Agentic AI based Fed

What if the FOMC or the FRB was a bunch of AI agents?

It looks like a great candidate for AI. The goals and objectives of the federal reserve system are clearly laid out. The targets for monetary policy are also well established and agreed. The macroeconomic, fiscal and banking data which the fed analyses is, well, and after all, data. And AI can consume it real-time. All past research has been consumed by AI, with excellent remember and recall. Some of those near-superintelligent AI models US wants to keep for itself can be deployed here. In fact, it often seemed to me that Jay Powell was himself a superintelligent humanoid robot.

The only problem - the biggest one - would be 'independence', which is fundamental to the federal reserve system - in principle at least. While a totally human Fed has appointees pushing political agendas and personal idiosyncrasies / biases, and then there's an occasional law-suit on the Chairman, an agentic AI based system can be misled with false data. And who knows, agents may also have personalities and affiliations, depending on what went into their training. Which means for a well-intended agentic AI based Fed, there has to be a tightly controlled training mechanism, that ensures the agents are unbiased, transparent, goals-driven, meticulous, diligent and clean. But the interface with humans is where it'll all still fail, given humans will never let their control go, for both good and bad reasons. Good reasons - we can only trust humans to protect our best interests. Bad reasons - humans are divided at various levels - individual, communities based on religion, region, beliefs, experiences, economic status, affiliations, and so on; interests served vary, and not necessarily in any order or priority, and not generally good for most. What if you extend agentic AI to all governance so that Fed is not meddled directly by humans? One - AI can screw us more bigly and widely. Two - the interfaces with humans would still be there, albeit farther from the center of the agentic system, and humans at the interface can still manipulate AI to screw us. The mechanisms would be far too complex to comprehend and the outcomes far too unpredictable.

Seems humans anywhere are a problem after all. But then, who is AI for?

And...

Isn't AI 'human' too?

Fun question - What do you think an Agentic AI based Fed would have done with the policy rates yesterday?

How is human expression changing because of how LLMs express?

It's well recognized that LLMs have a certain writing style. Most of them follow common patterns like em dashes, 'a, b and c' structures, punch - then expand, 'it's x, rather than y', 'it's not p, it's q', and so on. But with so much content being written by LLMs, including that in research papers - where it's generally permitted to use AI for editing and improving readability, it's quite possible that the way humans write is also changing. With most of the content we consume being AI generated, the influence on our written expression is expected, and in my observation, starting to emerge. As evolved monkeys, most of our learning is through copying. Being quite intelligent, we are able to copy even complex patterns. The same intelligence allows us to adapt, improvise and customize - leading to both similarity and uniqueness in every aspect. (The previous line looks most definitely AI.)

I would expect the adjustment to be mutual, but I don't know whether AI is still learning from us in the way we do from it. But in future, we'll definitely have difficulty figuring out what's AI generated, because with time, NI would start looking like AI. (NI is natural intelligence. I guess I can (can I?) claim the term as the 'natural' counterpart to AI, which existed before AI.)

But the bigger concern is that, perhaps, we may not have any purely NI based writing in some distant future. We'll only be fixing drafts generated by AI based on what we tell them, just like most coders only tweak pre-written code. What we 'tell', and how we do, would be the only pure and natural expression from NI, although not polished to the eventual intended format. It's hard to imagine how that informal expression might change, but it certainly will.

There is still some way to go before we start talking to AI more than we talk to humans. That will have interesting ramifications on how we communicate, not only with AI, but also with other humans. (A close parallel, purely natural, is how American accent(s) came about, although nobody in the source countries of the OG immigrants in America spoke like that. Same goes for Australian accent.)

It's interesting how the various forms of human expression would evolve with AI playing an increasingly central role here on. I'll be watching this closely. And would love to hear what others are observing and experiencing.

IT services outsourcing - trapped in the cost play

IT services business started and evolved as a cost-reduction offering. First, offshoring offers a direct drop in costs to customers. Then greater productivity - doing more with less resources - offers greater cost savings with time. It's funny how most IT deal reviews by leaders hover around ON-OFF (onsite-offshore) ratio and YoY (year-on-year) productivity, while trying to hit an attractive price at an acceptable margin. Often, it's people with limited understanding of technology trying to buy and sell technology services.

