Daybreak - How a tiny AI startup is giving IT sales a human touch

Episode Date: October 5, 2025

Humantic AI is changing up IT services sales. Founded by serial AI entrepreneur Amarpreet Kalkat, the 24-person startup has built what it calls “buyer-first intelligence”—using AI to decode a client’s personality, communication style, and preferences from public data. Humantic wants to give sellers an instant human edge in billion-dollar deals. But challenges loom. Enterprise buyers are wary of bloated sales stacks, and Humantic will have to prove it’s more than just another disposable add-on in a sector already crowded with AI promises.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission. We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture,

how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing and extensive post-production. Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd.

To get an alert as soon as we release our first episode, please follow Intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. Imagine you're a senior salesperson at an IT service company. You're preparing a pitch for a major US client. And you have three options as you work on putting it together.

You can do it the way things have always been doing. done. You spend hours looking through LinkedIn profiles, YouTube or articles to understand the person you're meeting for the pitch. Or there's another newer way. Maybe not a stride and tested, but certainly faster. You could feed these links into Microsoft co-pilot and get a quick summary of what the client has been saying in public. And then we finally come to the third option. You could use Humantic AI. Within minutes, you get a one-page report on the client, how they like to be approached, whether they prefer small talk or straight numbers, even draft lines for a follower B-mail.

That is Humantic's niche. And right now, it's more important than ever to understand what's going on here because it's been quite a while since Generative AI started rewriting the sales playbook in IT services. Now, with Gen AI, outreach can be personalized at scale. Proposals can be drafted instantly and representatives coached in real time.

In other words, the IT services industry badly needs a boost. Growth crawled to 3% in FY25 as clients reallocated budgets to AI. There was a small rebound in early FI26 when Vipro booked nearly $3 billion in large deals, InfoSys made almost $4 billion and Tech Mahindra almost $800 million. But still, the competition between consulting giants is only intensifying. And this is where Humantic comes in. Founded in 2021 by Amar Prid Kalkat, a three-time AI entrepreneur, it calls itself a buyer-first intelligence company.

Its backers include Flipkart co-founder Benny Bansal, ex-Google VP Bradley Horowitz and Sharath Narayana from Sena-I. Its client list also includes big names like McKinsey, Pay Paul, AWS, Whipro and First Source. Now, the pitch is quite simple. Help sellers understand buyers better. The practice itself, on the other hand, is a little messier. The conflict is that while salespeople want more intelligence, buyers don't want to feel surveilled.

Which is why Humantic is quick to clarify. It doesn't touch private data. In a conversation with my colleague, reporter Abhiramiji, Amar Prid Kalkad said that they don't refer to Facebook or Instagram. But any other source like organisation pages, crunch pace, LinkedIn, Twitter, podcasts and YouTube videos are all fair game. In fact, Humantic has also reduced its dependence on LinkedIn after the crackdown on scraping tools like Apollo and Seameless.

But here's the catch. It's still a 24-person startup and it's trying to influence billion-dollar deals. The upside is clear. Even a tiny edge can swing a bitch. But the risk is also just as clear. Humanity could end up becoming just another disposable tool in an already bloated tech stack. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the camp. I'm your host, Rachel Virghees, and every day of the week, my co-host, Nita Sharma and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time.

Today is Monday, the 6th of October. For years, IT service deals were won on a simple promise. We will save you money. That's not the case anymore. Mohit Upadhiai of Tech Mahindra told us that earlier, IT vendors used to win by cutting costs. About 15 to 20% of savings was considered good enough. But with generative AI in the picture, efficiency and cost savings are no longer differentiators. They are minimum requirements.

Upadhii added that clients now expect much bigger efficiency gains. What used to be an expectation of a 10% gain has now increased to 40% and many clients assume that vendors are already AI-ready. That's why tools like Humantic stand out. And the market is already reflecting this shift in demand. Just this month, TCS announced a nearly $650 million deal with Scandinavian insurer drink. This was TCS's first mega contract of the fiscal year. The thing is, clients aren't writing checks for incremental savings or efficiency anymore.

