Daybreak

At a fintech conference in February, Razorpay showed a demo. 

A user ordered food on Zomato by voice and paid — without opening a checkout page or a UPI app. No friction and no redirects. Just a job done end-from-end.

The same week, OpenAI quietly rolled back its own in-chat shopping agent.

Razorpay is calling this the biggest disruption to payments since UPI. But agentic commerce raises questions that a demo can't answer — around trust, fraud, consent, and who's liable when an AI spends your money.

Is India ready for that? Is anyone?

Hosts Snigdha Sharma and Rachel Varghese, speak to The Ken reporter Mutasim Khan. Tune in.

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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.

A cartoon reposted. An account restricted. A takedown notice with no warning and no appeal.

India's new IT rules give platforms three hours to remove flagged content — the shortest window anywhere in the world. But a draft amendment published last month could go even further, potentially treating anyone who posts about current affairs as a publisher. Without the protections that come with it.

For millions of creators, anonymous users, and global tech platforms, the stakes just got harder to ignore.

The deadline to push back is April 14th.

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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.

India's civil aviation ministry issued two directives this March that pulled in opposite directions. First, it mandated full refunds for cancelled flights. Three days later, it removed all caps on airfares. The trigger for the second move: the US-Israeli war against Iran has sent jet fuel prices soaring, up nearly 60% in the US, and India is bracing for the impact.

Airlines, already running on thin margins, are warning that fares will rise.

For Indian flyers, the net result is this: cancellations just got free but flights just got more expensive.

How did we get here?

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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.

India wants to design its own semiconductor chips. To help, the government launched a scheme with money and tools for startups that do exactly that. 

But there's a catch — and it's keeping out the very people best placed to build this industry. 

The engineers who spent decades in Silicon Valley, built the chips inside your devices, and are now coming home. A regulator that's also a competitor. And a factory that was supposed to be for Indian startups — but probably won't be.

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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.

Imagine paying insurance premiums for years and then one day you actually need it. You're in a hospital, or someone you love is. And the insurer says: no.

In the last financial year, Indian health insurers rejected claims worth ₹30,000 crore. Nearly one in eight claims were denied or left pending.

And what's wild is how far back the problem starts. There are agents filling out forms incorrectly to earn a faster commission. Hospitals that know exactly what a surgery costs but keep the number vague on purpose. And insurers operating on margins so thin that scrutinising every claim is more about survival than greed.

The Ken reporter Sudeshna Ray dived into this for The Ken’s Make India Competitive Again newsletter. Host Snigdha Sharma reads it for you in this episode.

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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.

Polymarket and Kalshi are two New York-founded prediction market platforms now valued in the billions. While both let users bet real money on elections and political events in real time, it is Polymarket — the larger, offshore, largely unregulated one — where someone made nearly a million dollars predicting US military strikes on Iran before they happened. Together, the two platforms processed over $44 billion in bets last year.

In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma explores how two New York startups turned opinion into a tradeable asset — and what happens when the people placing the biggest bets already know the answer.

India banned online money gaming last year. These platforms are taking bets on our elections anyway.

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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.

For a decade, digital advertising ran on one idea: get to the top of Google. Buy the keywords and earn the clicks. That was the game.

But AI just changed the rules.

ChatGPT and Gemini now have over a billion and a half users between them, growing at nearly 200% year on year. People have stopped searching for links. Instead,nthey're asking questions and expecting answers. And those answers mention three brands, maybe four. For the rest who don't make it to these answers, it's like they don't even exist.

What will those brands do?

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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 1965, Yoko Ono sat on a stage at Carnegie Hall and handed a pair of scissors to strangers. What they did next was entirely up to them.
It was a performance about agency — and about what happens when you give an audience too much of it.

Sixty years later, Sam Altman made a promise: OpenAI would treat adults like adults, and roll out an erotic mode for verified users.

The market was there. Other players in the intimate AI companion space were raking in dollars.

But after multiple delays, the Open AI plan was eventually shelved.

So, why is a company known for burning cash, saying no to a revenue making avenue it already considered?

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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.

Semaglutide's patent just expired in India. The molecule behind Novo Nordisk's blockbuster obesity drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy, is now fair game for generic manufacturers. An 85 to 90% price drop is expected.

Eli Lilly's Mounjaro had already been outselling Wegovy.

For most companies, this would be the beginning of an exit. But Novo is doing the opposite. Why?

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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.

India's hospitals have been slow to adopt AI.

Its government, however, has not.

A new programme aims to train 50,000 doctors in artificial intelligence. And not just to use it, but to help build it.
The argument is simple: engineers understand disease like an algorithm. Doctors know it's never that clean.

So what happens when clinicians become co-builders?

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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.