Zero Shot (Private)

Think of an action or crime film. At some point, when all of the different threads and plots converge, you witness a high-stakes scene. Three characters are locked in a fight. You don’t know who emerges a winner. This is what is loosely called a Mexican standoff. 

Apply this analogy to physical AI. There are currently three players in the game. America has BigTech and big models that only seem to be getting bigger. China has actual manufacturing capabilities and a sharp-minded executional focus on hardware. And then there are places like India and Nigeria that provide the data for some of these robots, especially “humanoids”.

In this episode of Zero Shot, host Praveen Gopal Krishnan talks to The Ken reporter Sakshi Sadashiv who wrote about the mushrooming gig economy around data collection to create robots that perform human tasks. We are also joined by Pramod Ghadge, the co-founder of Unbox Robotics, an Indian company that has deployed 700 robots across nine countries for a specific use-case: warehouses.

Each has a take on who wins. But more importantly, this episode takes you inside the growing Physical AI market. Tune in! 

Additional Material: 

AI product differentiation, living with robots, world models, and extreme leverage

Tesla and Figure AI are building robots to act like humans. Indian workers are teaching them how

The GPT Moment for Robotics Is Here

https://unboxrobotics.com/

After 15 years of building Wingify, Paras Chopra spent some time deliberating about his next stint.

For years, he had chased the 0 to 1 journey of building something from the ground up and watching it grow. He wanted to chase that in his next stint too.

But he knew it had to be different.

There would be no product. Forget that, he decided the next project would barely have any commercial inclination. Instead, he followed his curiosity and instinct as a child passionate about science.

That’s how Lossfunk, a “cosy home” for “independent researchers” was born.

Paras describes Lossfunk as the place where everyone — from undergrads to PHDs to just inquisitive people— ask foundational questions on AI away from the pressures that burden academia and labs attached to big tech companies.

In this episode of Zero Shot, Paras gets into the journey of Lossfunk and talks about its motivations and principles.

Now, a lot of the questions Lossfunk is asking might not result in a flashy new product that changes consumer behaviour. They might just become a research paper. Or two. For Paras, that's completeley alright because building a “research attitude” may fully be the point.
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This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.
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Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.

Write to us at [email protected]. We are all ears!

Additional Resources

Lossfunk

https://lossfunk.com

Inverted Passion

https://invertedpassion.com

Esoteric programming languages

https://spectrum.ieee.org/esoteric-programming-languages-daniel-temkin

Manifesto for doing good science in AI

https://letters.lossfunk.com/p/manifesto-for-doing-good-science

Particle Fever

https://particlefever.com/

For decades, Indian IT grew and grew some more based on the labor arbitrage model: deploy engineers from Bangalore at one-sixth the cost of an American engineer, bill, repeat. The industry perfected the art of selling "services" instead of building and owning technology. But AI has quickly made the engineer a commodity. The big question now is how IT services will pivot and reinvent.

A step in that direction was seen recently, when news spread that HCLTech looks all set to invest $150M into Sarvam and lead its latest funding round. 

But what exactly is HCL buying and what is Sarvam selling? That's the crux of this episode of Zero Shot. Host Rohin Dharmakumar is joined by Abhishek Pathak, the lead IT analyst at Motilal Oswal and Kashyap Kompella, the founder of RPA2AI Research, who has spent 25 years across AI strategy, M&A advisory, and industry analysis.

While both agree the investment signals a shift from applications, they debate the core tensions and questions surrounding this deal. 

Tune in and hear them unpack the move that could define the shape IT services will take going forward. 

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Additional material: 

https://x.com/nathanclark_/status/2056947354654355849?s=20

https://the-ken.com/story/google-meta-are-building-huge-data-centres-in-vizag-nobody-told-the-power-grid

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/startup/hcltech-to-lead-300-million-sarvam-ai-round-with-150-million-bet-at-1-5-billion-valuation-13918719.html
https://rpa2ai.com/about/team/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhishek-pathak-841a3494

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-5-layer-cake/

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This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.
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Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.

Write to us at [email protected]. We are all ears!

Another day and another Anthropic announcement has spurred conversation. 

This time, it is Claude for Legal services. On May 12, Anthropic unveiled 20+ new "MCP connectors that link Claude to the software the legal industry runs on". Think Westlaw, LexisNexis, DocuSign. Alongside this, it announced 12 "new plugins tailored to specific legal work". 

With every new Anthropic announcement, we typically ask two questions on Zero Shot. Are actual workflows impacted? And what does this do to companies building in similar spaces?