They want large-scale change and distinctive outcomes. Kalkat told us that IT service companies have been quite stuck for about the last two years, and many of them have growth mandates that are quite aggressive. And now, sales conversations have shifted from how much money will this save to how will this transform our business. Basically, the need for differentiation is harder and more urgent. And so, the human factor, and by that I mean the ability to connect with a client beyond price or tech jargon is suddenly important again.

Now, here is why what Humantic offers matters. An Etsyel tech executive told us that Humantic is essentially a faster, automated version of what a pre-sales team does. While the sales professional does client-facing work, the pre-sales professional does a background research. Before, that research could take three or four hours. Now, well, an AI tool can do it in 20 minutes. And as we mentioned before, it does this by referring only to

to publicly available information. More on this in the next segment. Unlike other AI-driven prospecting tools, such as Salesforce's Einstein and HubSpot's breeze, Humantic pitches itself as decoding the buyer, not just finding them. Does his executive respond better to data or to stories? Should the first meeting be formal or casual over coffee?

We had Humantic build a profile for a reporter at the Ken, and it suggested not pushing too aggressively, because the subject was slow to act. The writer later described it as an uncannily accurate, if a somewhat exaggerated read of the subject in question. But the thing is, Humantic's proposition rests on a very weak distinction. The startup insists it never touches private data and relies only on public sources. Now, Kalkat also insists that the value isn't in the scraping that the AI does, but also the insight it provides.

He said that Humantic doesn't just turn scattered public breadcrumbs into something that feels actionable for a salesperson that's under pressure. In fact, he even said that if they had lost access to LinkedIn six months ago, it would have been a real business risk. But the bigger issue is actually ethical. Humantic doesn't use private data at all because it's basically unethical to do so. So, they add value where they can, with the insights. The company also makes a distinction between the size of a contract at sign-up and after a full rollout. The company claims that the initial average contract value is around $30,000.

But once a deployment scales across teams, that figure can rise above $100,000. In its early days, the startup did landmarki logos. PayPal signed up within weeks of its 2021 soft launch and McKinsey followed soon after. But those names aren't on the roster today. And that's by design. Basically, rather than chasing every Fortune 500 logo, Humantic claims to have narrowed its focus to companies with annual revenues under $3 to $4 billion. because this is where decisions move faster and deployments don't get caught up in bureaucracy.

And now, four years later, Humantic is doubling down on IT services firms. The companies where deal cycles stretch over months, the stakes run into billions and where walking into a meeting unprepared is unthinkable. Stay tuned. Okay, so measuring Humantics impact is kind of tricky. It says outcomes are rarely linear and no single tool can claim credit when a multi-million dollar deal closes. So, Humantic has been trying to build proxies. For instance, tracking whether personalized emails get opened. One US SaaS client, Domo, reported an almost 70% increase

in open rates and a nearly 90% reply rate after adopting the platform. Anakate Meanderkar offered a similar story. He is the chief marketing officer at First Source, a client of Humantic that offers business process management services. He told us that when First Source initially started using Humantic, it was first rolled out only to the company's CEO and the inside sales team, and they handle about 80% of all leads. Apparently, that pipeline has more than doubled. Could it all be because of Humantic? Mandakar said, maybe not.

Because of course, there are other factors. But he also felt that Humantic had a role to play. But not everyone is convinced. At CL Tech, for instance, uses Microsoft's co-pilot to pass client personalities instead of a specialized tool. Even First Source, despite its gains, has been cautious. Manderkerkul believes that companies that are constantly at the edge of technology will always find better and cheaper ways of doing things. But that leads to Techblood, which is basically when everyone starts using a tool for everything. In fact, FirstSource has a policy

where every time it starts using a new tool, it gets rid of two existing tool. This skepticism is exactly Humantics Challenge. For IT services companies, the test is whether they can adapt to an industry where costs no longer wins contracts and clients demand transformation, which is possibly why Humantic is already looking beyond its core product. In September, it plans to launch a tool designed to help sellers understand companies, not just individual buyers better. Early next year, it expects to roll out an AI-based sales coaching assistant. Both are attempts to broaden its role in the sales process and to ensure it isn't just another app

tucked into a busy tech stack. But the bigger question may not be whether Humantic can help salespeople close deals today. It's whether it can evolve fast enough to matter tomorrow in an industry where the rules of selling are being rewritten every six months. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform.

What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.