“What’s the one thing that has changed in your job since tools like ChatGPT became available?”

“Where do you see AI’s biggest value-add in your role?”

“If you had access to AI tools in your last job, what would you have done differently?”

“How can AI reshape your profession in the next 3–5 years, and what excites you most about it?”

These are a few questions that Harshil Mathur has been asking every interviewee at Razorpay for the past few months. Irrespective of the role or management level. So far, just about one-third of the candidates he interviews seem to be have the familiarity he is looking for with the technology.

As AI devours various skills, automating one task at a time, some of India’s large unicorns want to help their employees keep up. Razorpay and others, including home-interiors solution company Homelane, payments firm Phonepe, used-car marketplace Cars24, and discount broker Zerodha*, are taking enterprise licenses for generative AI tools. For most employees, if not all.

“Pushing employees to adopt AI without giving them the necessary tools is unfair, as few will know where to start,” said Srikanth Iyer, co-founder and CEO of Homelane.

Many of these companies have subscribed to Google’s Gemini since it comes integrated with Google Workspace. This is in addition to work-specific tools like Cursor, which helps engineering teams code, or Replit, which lets product teams spin up mere concepts into functional prototypes.

Most firms may be investing in AI infrastructure to improve their services to customers. But with taking licenses, these companies are also making a financial bet on their workforce. The 13,000-odd employees who work among these firms are in a petri dish of sorts. If businesses pay about $20–30 a month per employee for various AI tools, can they create the right medium to drive their adoption?

To know how deep AI’s roots have grown in Indian companies, The Ken surveyed nearly 500 employees—across entry-, mid-, and senior-level positions. Nine out of 10 respondents said they’d begun using AI tools, even if it meant paying for them out of their own pocket.