In our latest episode, we sat down with Shashank Bijapur, the co-founder and CEO of SpotDraft, to find out more. SpotDraft works on contracts, a crucial component of a lawyer's workflow that Anthropic wants to augment.

But Shashank is not worried. 

He calls Claude the UPI layer. What you build on top of it is "heavily defensible," he adds. 

But what exactly is SpotDraft building that enables it to work with Claude as opposed to being pressured by its entry into the legal tech stack? 

Tune in!

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Additional material: 

An AI System Built by Litigators, for Litigators

https://law-disrupted.fm/ai-system-built-by-litigators/

Claude for the legal industry

https://claude.com/blog/claude-for-the-legal-industry

Mike OSS

https://mikeoss.com/

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This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.
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Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.

Write to us at [email protected]. We are all ears!

On May 5, Anthropic released 10 financial services agents. The company said they “pair best” with Claude Opus 4.7, a “state-of-the-art” model that leads the industry on financial agent benchmarks. And the hype followed. The media called the agents a threat to Wall Street.

The reality is more complicated.

In today’s episode of Zero Shot, hosts Brady Ng and Praveen Gopal Krishnan are joined by Musheer Ahmed, founder of FinStep Asia and ex-trader, and Sharath Chandra, founder of EmpowerEdge Ventures, to make sense of what actually changed.

The conversation covers why financial services keeps attracting AI investment, why the 10 agents are more useful to junior analysts than to the industry at large, and why trust remains the real bottleneck in finance. They also get into data residency, the regulatory moat protecting incumbent banks, and what happens to a service like the Bloomberg terminal.

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This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Cymasonic productions.
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Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.

Write to us at [email protected]. We are all ears!

Additional Resources

Who watches the AI watching your money?

https://the-ken.com/kaching/who-watches-the-ai-watching-your-money/

Anthropic releases new AI agents for financial services firms

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-releases-new-ai-agents-for-financial-services-firms-e2829b37

Anthropic unveils AI agents for financial services tasks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3RLgeUiUXY

AI for financial services

https://www.anthropic.com/news/finance-agents

What is the market for AI wearables? And what do they do that a phone already doesn’t?

These were the two main questions we asked Dhananjay Yadav, the co-founder and CEO of NeoSapien, a startup that makes an AI-powered pendant that “transcribes in real time, summarises what matters, and reminds you to follow through”. He calls it a “productivity tool” that will change how we interact with devices.

But the AI wearable market is tricky. Remember Humane? The AI pin company? It raised $230 million, shipped fewer than 10,000 devices, and permanently bricked every single one of them on February 28, 2025. And Rabbit, the other AI wearable startup that made a big splash, sold 100,000 units and watched 95% of its users disappear within five months. 

And yet here is Dhananjay who is building a pendant in Bengaluru, telling us India can win the global AI wearable race. And the product, he says, will be used by regular people: small business owners, real estate agents, and even journalists. 

Tune in!

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This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Cymasonic productions.
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Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.

Write to us at [email protected]. We are all ears!

Additional material:

NeoSapien

What Anthropic’s Mythos can hack in hours, Indian banks take months to fix

Note taking app Plaud

Can a Note-Taking AI Bracelet Really Make You More Productive? I Tested One to Find Out.

Most AI startup success stories start in November 2022. For the story of Presentations.AI, however, we have to go back to 2005.
That year, Sumanth Raghavendra, who is also the co-founder of The Ken, started his first venture. It was called InstaCall. The idea was to build an online office suite in Bangalore with a team of six engineers. They ended up cracking the product, but had no way to market and sell it. It had to wind down.

In 2012, when the iPhone opened up the App Store, the team dropped the full office suite idea and bet everything on one slice of it — presentations. That became Deck, a mobile-first presentation app.

Deck’s thesis was that users came to a presentation tool knowing what they wanted to say, and just needed help saying it visually. But that assumption fell apart really quickly. People would land on the first slide, type a title, and freeze.

This insight sent the team down a years-long road of trying to solve presentations by gathering tons of data from designers and working with traditional machine learning tools.

Then, GPT arrived. Instead of panicking, the team rebuilt itself entirely, changed its tech stack, and cracked its unit economics.

It reinvented itself and unveiled Presentations.AI in 2023.

Now, it surfaces at the top of every search for "AI presentation maker". 

The startup not only survived but rode the AI wave. Sumanth tells you the story of how that panned out.

Tune in!

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This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.

