Hey, good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for having us, and thank you Vikram and Harshil for doing this. I'm very excited to have this conversation. Over the next 20 minutes, I wanted to share with the audience why I believe Razorpay and Cars24 are two of the most AI-built companies in India. So a bunch of questions in that direction, right? Maybe to kick things off, you know, being AI-built, of course, starts at the top with leaders like you all. But how do you diffuse this through the organization? How do you make sure everyone else is as excited about this technology shift as you are? Harshil, if you can maybe start us off.
Yeah, sure. I think, as you rightly said, right, I think the first thing it starts with the founder itself, right? Like, I mean, you can read all about AI, unless you've tried it yourself, unless you're trying the newest model yourself, like it's you're preaching something that you have no idea about. And what I've seen is that like either you're overestimating it, you suddenly start saying, "Hey, everything can be done with AI. And why are you spending your time on this?" Or you underestimate it, "Hey, people are talking about it, but I don't care about it." The only way to really know the strength and the boundaries is to try it yourself. So the first step was to, I think I spent a lot of time on my weekends when the new, the Opus model came out in December, just trying my hand at like what are these models capable of and just to get a strength of it. The next thing was to encourage our leaders to do that, so that my leaders knew what is the power of AI now, what these latest models can do, whether it's voice models, text models, and so on. And only then you can start diffusing it to the broader org.
So I think one of the, a lot of things that we had to do in that direction, for example, we used to have hackathons. Almost every tech company has hackathons where your engineers build something, then your leaders sit and judge what they built. We flipped it around and started doing leadership hackathons where leaderships build something, every person builds something, and the actual on-ground engineers sit and judge how well the leaders have done. And I think that's one of the ways to demonstrate to the company that hey, now we are all trying hands-on on what new things are coming out, but also to ensure that the leaders understand the power of these models. And then we had to start changing everything from the company. From, I think the first thing that we had to change was how do we manage our talent. So how do we hire, retain, and grow our talent? AI became a significant component of that. A lot of top-down conversations and messaging around AI had to evolve to a point where people could see that hey, if you're not really using AI in your day-to-day work, you're not really building your career at Cars24 anymore. I think a lot of that had to go, and it is a combination of things, but the core idea was that it is such a fundamental generational shift that unless everyone in the org is really understanding and spending their time learning and adopting the new ways of working, it's not going to happen on the side. Like I gave examples of computing. A lot of organizations started hiring a digital team when computing came in, and they did, these are three, four people who are responsible for making our company digital, and that never worked. Same applies to AI. You can't have a team of five people and say, hey, these are the people who are going to make your company AI-built. It had to start from the top. It had to flow down to the entire org. It's still a work in progress, but a lot of these things have helped change the way the company operates.
Makes sense. Vikram, maybe switching over to you. Cars24 post-AI looks very different as compared to Cars24 pre-AI. For example, I know that you all no longer have titles in the company. Everyone is a builder. So maybe just talk us through what does Cars24 look like today? How are you all operating? What do those changes mean for you all as an organization?
Yeah, so just picking up from what he mentioned, I think around January, February, March this year, it was very clear that this is magical and it has reached the capabilities that are, you know, just could be like literally applied to actual use cases in a big way. And as I was figuring out how do we do the diffusion of AI in Cars24, I felt I think one of the very important things is for all of us to become AI-native. For example, we don't, you know, we don't hire people, no one hires people who don't know how to type today. It's granted, right? But that was not the case maybe 30 years ago. I remember my mother had done a typing course. So clearly not everyone knew how to type. So I believe we are at a similar time now where everyone needs to be AI-native. And one of the ways to do that in my mind is to just disrupt the way any organization works today, including Cars24, because the old ways of working are not applicable with AI-led, because now we don't need to delegate work. I don't need a chief of staff or a founder's office to tell me on what things to do. Most of the things my agents can answer for me. So why do I need to delegate? Like one of the questions I ask all the time is, what am I doing on my computer that my agent can't do? So if you put those two together, that the number of people that I really need to work with reduces in terms of delegating to each other, but it really becomes more like a football team that, you know, we are all passing the ball around to each other, but you're not really reporting into each other. So we had some of the thoughts on that line, and we decided to just get rid of all titles. So now at Cars24 there are no CXOs, there are no vice presidents, there are no managers. It's all builders. I was announced here as founder and group CEO, but, you know, I like to just call myself a builder like the rest of my teammates.
But Vikram, maybe just double-click on that. You all have hundreds of people. You all had this hierarchy before that. One day you walked in, you said everyone is a builder. How does work get done today at Cars24?
