How to 10x Your Value in the A.I. Era | ft. Kunal Shah

Thank you so much. First of all, how many of you use any of the apps like ChatGPT or Gemini every day? Awesome. And how many of you have built one agent of your own so far? Okay, that's good. How many of you are concerned that you're going to lose your job to AI?

Yeah, that's good. How many of you think that your colleagues are going to lose their job to AI? Awesome. Awesome. I think this is a better understanding of what's really happening. So, first of all, let's break down what is really happening. When internet happened — and I mean I'm old enough to tell you that I've lived a time where internet was not there in most of the workplaces or computers were not there —

Yeah, I'm turning 47 in a few weeks.

When I went to my first job there were no computers.

No not really, you'd be surprised how long Gmail has been around.

So the thing is that if we are looking at that time, internet made information accessible in the air — you could just search anything and get anything. AI has made intelligence accessible in the air. And this is a very hard concept to understand because intelligence was a unique trait that we attributed to humans as a species, and now you can just plug it up in the air and suck it in and actually accelerate materially. The second thing is that we forget that the largest employer of the world is actually inefficiency. At the pace inefficiency is going away, current jobs are getting displaced or changed materially. A lot of people worry about job layoffs. I think the thing we have to worry about is per capita income not growing. There are enough people in India who are still doing liftman jobs and ATM guard jobs and they all have jobs. There are rickshaw drivers operating without maps who make less money than people with apps on their phone, but they exist. The income delta between people who use technology and AI versus those who don't is going to be wide. The world has interesting ways to keep people employed, but the real question we have to worry about is per capita income growth. A lot of us are waiting for our companies to teach us AI or some workshops to teach us AI or show up at this event and learn something. The truth is everything is up there. If you are really keen to learn, you will figure out everything on your own. The problem is there is a huge shortage of self-motivation and self-discipline because now every single thing is transparently available. You can build anything, create anything, research anything. The question is how many people are actually using these tools for better stuff. A bulk of people are still using AI for frivolous use cases and not for what it is truly capable of.

Well, we are just still editing pictures and videos and talking to ChatGPT like a friend and getting rid of our real friends. How many of you talk to ChatGPT as a friend? How many of you have friends who are talking to ChatGPT as a friend? Already quite a lot. Many of you are going to be shy to talk about it, but it's quite a big phenomenon. How many have done astrology on ChatGPT?

How many of you have done therapy on ChatGPT?

So first of all, if we're talking about wealth, the most valuable wealth you have is time. And what you do with time becomes even more important than it was before. I don't know if you know this — India is now at 35GB usage per capita per month, which is much more than any other country in the world. And 35GB usage requires a lot of time to be wasted. No matter who we are — Elon Musk, Sam, Kunal — everybody has only 24 hours. What we do with that time is becoming even more important for wealth to happen. It has become extremely easy to waste time in the world we live in right now. We have the same device that can make us super intelligent or super dumb very fast — within weeks you can see yourself go in opposite directions. My worry right now is productivity as a concept. By the way, the word efficiency and productivity does not exist in most Indian languages. That vocabulary is not in our core DNA. We don't value time as much and I think that is what's holding us back.

Yeah, there is no word for efficiency and productivity in any Indian language. Most of you can ChatGPT and find the answer but you'll find it's actually surrogate words, not actual words for it. Productivity and efficiency words came from the Industrial Revolution where time became valuable, and we are still to realize that. For example, most jobs in the Western world are hourly jobs. We have never been paid on an hourly basis so our brain doesn't work in hourly mode.

I would say China is not too far away. The gap is getting wider and wider in terms of sheer awareness. It's become hard to even keep up on a weekly basis what's happening in the world. When I meet people socially, what they talk about AI seems so ancient because it was something from last year, and last year feels like an ancient time now. Everything comes from intrinsic motivation. India has a very unique tendency when it comes to these situations. Remember COVID — we had only two modes: apathy and panic. There was nothing in the middle. We didn't give a damn and then we panicked like crazy. I feel we are going to go through the same phase with AI. Right now we are in a phase of apathy because it doesn't seem to be impacting us. But as soon as it starts getting close and there are second and third order effects — let's take banks. Banks today form 30 to 40% of India's market cap. A lot of stability comes from lending, and IT/BPO jobs form 30 to 40% of banks' books. Even if 10 to 20% of jobs get impacted, the safest part of the book starts getting impacted, which means 30-40% of India's market cap is at risk. I don't think anyone's talking about that. We don't think in second order effects. We tend to stay at the surface level and our curiosity ends at reading something quickly on a tweet. For example, a lot of the jobs that were outsourced to India are significantly more likely to get impacted versus jobs that were not outsourced, because their complexities were different. I talk about journalism right now — there are things you assign a junior person to do that can now be done through ChatGPT or OpenAI. The gap is getting wider. To be eligible for a job, the college graduate is going to have an even bigger struggle than before.

And Sam, we're talking about this today in May 2026 when AI is evolving exponentially every month. By the time we talk about this in a year, the issue may get even more stark. The issue is who's supposed to fix it. We have gotten addicted to somebody else solving this for us — the government will come and solve this, or my company, or my parents. A large majority of Indians are still doing arranged marriage. The point is that we are in a time where everybody's on their own and they need to operate with very high agency, solve for themselves, become very good at things because the time you need to become good at something has completely shrunk through all of these tools. The question is: are you doing something about your time or not? It's also the time you can waste your time the most. The reason I worry about India specifically is that when you have such large data usage, when you have a large young population, when you have jobs that can potentially get impacted through these tools at entry level — we are looking at the impact getting more severe unless we create a mission-oriented mindset saying we need to ride this wave.

It's a good question. I used to run a BPO company before, a large outsourcing setup out of India for US companies. I remember this line all the American companies used to say: 'Do what you do the best and outsource the rest.' The thing is that the word 'outsource' was not outsourced to a country. It was just 'outsource.' The word outsource will get replaced by agents, by AI, by robots, and so on. People will keep doing the best stuff themselves. The question is: have we built resilient industries and capabilities that can survive? We have multiple issues to start with. Female per capita growth is not happening. Our per capita income is lagging because female participation in labor is not to the level the world is expecting us to have.

My guess would be sub 10% right now for banking, sub 20% for credit cards, and for AUM across wealth would be even similar small numbers. How do you expect the country to get richer with one gender working? It's never happened unless you find oil, which will magically make all of us rich, but it's unlikely to happen. Every country has grown by getting both genders working.