:45

Yeah, thank you. Very well summarized out there, and I think uh you're right. We're at a point in uh time where it feels like 1995, 96, where the browser completely changed the way connectivity was, and now maybe the same for skill set as well with the um onset of AI. Exciting times ahead. And uh I do appreciate your time a lot. Thank you so much for going in such detail about you know your journey, the way you think, everything that's gone behind your journey towards the OP and summarize it for our benefits within two minutes and we appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01 35:22

I I I really appreciate and honestly, uh thank you so much for doing this, Sohan. I I think if there's a small way I can contribute, I'm I'm so happy that you chose to do this. Uh and um I I this actually allowed me to get introduced to your podcast and I heard a whole host of them and it's it's been incredibly valuable. Thank you so much for doing this. Thanks so much. Bye.