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Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. 

Write to us at [email protected]. We are all ears!

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Recommended Reading:

Your Startup Is Probably Dead on Arrival

AI and the end of SaaS playbooks

https://presentations.ai

https://aiboomi.org

"People in Silicon Valley and in China often have assumptions about each other. And their assumptions about each other are extremely self-centered."

Our guest today is Afra Wang,  a fellow at the Centre for the Governance of AI and the writer behind Concurrent, a Substack that translates the tech culture of Silicon Valley and China from angels you wouldn’t typically expect. 

Afra understands both these tech ecosystems and is specific about what that self-centeredness looks like on both sides.

Chinese entrepreneurs assume the American government has a heavy hand in pushing AI infrastructure, for example, the way Beijing does. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg of assumptions that both sides keep building on. 

Instead, in reality, there are specific ways in which AI development occurs in both places. Consider a leather factory in China using AI to scan cowhide in real time — it maps flaws, computes optimal cutting patterns, and eliminates waste. Silicon Valley has no equivalent because America doesn't have this sector. 

Afra sums it up: "You cannot map everything from Silicon Valley to China. You cannot map a lot of things from China to Silicon Valley." 

So, what’s similar and what’s different? What’s moving between these two competing systems? And what lessons does that have for India?

Tune in.

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This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.

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Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.

Write to us at [email protected]. We are all ears!

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Additional Resources

China OS vs. America OS (2026 version)

https://afraw.substack.com/p/china-os-vs-america-os-2026-version

Chinese Open Source: A Definitive History

https://interconnected.blog/chinese-open-source-a-definitive-history/

Chinese Tech Workers Are Starting to Train Their AI Doubles–and Pushing Back

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/20/1136149/chinese-tech-workers-ai-colleagues

Jack Dorsey’s Block to Cut Nearly Half Its Workforce in AI Overhaul, Shares Surge

https://www.reuters.com/business/blocks-fourth-quarter-profit-rises-announces-over-4000-job-cuts-2026-02-26/

The Dark Forest Theory, Explained

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/dark-forest-theory-alien-life

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest

US bans sale of Huawei, ZTE tech amid security fears (2022)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63764450

Today is not regular programming for Zero Shot.

We present to you a glimpse of our first live event, which we dramatically titled “The Great Unbundling”. 

It had a simple premise: agentic AI is coming. Soon. Hard. Fast. For India's consumer internet companies. Who will survive it? 

We posed this question to Muralikrishnan B, former President of Xiaomi India; Amod Malviya, co-founder of Udaan and former CTO of Flipkart; Anant Choubey, co-founder of Capillary; and Thomas Fenn, co-founder of Mahabelly and joint secretary of the National Restaurant Association of India. 

This was The Ken's fifth live event, and it was sold out. A big thank you to all of you who were there. We are doing a lot more events this year and if you want to be there next time, keep an eye on our website. 

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This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.

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Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. 

Write to us at [email protected]. We are all ears!

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Recommended Reading: 

The Great Unbundling

"We have 353 billion data points on user behaviour. Why wouldn't I use them to make a better story and get into newer businesses within content?"

That's Kunj Sanghvi, the vice president and head of content at Kuku, explaining their next big bet on theatrical films. 

Kuku has seen 10 million paid subscribers and 350 million downloads so far. This is precious data of “micro segments”, people’s consumption behaviour, preferences, sentiments and indulgences. 

Kuku says this is the bedrock of what they do: “turning creativity into a science”. AI has been the central to how they achieved this with audio and microdramas. It is also key to what they did with their first full-length feature film, which is ready for release on May 8. 

In this episode of Zero Shot, Kunj walks us through how Kuku uses AI in production. It starts off with their “proprietary content genome” that ingests millions of data points, scores incoming story pitches, flags weak cliffhangers, predicts which micro-segment an idea will resonate with, and tells you what to fix before a single frame is shot. And come production, AI is helping create scale, making possible complex shots that would require budgets, extras, and massive resources. 

The result? A film called Indian Institute of Zombies, made at a fraction of regular film budgets. 

"The audience going to cinemas wants spectacle," says Kunj. "AI lets you cheat that. You can show scale without it feeling like a low-cost production."

Tune in.

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This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.

____

Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. 

Write to us at [email protected]. We are all ears!

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Recommended Reading: 

‘Indian Institute of Zombies’ Marks Kuku’s Big-Screen Debut With Campus Horror Comedy

MS Dhoni Invests in AI-driven Storytelling Platform Kuku