Good Morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

In May, payments aggregator Razorpay decided to flip the script on hackathons.

“Instead of engineers building and leaders judging, we did a Leadership AI Hackathon,” Razorpay co-founder and CEO Harshil Mathur wrote on X after the event. Every leader, including those who led teams like finance and human resources, was expected to build something new with the assistance of artificial intelligence. “No spectators. Just hands-on creation.”

The head of marketing won. They used Google’s AI Studio to make a tool that could answer customer calls, understand the caller’s problem, and resolve it without human intervention. It was a fully automated support agent, imagined not by engineers but by a marketer.

“Honestly, winning didn’t really matter,” Harshil told me in the latest episode of 90,000 Hours.

90,000 Hours • EPISODE 2

At work, it’s ‘AI or bust’. What’s your move?

Across the board, companies are investing in AI tools for their teams. But with that access comes a new kind of pressure to work smarter, move faster, and think more creatively

Play Now on The Ken App

Premium subscribers only

Don't have The Ken app? Install now

Razorpay is among a growing set of organisations that are compelling their workforce to keep up with advancements in AI. His goal is to make his employees realise “the magical power that AI has now”.

This isn’t unique to Razorpay. In many companies, staff with no engineering experience are matching AI tools with fresh use cases.

Consider the case of Aswath Sachin. He joined Zerodha’s* customer support team in 2021, then eventually moved into a business analyst role. That meant working with huge amounts of data—far too much to parse in spreadsheets. To make sense of it all—which involved searching, filtering, and extracting insights—Aswath taught himself how to write basic code.

Then came Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. 

Aswath built a simple tool to solve an accounting problem that had been eating up hours every day. Zerodha’s accounting team manages thousands of fixed deposits made across different banks. Every day, they have to track which ones have matured and which can be broken with the lowest penalty fees. Instead of opening a ticket for Zerodha’s engineering team to create a custom application for this process, Aswath turned to Claude. He created a tool that solved the problem. It’s now used across Zerodha’s accounting department.

You can dive into all of this and more in the latest episode of 90,000 Hours: “At work, it’s ‘AI or bust’. What’s your move?” It’s worth a listen.

Hearing about Aswath’s experience made me consider my own work processes. I’m normally working on two episodes for 90,000 Hours at any given time, but multitasking doesn’t come naturally to me. At the moment, I keep track of this manually, with the help of multiple Google spreadsheets—the old-fashioned method.

But I’m sure there’s a better way to do this. If you’ve built a novel task tracking system that works for you, I’d love to hear about it at [email protected].

Until next week,
Rahel 

*Zerodha’s perennial fund, Rainmatter Capital, is an investor in The Ken.

Get a premium subscription to The Ken

Unrivaled analysis and powerful stories about businesses from award-winning journalists. Read by 5,00,000+ subscribers globally who want to be prepared for what comes next.

Upgrade Now

Trusted by 5,00,000+ executives & leaders from the world's most successful organisations & students at top post-graduate campuses