The Nutgraf (Private)

AI may be overhyped, but the fact that we’ve now entered a different era seems to be apparent. 

Even if AI never attains the best version of itself, the world has already decisively changed. 

And everything from capital, geopolitics, and a cultural shift with work, careers, and society is playing its part. 

The old world is not coming back. 

And this new world is filled with paradoxes. 

Praveen Gopal Krishnan explains further in the last episode of The Nutgraf.

The art is back in product management. 

It’s like someone just pressed a switch, and all the old rules are gone, and nobody knows what the new rules really are. 

This is really what Praveen had missed the most about product management, as he had written about on multiple occasions. 

Back in 2011, when he started his career, product was dismissed as an offshoot of the IT team.

By 2016, friends on track for partners at MBB firms were asking him how to break into PM. 

By 2020, gimmicky PM courses were everywhere. 

He has lived through it all. 

So by 2021, he felt that product management had run its course, and decided to do other things instead. 

But today, he feels like the power has decisively shifted back to Product.

In this episode of The Nutgraf, listen to Praveen Gopal Krishnan’s journey and his advice for adjusting to this shift. 

Previously, we have looked at AI as a technology evolving in a (mostly) predictable way, and focused on what India should do across policy, tech, capital, and labour to take advantage of it. It is assumed that India will behave more or less exactly as it has in the past.  

For this edition of The Nutgraf, we have Praveen Gopal Krishnan’s take on how AI could benefit India, based on his predictions of how the technology could evolve.

Over 500+ subscribers took the AI survey that we put out, and they poured their heart out.
In fact, if you were at The Ken’s most recent event where we discussed product development in the age of AI, you’d have caught a glimpse of these responses.
There are many themes that emerged from the survey.
For this edition, Praveen Gopal Krishnan has chosen to focus on how using AI is making people feel, rather than the specifics of how they’re using it. 

When TCS broke the news about layoffs, guess what happened to its stock price?

It fell by 3% in a week.

When Microsoft announced multiple rounds of layoffs over the past few months, they used more or less the same corporate jargon that TCS did: AI transformation, agile, future ready. The layoffs also impacted the same cohort of employees across both companies—middle and senior management.

And yet, the response couldn’t have been more different.

In this edition of The Nutgraf, we have Praveen Gopal Krishnan with an in-depth analysis.

There have been telecom partnerships before, most notably with OTT platforms like Netflix, Hotstar, and Amazon Prime. 

They’ve usually been bundled with postpaid plans, or sometimes with higher value prepaid topups. 

Nobody has ever gone to Airtel and said, “we want you to give our product away for free to all of your subscribers….yes, all 360 million of them…send us a quote.” 

The most intriguing aspect of the Perplexity-Airtel deal is the full-scale buyout of distribution.

Listen to Praveen Gopal Krishnan divulge on the importance of this kind of a deal in this edition of The Nutgraf. 

Amazon launched Rufus in February 2024, the company’s AI shopping assistant, across both mobile and desktop platforms. 

It is more popular than you might expect, that is, ~14% of all searches on Amazon’s website in October 2024 may have been handled through Rufus. 

After all, AI is the obvious answer to one of the hardest and most annoying problems in e-commerce. 

There are several reasons why but it primarily it comes down to three things. 

Praveen Gopal Krishnan explains in this edition of The Nutgraf. 

You can take the survey here. 

You can also read the edition here. 

After almost a year, Zomato, Swiggy, and Zepto don’t appear to be on the front foot any longer. 

The market was bound to tap out at some point, and it was always going to plateau much faster than food delivery did. 

There is a well-known framework for understanding how humans respond to perceived threats. 

Tune in to The Nutgraf to hear Praveen Gopal Krishnan explain the above companies’ responses.