Daybreak - The AI-powered workplace is here — and it’s messier than you think

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

Last month, The Ken set out on a quest to understand how deep AI’s roots have grown in Indian companies. We asked India’s employees across industries and experience levels the extent to which they were using AI tools on a day to day and how it had changed workplace dynamics for them. Nearly 500 people took our survey. Nine out of 10 of them said they had begun using AI tools, even if it meant paying for them out of their own pocket. Once we got a sense of how employees were feeling about AI, we turned the lens on some of India’s biggest companies. What were they doing to help their employees keep up? Turns out that’s something the likes of Razorpay, Phonepe, Cars24, Homelane and Zerodha are actively working towards. Tune in. Want to attend The Ken's next event on health, fitness and wellness? Buy tickets here. Here's your chance to help us shape the conversation: https://theken.typeform.com/to/bZhqWl2g

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 alert, as soon as we release our first video. episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcast 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. Last month, the Ken set out on a quest to understand just how deep AI's roots have grown in Indian companies. So we asked India's employees across industries and experience levels, the extent to which they were using AI tools on a day to day. and how it had changed workplace dynamics for them. Nearly 500 people took our survey.

And nine out of 10 of them said they had already begun using AI tools, even if it meant paying for them out of their own pocket. Now, what's interesting is that about two-thirds of all the respondents weren't even in tech roles. When it comes to workplace dynamics, a majority of them reported some dramatic changes. Seniors were relying less on juniors for jobs. Juniors were finding a lot more autonomy because they, no longer had to run from pillar to post to get context or insights anymore. They said that that blurring of lines was at some level, efficient and empowering, of course,

but at the same time, a lot of them felt somewhat insecure and overwhelmed. Once we got a sense of how employees were feeling about AI, we then turned the lens on some of India's biggest companies. What were they doing to help their employees keep up? Turns out, that's something the likes of Razor Pay, Phone Pay, Cast 24, Home Lane and Ziroda are actively working towards. These companies are already investing heavily in AI infrastructure to improve their services to customers.

But they've also realized that it is important in the long run to invest on acquainting their workforce with AI tools. So they are taking enterprise licenses for generative AI tools, not just for their engineering team, but across departments. At Razor Pay in particular, founder CEO, Harshal Mathur, has been making it a point to ask every interviewee about their use of AI tools. He typically posts questions like, what's the one thing that's changed in your job since tools like chat GPT became available?

Or where do you see AI's biggest value add in your role? Or how can AI reshape your profession in the next three to five years and what excites you the most about it? Now, these are questions he's been asking every single applicant, irrespective of role or management level. And he's been asking them for the last couple months. But so far, just about one third of the candidates he interviews seem to have the familiarity he's looking for with the technology. So you see why it is integral for companies to step in and take the reins when it comes to their employees adopting AI.

You see, today, the 13,000 odd employees who work among these firms are in a petri dish of sorts. If businesses pay about $20 to $30 a month per employee for various AI tools, can they create the right medium to drive their adoption? Well, let's find out. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Kemp. I'm your host Rahil Filippos and I don't chase the new cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague, Sikta Sharma and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Wednesday, the 10th of June. Right now, companies are adopting somewhat of a gentle parenting approach to the whole AI adoption process.

So they aren't breathing down. their employees next about AI. Instead, the idea is to get the license, give them access, and then let them go explore and have fun. But the thing is, before you know it, things will get real. Because most of these companies do have targets in mind. For instance, phone pay expects all 7,000 of its employees to be able to automate for accuracy by the end of the year

and to have a faster turnaround time in 30 to 40% of the work that they do. Now, this isn't official yet. But according to a company executive, spoke to. The expectation is still real. Meanwhile at Home Lane, CEO Shrikant IR is expecting a 15 to 20% increase in efficiency across the organisation within a year. The 2,500 member company is about 10% AI driven now and the CEO expects that to go up manifold in that period. Meanwhile, over at Razor Pay, Matur is also expecting a 30% bump in output. Now here's the thing. To get there, all of these companies will

really have to up the ante. For instance, one would think it's good progress of a company like Razor Pay with nearly 3,000 employees could get 40% of its staff to use AI over the last 45 days. That's since the company made the AI license available organization-wide. But CEOs and founders are paranoid and impatient. Compared to seniors, the junior workforce is far ahead in their level of adoption according to Mathood. So the FinTech held a hackathon earlier in May for its senior workforce across functions to increase their AI familiarity. It's not like employees do want to pick up these skills. Our survey found that they, in fact, do.

Except there's a fair bit of uncertainty around how and to what end. Just about half of those surveyed were able to definitely say that they were expected to deliver better outcomes using AI. That said, the unexpected and unanticipated outcomes of letting non-tech staff find new ways of using AI have been pretty interesting. Just take Ashvath Sachin, a business analyst at Zerodha, for instance. Ashvath has quite the fan following now, especially within the company's accounting team, all because of his simple AI-enabled solution to a rather complex problem. Let me explain. You see, as a broken app, Zirrida manages thousands of fixed deposits across banks. Its

accounting team maintained an inventory of all FDs on spreadsheets. Now, that meant constantly having to monitor which FDs matured and which ones to break with a lease fine, almost every single day. Now, Sachin, who happens to be an engineering dropout, came up with a solution. Using Claude A.I.'s tools, he developed a standalone web application for fixed deposit management and reporting

that gave a cleaner visibility of the inventory. The app was an instant success, so much so that the company has now officially hosted it internally. Now, Sachin's interest in AI was sparked during and AI orientation program Zeroda hosted back in November 23. Now, the program was called Project Bicep, and the goal was to give its non-tech workforce a taste of the tech. Clearly, it paid off.

Similarly, even at RazorPays Hackathon for seniors, the company's legal head, Shivli Katayyan, built a Google plugin to automate the review of new contracts to see how it matches up the fintech's predefined acceptance standards. Essentially, in this whole process, Founders are increasingly finding that their employees are thinking about solutions for many of the problems they face at the workplace in very new and creative ways. AI, of course, offers a great starting point. But with these new skills comes a tremendous amount of pressure.

Stay tuned. Our survey found that most employees are dealing with new ground rules at their workplaces. For starters, most of them expect their workplaces to become quote unquote high performing very, very soon. And with that, they find the lines between roles, designations, hierarchies, all blurting. For instance, product managers are now discovering that they can do what engineers do. The same applies to engineers as well. But an interesting distinction that emerged out of the survey was that junior-level employees are far more open to using the stack and also use it a lot more frequently than those at senior

levels. For instance, an executive we spoke to at PhonePay found that the junior employees at the firm are placing a lot more requests to use new tools. Now, that's concerning. Because like Srikanth Ayyar pointed out when he spoke to us, your experience and knowledge is obsolete if the senior workforce doesn't adapt and relearn quickly. Now, the reality is inescapable.

Going forward, what companies save from hiring more will go towards building infrastructure. The early signs of that risk are already visible. As a survey respondent put it, everybody just seems to focus on solving problems using AI, rather than actually solving problems. Kailashnaad, the CTO of Zerodas, said whether or not you used AI to solve a problem

will soon become the measured in many organizations. But that could end up backfiring because you may end up having more tools than you can manage. Now, that makes employees nervous. They believe going forward, there will be very little leeway at workplaces. Employers will become far more anal about things like timelines. They worry about the constant demand

to be fast and tech savvy. After all, this is a new language over. HomeLanes, IR. puts it quite well. He says, the real MVP's that will emerge out of all of this will be those who can unlearn the fastest. 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 unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcast extras. Head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was posted by Rahil Filippos and edited by Rajiv Sien.