Daybreak

India's best AI models are confidently wrong. Not occasionally — structurally. If you put two unrelated ideas into a prompt, the model will usually invent a connection rather than admit that none exists.

In this piece, The Ken's Debanjali Biswas traces what a five-month study of leading AI models — from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — actually found about how they reason. The results landed almost every model in what researchers are calling the "danger zone", which shows high confidence and low accuracy.

This is a read aloud of Debanjali's original story, by Rachel Varghese, on Daybreak.

📖 Read the full story on The Ken: This startup ranked AI models. They all landed in the danger zone

A two-year-old think tank backed by Adani just got 14 of its suggestions, some of them word for word, written into a law passed by Parliament. That law opened India's nuclear sector to private players for the first time in history. Months later, Adani floated a new subsidiary to enter the same field.

The think tank is called Chintan Research Foundation. It started in a South Delhi cafe. It calls itself independent. And it's now one of the more visible and contested players in Delhi's policy world.

So what exactly does Rs 100 crore buy you in India's policy ecosystem?

Also listen to: Friday Roundup: Adani goes nuclear and AI's talent exit

The Parle-G packet has cost five rupees since the 1990s. Once, when the company tried raising it by 50 paise, consumers switched to Britannia's Tiger within weeks. The price was rolled back. That's how sensitive this market is.

But something else has been changing — quietly, and without announcement. The packet that was once 100 grams is now 45. And Parle-G isn't alone. Dabur, Britannia, Nestlé, Godrej — all cutting weight, all in the same quarter, all for the same reason.

A war in West Asia has sent packaging costs up by 40 to 75%. The buffer won't last. What comes next?

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

West Bengal and Tamil Nadu declared their results yesterday. BJP swept Bengal after fifteen years of TMC rule. In Tamil Nadu, Vijay's TVK won, upending the DMK return almost everyone had predicted, including the platforms that had money on it.

Prediction markets are now a $150 billion industry. And they were taking live bets on India's assembly elections, on a platform India officially banned last year. In a recent edition of The Ken's Make In India Competitive Again, Seema Singh wrote about an interesting research paper. While most assume the trading volumes were not high enough for concern, this peer-reviewed paper in Science says otherwise. In fact, this it says, it matters even when the volumes are thin, or maybe especially then.

So what is India's ban actually achieving?

Tune in.

Also listen to: India banned online betting. Polymarket is wagering on our elections anyway. 

Market shocks hit retirees harder than anyone else. For those just retired or on the verge of it, a sharp early drop in portfolio value can cause damage that compounds quietly over decades, long after markets recover.

The American war in Iran is the latest trigger. And it may not be the last.

The good news: careful planning can offset the risk. A concept called the safe withdrawal rate, used correctly, can be the difference between a corpus that lasts 30 years and one that runs out in 20.

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In November 2024, one of India's biggest FMCG companies, Hindustan Unilever, started getting a barrage of complaints from its consumers, who said they were seeing the same Dove and Surf Excel ads repeatedly on OTT platforms during a single watch session. Some of them were shown the same ads as many as 150 times within a week.

With IPL around the corner, HUL — which spends nearly Rs 4,000 crore on ads annually — couldn't afford to ignore these complaints. So what followed was a series of investigations. And what they discovered has opened a real can of worms for not just JioHotstar, the platform streaming the IPL, but OTT platforms in general. The big issue is a serious mismatch between what was promised and what's actually being delivered for ad campaigns, according to seven insiders from HUL, Disney, and other industry rivals who spoke to The Ken.

So what happens when a big spender starts feeling like it's not getting what it signed up for during the biggest streaming event of the year? The Ken reporter Rounak Kumar Gunjan speaks to Daybreak hosts Snigdha and Rahel.

This episode was first published in February 2025. We're re-airing it now because IPL 2026 is live, and the underlying issue the episode raises has not been publicly confirmed as resolved.

Here's what has changed after we first published: ahead of IPL 2025, JioHotstar partnered with Nielsen to introduce third-party verified ad measurement for the first time in Indian OTT. It was a direct response to the advertiser pressure this episode describes. But the Nielsen study that followed measured cross-screen duplication: whether the same viewer was being counted differently across TV, mobile, and connected TV. It didn't address the specific complaint HUL raised, which was about a single user being shown the same ad repeatedly within one platform. JioStar has not publicly confirmed that the problem has been fixed.

What has changed though, for IPL 2026: connected TV ad rates are up 25%, with the base cost of a 10-second ad rising from ₹480 to ₹600 CPM. The money is bigger. And the question of whether advertisers are getting what they pay for remains the same.

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Investors are calling India's home-services market quick commerce's next big moment. Instahelp, Snabbit, and Pronto are betting big on it. They're sending trained workers to your door in under 10 minutes, at prices cheaper than a coffee. Orders, naturally, are in the millions.

But the difference is that quick commerce eventually figured out how to make money. Here, on the other hand, 82% of consumers have already said they won't pay more than Rs 200 an hour. 

And on every order placed today, the market leader is losing twice what it earns.

So who exactly is this boom working for?

Tune in.

Diet Coke disappeared from Bangalore's shelves, and a teenager's frustrated Reddit post accidentally explained why: the Strait of Hormuz.

When the US-Israel war on Iran began in February, fuel shipments slowed. Aluminium furnaces went cold. PET resin prices jumped 75%. At least 25 plants shut completely. In one Odisha industrial belt alone, 700 of 1,500 workers lost their jobs.

But the war only made an existing problem worse — India had already tightened import rules on aluminium cans, leaving beverage companies dangerously dependent on West Asian buffer stock.

The shortage was always coming. The war just decided that it was now.

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Last week, Rihanna was all over our social media feeds as she flew to Mumbai for the official India launch of Fenty Beauty. Now it is exclusively available through Reliance Retail's beauty company, Tira. This was the popstar's second visit to India in two years; the first being a private performance at Anant Ambani's pre-wedding celebrations in 2024, her first paid show in eight years.

For a woman who built her entire brand on never showing up on anyone else's terms, there's something worth examining here. Fenty is valued at nearly $3 billion and India's premium beauty market is heading towards $4 billion by 2035.

But the real story starts in November 2023, when Reliance spent ₹99 crore acquiring Sephora India.

In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma examines if any of this was really Rihanna's choice.

Tune in

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

At Kochi's Infopark, two models of the IT industry sit 500 metres apart. 

Infosys and Wipro: sprawling campuses, thousands of engineers, margins built on scale. 

IBM: a smaller hub, senior-heavy teams, focused on enterprise AI. Same city, completely different bets on the future.

India's IT giants are expanding into tier-2 cities because they're cheaper. 

But AI is quietly making the old logic — hire more, deliver at scale — look like the wrong answer. Infosys and Wipro's stocks have nearly halved since 2021. IBM's has doubled.

So what does Kochi reveal about where Indian IT is actually headed?

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.