This week, Two by Two debuts a new format: “Reverse engineering the playbook.”

Hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan attempt to crack the math behind this recent wave of AI-telco partnerships in India. Why are companies like Perplexity, Google, and OpenAI racing to bundle their expensive premium subscriptions with Airtel, Jio, and Phonepe? 

To decode the economics, they are joined by two industry experts with firsthand experience managing these exact types of deals: Chandrashekhar Vattikuti (ex-CPO of Inmobi and SVP of their Telco Cloud business) and Prakash Deep Maheshwari (head of product at Grab and former director of growth for Netflix in India and Southeast Asia).

The group explores whether Indian telcos are desperate for differentiation or simply cashing in on a gold rush where the smartest move is to sell shovels–or in this case, subscribers. Prakash argues this is a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma: once one telco bundles an AI service, the others have no choice but to follow.

They also break down the actual structure of these deals, from minimum guarantees to the marketing halo the partnerships create. The conversation gets into why OpenAI likely entered these deals “kicking and screaming” to protect its platform ambitions, while Chandra offers a reality check on whether these massive user numbers will actually stick around once the free periods end.

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Episodes referenced in the conversation:

1. ‘Do we even need product managers?’– Two by Two episode 13 with Chandrashekhar Vattikuti

2. ‘Threat models, using taste to defend margins, ChatGPT’s ‘collab’ with Phonepe’- Zero Shot episode 9

Timestamps:

00:00 – The ‘Reverse engineering’ experiment

04:36 – Are telcos becoming just dumb pipes? 

13:14 – The gold rush for subscribers 

29:51 – How these deals are actually structured 

47:38 – Why OpenAI resisted these partnerships 

58:09 – Will users actually stick around?

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This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.

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