These ratios, of course, are just high-level indicators of solution optimality, and benchmarks like 90-95% offshore headcount and 50-60% productivity-gains over 5 years are hard to push further. It's all in excel after all.

Seeking higher productivity has helped shape IT services with efficient processes, tools, and mechanisms, including automation and AI. But the pursuit is endless. Every new large deal, you are still asked - how will you bring your team to half its size in 5 years? There are no real, rather complete, answers. There's some experience, at times. There's automation. There are tools. There's AI. There's God. There's - 'we'll figure out when we get there'. Mostly, there's leap of faith compelled by fear: if we don't offer this, somebody else will, and the deal will be theirs; we have to take the risk... a calculated risk.

Peeling layers, you start looking for people mix - the pyramid. More the junior people, lower the cost - that's one lever you can pull. What about skill? - we'll train them - let's assume for now; and there's AI.

Once you've totally beaten this chain iteratively to its bare minimum cost configuration: # of people - ON-OFF ratio - Pyramid - Productivity - # of people - ON-OFF ratio - Pyramid - Productivity - ... You'd now turn to other costs - infrastructure, shifts, cabs, management, overheads, nickels, dimes, chillar!

For at least a decade now, IT service providers have recognized this need to get out of the cost play and move to value play. Mostly through talking, without really investing in genuine capabilities. So, outcomes have been only in pockets. The problem, I think, is in the nature of the buyer-supplier relationship - the relation is designed to be transactional, and both parties enter with short-term motivations.

And that probably explains why GCCs are emerging as a stronger value creation model.

The story around the picture...

Often when I look at a picture posted by someone, I can't stop myself from thinking how that moment came about, what happened before, what happened after, how that day must have looked like for people in the picture, how they interacted, what was going in each of the minds, what happened! They say 'a picture is worth a thousand words'. But the beauty of life is in what the picture doesn't convey but merely represents - all of which is in memories of those in the picture - each his/her own, fading slowly with time. And after long, the picture remains to serve only as the reminder that the moment truly happened.

Solution Modeling and Pricing Tools in IT Services Companies

I have been part of presales and solution architecting in various IT services firms. One common struggle and frustration in all these firms is with using tools (software, often web-based) for solution modeling and pricing. They keep trying, but just can't get them to work reliably.

The reason may be within the underlying data and the process. And it's complicated.

The sequence of steps to get to a price, in simple terms, is: resource-estimates → resource-loading → costing → pricing. In other words, there's a 'solution' to customer requirements - which is primarily the 'how', but also the 'who', the 'what', the 'when' and the 'where', which would determine the cost of doing it.

(1) Understanding the requirements, depth of solutioning and confidence in resource estimates is the foundation the commercials would be built on. This is also the first input, and the most common source of errors.

(2) The solution - including the estimates, staffing and the delivery model - have to be mapped into the modeling/pricing tool, coz the architect who built the solution is unlikely to be able to do it 'on' the tool; it's a technical and creative process.
On the surface it sounds like a simple porting of data. But this is the point where using the tool starts feeling like a waste of time, especially for large and complex deals. The transferring of data is pretty much manual, and each major or minor change in solution will need a repetition of the whole effort. A lot of tools have capabilities to read excel sheets, but those are rarely seamless, and still require manual effort to get to certain formats each time something changes.

(3) The next input tools require is access to an accurate, exhaustive, complete and well-maintained database of costs. Besides people, there are a whole host of delivery model considerations that determine a lot of the costs, most of which are very context specific. Most companies don't have such databases with all the characteristics listed above. They end up working with averages or ballparks - another source of errors.

(4) Solutioning and pricing are iterative, and may involve numerous rounds of back-and-forth adjustments, even manipulations, to make pricing attractive. Besides for the humungous manual effort it implies, there are things that don't add up, which are easier done in excel spreadsheets.

Errors add up in strange ways.

Conventional wisdom says processes and tools bring greater efficiency and reliable outcomes. But in the case of solution modeling and pricing, the tools seem to represent vicious circles companies don't know how to get out of, yet they are things they can't get rid of.

