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The Collection Wed, 16 Jul 25 |
Multiple stories, multiple perspectives, one theme worth your time—every week. |
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Pick any role of your choice, in any field, and you’ll find that AI is fundamentally altering it. Product, engineering, support, legal, teaching—it’s everywhere, and professional networks are now flooded with posts and courses on how to “augment” your career with AI.
Adopt or adapt, or else risk falling behind—that’s the overarching prediction.
Just look at a few of the responses we received in our ongoing subscriber survey about how professionals are using AI at work:
“We use it for analysing tickets to get customer sentiment scores, and help support engineers identify tickets which need to be escalated.”
“For prototyping and designing flows.”
“For reducing dependence on the analytics team by writing new SQL queries/ automating data-related tasks, and refining stakeholder emails/pitches.”
“I create mock test papers. Questions from books are copied and pasted. ChatGPT then creates similar questions. It is used for increasing the number of questions.”
“Generation of unit tests, generation of scaffolding code.”
If you’d like to participate in this (anonymous) survey, you can do it here: https://theken.typeform.com/to/HLb4zczH
We’ll be releasing the results at our upcoming live event in Bengaluru on 26 July. It’s called “How AI is breaking and remaking the way products are built”.
Our live discussion will encapsulate the major shifts happening in India’s product and tech landscape. We’ll find out how product cycles are evolving at a time when AI can write code, generate ideas, and even make decisions. And we’ll figure out which functions and teams are gaining influence when others are losing out. The panel features some of the country’s sharpest leaders and practitioners.
In case you are not able to make it in person, we’ve got you covered with a live stream, so go ahead and pick up your tickets here (subscribers get a 50% discount): https://the-ken.com/event/how-ai-is-breaking-and-remaking-the-way-products-are-built/
For today’s edition of The Collection, we’ve curated stories and newsletters from the past few months that explore just how far-reaching AI’s impact really is.
It’s only been a little while since companies started adopting AI, but it’s already having a huge impact.
Microsoft has cut over 15,000 employees this year over multiple rounds of layoffs. And many of the people who helped develop its AI solutions, including their Director of AI, have found themselves on the chopping block.
The ones who survived the purge have been told that “using AI is no longer optional”.
For decades, tech companies have monetised everything humans have. Just examine what you spend your money on every month, and observe the share that tech companies have on your wallet. This used to be much smaller. Retail. Commerce. Finance. Entertainment. Communication. And even attention. All of these have been squeezed dry.
The final thing left is knowledge—and the act of learning itself.
The layoffs at Microsoft are the consequence of this last act of monetisation.
My colleague Praveen Gopal Krishnan explored what such AI-induced layoffs really signal—and what it means for India—in this piece from May.
Build AI and they will ask you to go
Companies are starting to get rid of the humans who built the machines that will replace them
While India hasn’t seen layoffs on a similar scale yet, some unicorns such as Razorpay and Phonepe have already begun adopting enterprise-level GenAI tools, leading to noticeable changes in workplace dynamics, as a subscriber survey showed earlier this year.
Nine out of 10 respondents said they’d begun using AI tools, even if it meant paying for them out of their own pocket. About two-thirds of all respondents weren’t even in tech roles.
The employees are also increasingly finding that the workplace dynamics they were used to are getting chipped. Seniors are relying less on juniors for some tasks, and juniors don’t find themselves scurrying to the former for context, according to at least 10 executives across seniority.
Companies like Accenture are offering upskilling solutions powered by AI, with the global consulting firm investing $1 billion in its learning and development vertical—Learnvantage.
Accenture’s latest offering in the wake of AI: Survival as a Service
As GenAI deconstructs work, Accenture is busy acquiring companies to reconstruct it, aiming to beat TCS’ 10-year game of L&D
And AI-generated content is turning out to be a vibrant new use case, both for content creators and the companies purportedly protecting users from such AI-generated slop.
AI sells swords at dawn and shields at dusk
It fuels the fight, then sells you safety. Welcome to the new economy of conflict
We aren’t just seeing new business use cases, though. The sudden explosion in demand for AI tools and models is also opening up new job opportunities for people with the right skillsets.
Previously, AI model training was largely limited to labelling, so technical degrees didn’t matter as much. Now, though, AI trainers are expected to be far more accomplished. Some US-based companies are calling upon thousands of Indians, including those from top institutions like the IITs and NITs, to fill such expert roles.
But how sustainable are these jobs really? We explore in this story from June.
Train AI models, earn up to $50/hr: these firms turn to Indian PhDs, techies, actors
A $14 billion Meta-Scale AI deal has brought sudden visibility to the white-collar gig economy powering OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others
AI isn’t just changing our professional lives. It’s starting to impact who we are as people too. For instance, just what are the implications of outsourcing our thinking and creativity to AI, as many seem to be already doing?
Will AI prompts become the real measure of human talent and expertise?
And just what does it mean to be human in the age of AI?
(Unformed) Thoughts on AI
There hasn’t been any economic, technological, or behavioural trend in our lifetime that has sought to subsume and erase the very essence of what makes us human as LLM-powered AI
If you’d like to share your own thoughts on the AI revolution and how it is (and will) impact our lives and communities, let me know by writing to [email protected].
Or even better, be part of our event on 26 July! We’ll be really glad to continue this conversation there, whether you’re in Bengaluru or joining us via live stream.
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Rahul leads the promotion and distribution efforts for the journalism produced by The Ken. He works at the intersection of the publication's editorial and business operations.
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