Entrepreneurship
What building real businesses taught me about AI
Silicon Valley builds AI for tech workers with twelve tabs open. Building businesses in India teaches you that software must live inside existing daily habits to survive.
There is a huge chasm between how AI is built in developer sandboxes and how it performs on the bustling shop floors and trading desks of Indian commerce. Most SaaS companies create beautiful dashboards that require customers to open a desktop browser, log in, remember a password, and navigate four dropdown menus.
In the real world, dashboards are graveyards. Business owners and their staff do not want another tab. They live on WhatsApp, their phone dialer, and UPI payment apps.
If your AI solution requires people to abandon their natural working habitat, adoption will drop off a cliff within thirty days. But if you embed that same intelligence directly into a WhatsApp conversation, it becomes second nature instantly.
Software must adapt to human habits, not the other way around. The most valuable software of the next decade won't look like complex enterprise dashboards — it will look like an invisible assistant working silently inside channels people already check fifty times a day.