Reflections

The rising usage of AI in Creativity is a perfect stand-in for what is in my opinion the biggest risk facing Industry and Business today: the acceptance of substandard solutions, and the concomitant rise in mediocrity along with the loss of domain expertise. This is readily apparent in the content space on any social media nowadays with the advent of AI written posts filling our feed. Now, apparently you don’t need real skill to write a post – this is worrying. While AI is a great equaliser, unplanned-   it can be a greater destroyer of skills.        This is not an article about creativity and usage of AI – rather, it uses this field due to the author’s profession of being in Advertising as well as in AI Software companies as a Fractional CMO to raise a fundamental issue relating to this industry – the rising acceptance of the mediocre. AI in the field of creativity needs a dedicated treatment – but here, I analyse mediocrity through the lens of AI usage ...

  What makes innovation and new technologies like artificial intelligence commercially scalable? — the answer is deceptively simple yet diabolically hard: someone has to create the market, educate buyers, establish use cases and reduce adoption friction. Innovation does not automatically create a market. There is a missing middle between building the product and having customers willing and able to buy it. That is precisely where marketing, industry development and senior leadership come in.   People oftentimes make the error of placing the innovation engine all by itself - that results in sunk costs with no commercially viable enterprise; this is one of the reasons why startups fail so often. They forget - any product or service has to have an addressable market, and a total market. Not just a market - but an addressable market, one that can interest and desire, has a willingness to pay etc etc. And in innovative or new product lines, often these are missing; and this d...

  One of the key roadblocks to wider AI adoption especially in India is, apart from an understanding of the specific benefits in real-world detail, the lack of understanding of the risk associated with them. In customer conversations, this is an element that is now beginning to crop up more and more – alongside deep, workflow-specific questions. Sadly, most AI companies do not do a good job on either front – addressing specific workflows, or specific risks. This is where hype around risks can emerge.        For example, AI Agents in particular, and AI in general, going rogue is a nightmare scenario that I am sure many of us have heard of. However, the real problem with AI is not simply whether an AI can go rogue. It is whether organisations have any practical framework for quantifying the risk of autonomous exec...

  "What is execution?" This line came up in a discussion recently, and it got me thinking about a question I've circled back to many times: what is the acceptable definition of "execution"? How do we judge it? Is it labour, is it work, or is it success?   My answer: Direction + Prioritising + Process + Plan + Implementation + Moderated Velocity + Monitoring & Pivoting = Execution.   Is Success A Parameter Of Execution? Execution is not success – success is the result of seamless execution. In fact, success is not even a parameter. Including it takes the mind away from execution, which needs a laser-like focus on the objective, and the way to go towards it — while keeping an eye on the strategy and the market shifts so one can pivot to cater to the evolving market or internal changes. That is the fundamental core of execution   Understanding Execution A commando or a soldier does not think of the battle victory. He or she only focuses on the...

  Strategy Begins With Understanding the Economics Underneath Strategy, in its most basic form, is about making choices based on an understanding of the environment in which a business operates. That sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy to forget when strategy gets reduced to market size, consumer trends, competitive positioning and growth ambitions. Underneath every strategy sits a more fundamental layer of assumptions about costs, demand, pricing, capital, people, productivity and the economics of the business itself. If those assumptions change materially, the strategy has to change too. This is why I believe an underlying understanding of business costs and their interconnected behaviour is not merely a finance or economics requirement; it is a fundamental strategic capability.   Inflation is perhaps one of the best examples of this. We have become accustomed to discussing inflation as a number. CPI is at 5%, food inflation is at 7%, core inflation is stic...