Reflections

In the modern business landscape, brands need to pay far more attention to their customers. A single review in today’s interconnected world can completely destroy sales, or a single missing detail can cause missed sales. How brands communicate, how they structure their packaging details, and how they handle consumer mentions on social media reflect the state of the modern marketing scenario—and right now, critical fundamentals are being missed. A Lesson in Consumer Behavior: Financial Incentives vs. Trust My experience began when I was looking for Pooja ghee. I was evaluating a new brand simply because it was available on a particular platform where I had some credit available. Having free cash or credit on a platform makes a purchase financially more remunerative, but that doesn't mean a consumer is going to compromise on product quality. That is a crucial consumer behavior lesson. Because this was not my regular brand, I decided to look up the product in detail before committ...

  The Fallacy of Tech-Led Returns Take a look at the current landscape of Technology and AI adoption. Everyone bought invtested into Technology, and then later on into AI tools. They ran pilots, automated functions, introduced AI when the AI boom came, built agents, and scaled them. Yet the vast majority are left wondering at empty balance sheets, wondering where the promised returns went. The reason for this failure isn't technical. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of corporate finance and organizational architecture. The truth is simple: ROI is not and will never be a technology function. It is a business function.       Why ROI Belongs to Business Leadership First of all, revenue KPIs in the managerial performance sheet only start from Senior Manager or AVP on up, where revenue and cost parameters actually appear. There is a reason for this – achieving ROI needs a business perspective, an eye for cross functional detailing, an ability to execute across...

It is time to reverse the approach. Let us start asking our prospects a fundamentally uncomfortable question: Are your data, processes, and people actually ready for AI solutions? In a recent poll, I asked this exact question across my network, offering four distinct perspectives: that you cannot deploy AI when you aren't ready; that it is the AI vendor's job to teach readiness; that data and processes will remain a mess so we cannot wait; and that asking this question is simply too risky because it may turn away customers.       Having vacillated between all four options at various times—depending on whether I was consulting for a vendor or a client—I know firsthand that there are no easy answers. That is precisely why I asked the question. What remains undeniable, however, is that AI requires robust, uncompromising preparedness. A single difference of just one letter in two data sets within a critical field, when replicated across thousands of records, can and does ...

  There is a lot of talk around the rise, nay - the rapid lightening rise of AI LLMs, Gen AI and more. The rhetoric around its being innovation-driven is to be heard a lot nowadays; there is no denying their innovative and inventive background reality. To deny that would be abject foolishness - but that does not mean it is the innovation that won the market. Innovation never wins markets - and that, in a world where absolutes cannot stated, is an absolute. The Prerequisites for Winning Markets A market victory requires purchasing customers, the right ecosystem, available finance and regulations, and a demonstrable value proposition - not one of these is negotiable. Therefore, let me take a quick look at the growth of the LLM phenomenon from the eye of a marketer   First of all - there is nothing like a product-led innovation - innovation is always market-led. Unless there was some history of innovations winning in the market, there would be fewer risk takers i...

  AI Will Be Decided in the Real World, Not in the Lab There is something increasingly odd about the way the AI industry talks about Artificial General Intelligence, Superintelligence, the Singularity and the risks associated with them. The language is becoming increasingly grandiose: AI will transform the world, AI may surpass human intelligence, AI may become uncontrollable, AI may eventually pose an existential threat to humanity.   Yet when I look at these conversations from the perspective of someone who works with businesses and is actually trying to use AI to improve productivity, I find a fundamental disconnect. The AI industry, particularly the technologists within it, seems to have very little understanding of how the real world works — not just of the risks of AI, but even of its benefits. And that disconnect matters because businesses are ultimately the ones that have to adopt, pay for, manage and live with this technology.       Redefini...