Is AI cutting your costs or bringing in more revenue?

Remember when everyone thought the internet would make travel agents obsolete? Well, it did... sort of. But it also created entirely new industries like online travel booking platforms. The AI revolution promises a similar upheaval, but on steroids. 

Let's cut through the noise and look at what's really happening. Yes, AI is replacing jobs - and at a pace that's making even the most optimistic futurists do a double-take. Recently, an AI version of legendary sports announcer Al Michaels was set to create 7 million customized recaps of the Paris Olympics. That's a lot of human voice-over artists potentially out of work.

Here's where it gets interesting. While jobs are being displaced, they're also being created and transformed at an unprecedented rate. The question isn't whether AI will eliminate jobs - it will. The real questions are: How quickly is this transition happening? What new jobs will emerge? And most importantly for us as founders, how do we navigate this shifting landscape?

Naval Ravikant, in a 2019 podcast, argued that automation frees people up for new creative work. He's right, but he underestimated the speed of change. We're not just talking about the Industrial .Revolution's decades-long transition anymore. We're seeing entire skill sets become obsolete within years, sometimes months.

Consider this: ChatGPT has already made certain types of copywriting, basic coding, and customer service roles significantly less labor-intensive. But it's also created a surge in demand for prompt engineers, AI ethics specialists, and machine learning ops professionals. The job market isn't dying - it's metamorphosing.

For us in India, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. Our IT services industry, long a cornerstone of our economy, is particularly vulnerable to AI disruption. But we're also uniquely positioned to become leaders in AI development and implementation.

Here's the kicker though - and this is where it gets tricky for founders and business owners. The economics of AI adoption aren't as straightforward as they might seem. Yes, AI can dramatically increase productivity. However, AI investments need to generate massive revenues to justify the underlying capital expenditures without causing net job obsolescence. If we're not creating significant new value with AI - not just cutting costs - we risk economic upheaval. It's a delicate balance between innovation and social stability.

So, what does this mean for you, building your startup in Bangalore, Mumbai, or Delhi? It means we need to be thinking not just about how AI can make our existing processes more efficient, but how it can help us create entirely new value propositions.

Instead of asking "How can AI help me cut costs?", ask "How can AI help me solve problems that were previously unsolvable?" That's where the real opportunity lies.