Everyone is expected to build their agents for the day-to-day work that they are doing and move on to do more high-value-add work. So regardless of what you do, what problem you're solving, the problem you are solving even in finance or on the HR side or on marketing or even in administration work, you need to be agentic. Like if you have not used Codex or Claude Code and have not built some agents, we don't hire. So for us, it's literally equivalent to like hiring somebody who knows how to type, use a typewriter, how to use a keyboard. And we have been trying to diffuse that mentality, and I thought that I had to get rid of designations to just diffuse this faster because I wanted to get rid of this delegation mindset that comes with hierarchies.
Thank you. Harshil, maybe, you know, moving over to you and switching gears, right? You have a front-row seat to everything commerce in the country and really the world more broadly, right? You've often said that, you know, where the puck is going is towards agentic commerce. Customers will be able to speak to their agent in their own language, understand what they're buying, and potentially even buy using their voice. Like, what has to be true for that world to exist, and why is that world exciting?
Yes, see, first of all, I will say that that is the world in which India, most of India today lives. So if you look at like today, the amount, the number of people who use UPI daily is about 600 million. But the number of people who do e-commerce regularly in India is less than 50 million. The rest of the population, it's not that they're not buying stuff, but they're buying stuff mostly offline because most of their commerce is voice-led. They want to meet somebody, they want to ask what they want to buy, and then complete a transaction. Like, for example, like insurance is in the news a lot right now, but if you look at it, 90% plus of insurance in India is purchased through offline brokers. There are online platforms available, you can find insurance, you can search, but you don't want to buy online because you want to talk to somebody in your own local language and ask 20 questions and then want to buy the insurance. All of that information is available online, but you don't want to spend your time reading through that information. And I think that is the big delta that voice-led commerce can bridge. That Indian who's still transacting and doing commerce in an offline store, in an offline interface, is primarily because he wants to speak in his own local language and he completes a transaction. And I think that is the delta you can bridge with voice commerce and agent-led commerce. So a lot of countries in the world are trying agent-led commerce, but I think India will change it and lead it, lead it far stronger than the world. And we saw that in mobile payments. Every other country tried mobile payments, but India took the lead because most Indians were sitting on smartphones, they had never used a credit card before. I think same applies to commerce, that most Indians already do commerce mostly by voice. And when you bring that interface into agents, you'll be able to change it significantly. Today on Razorpay, we see 70-75% of consumers who transact regularly daily on Razorpay don't use English as their first language. And yeah, we can build translation features on checkout, we can do all of that, but like a large majority of India, languages in India don't even have a script. So how do you build an interface in the traditional digital world for languages that don't have a script? The only way is to do it by voice. So I believe voice-led commerce is going to shift that journey from 50 million e-commerce users to the 600 million UPI users. I think that bridge is where voice commerce is going to play a very significant role.
Vikram, you know, coming to you, maybe this is a discussion we were having even when we were outside right now. You know, post-AI, the way you've started thinking about your company and thinking about company building, and really, you know, what ambitious companies mean to you, has changed. Maybe just talk the group through that. Like, what has AI really unlocked for you? How are you thinking about building your company? Where do things like voice kind of play a role in growing something like Cars24 today? And maybe just give some examples as well.
Yeah. So around February, March, when I started playing with Claude Code myself and started building my own agents, probably built like 40 of those. Right from the ones doing my personal work. For example, if there is a WhatsApp from somebody coming to my house or a candidate I'm meeting, something's on my calendar, then my gate passcode will be sent immediately. To triaging customer grievances automatically, whether this is a repeat grievance, is already somebody handling it, who should I send this to, etc., which I was earlier doing manually, reading those emails. Giving me insights on how the last week of business performance was. So, you know, across a lot of things. Basically, I asked myself, what do I come and do in office every day that my agents can do for me? And as it turns out, they could do a lot, right? And I feel that almost half, like my productivity is up by at least 2x. So if I believe that my productivity is up 2x, and many of the AI-native builders at Cars24 also believe that, then the hard question to ask is, how does it actually show up in your performance? Because if your performance is truly 2x, and if that is true for everyone that works at Cars24, then why can't two years of goals be achieved in one year? And why can't one year of goals be achieved in six months? That, for me, is a real test that we have truly applied AI well. And I believe that will happen. And if that happens, that you could actually do two years or even several years of work in one year, I think it's mind-blowing because it gives you permission to be audacious. Like, why can't you build several more businesses? Why can't you, you know, a lot of us talk about focus is so important and just do one thing and do deep, but if your agents are running your org, then, you know, another business that you intended to start and said that, you know, I'll do this maybe in a couple of years from now, why can't that start now? So I believe that we can do 10 years of work in one year. That's the steady state or end state that I want to get there personally, and that is what I'm excited about building in Agent Tickog.