Companies that have the best handle on the four areas - (i) depth and confidence of solution, (ii) standardized solution modeling, (iii) robust cost database, and (iv) minimum solution meddling for better pricing - also have the most successful delivery, manage risks better, make healthier margins and have sustainable growth.

China to publish less in international scientific journals

Chinese scholars being urged to prioritize domestic journals as opposed to 'international' journals may open up some room. I wonder who'll take it. How wonderful it would be if the Indian context and Indian voice became so interesting to the international journals that they'd want more of it. Journals must reflect the choices of the audience. And audience for research requires not just a mindset, but an economic model where incentives from hyperinnovation are enormous, where institutions reward novelty, where perfection and aesthetics take precedence over fail-fast, and where capital is abundant. People in academia deliberate on the importance of having some top journals from India, with the highest reputation, standards and reach. But do we have the audience? Are they asking for it? Are they ready for it? We probably need the ecosystem first and the rest will follow.

China cools on overseas publication of scientific research

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 08 July 2026

Empathy, Emotional Intelligence - ‘show’ vs ‘have’

Past couple of decades, the discourse on personality, relationships and values has laid a lot of emphasis on empathy and emotional intelligence. While the underlying intent is goodness of heart, and the emphasis intends to condition humans to be good to each other and also to themselves, the outcomes we are marching towards are performative, rather than internalized. We are taught to ‘show’ empathy, not necessarily to ‘have’ empathy. We must ‘appear’ emotionally intelligent, not necessarily to ‘be’ emotionally intelligent. A key aspect to consider here is the vantage point, of course, i.e., the world sees what it sees about you — so “look” the part; and you know what you know about yourself — so “be” the part. The worldly material incentives are tied to performances. The internal incentives (which are?) are tied to being true to oneself. Through parallel discourses on personal branding, looks-maxing, and individualism, we are only validating performance as the means to worldly success, without offering any incentive to inculcate genuine human values. I wonder whether there’s truly a way to do the latter? And what kind of success would it offer? Why does it often take experience and maturity? What if we aren’t truly anything? What if we are all just performing — as best as we can and to the extent our abilities and impulses allow — to being whatever helps us get what we need, want, desire, crave or love?

Let's make some theoretical contributions today

Good morning. As I am sucking this 'heart' in, and starting my day, the thing I am thinking about is "Theory". Ability to theorize is what differentiates a scientist from a mathematician, a statistician, a data analyst or a consultant. While all of them draw 'conjectures' and rely on data to validate them, only a scientist 'hypothesizes', tests, and offers an explanation - a theory - one that works most of the time, preferably 99.9% of the time. Until it doesn't. Until someone, also a scientist, finds a nuance which demands an additional explanation, offers one, which becomes a 'theoretical contribution' - and then, with the padding, the theory claims to go back to 99.9% success rate.

Let me pour the 'heart' out and make some theoretical contributions today.

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 17 June 2026

From memorizing to now seeking the illusive originality

As I was making my daughter do her homework, I was reflecting on how our minds were trained as we grew up. Throughout primary school and even until the 10th standard, the predominant approach to 'studying' was to learn by-heart the questions & answers. One of my teachers often used the phrase "commit to memory, vomit on the paper". Exams were fundamentally memory tests. Writing as the textbook said was rewarded with highest marks, especially in subjects like social science, general science and languages. But in later education, especially in areas that involve academic writing, more so in research and publications, one is supposed to be extremely careful not to copy verbatim. Plagiarism is next to crime in academic ethics. Original writing carries value. But because we are trained to do everything by copying, we learn even original writing by copying, in a very ironic sense. Rather, we mimic - the style, the words and the broad structure - and fit in our thoughts. And now here's AI, and plagiarism doesn't matter anymore. Originality now has other dimensions, and we have opened all of them to adultery.

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 15 June 2026.

em dash—but only when you need it

The constant urge to post on social media, driven by wanting to be visible and relevant all the time, has become the defining characteristic of a certain stratum of people in our times. It offers a feeling of being watched, performing and contributing. And in the process—right from personalities on the top to aspirational life-coaches—people are throwing around garbage or in-process uncertain, unshaped fluff that the world would be better off not consuming until it has gained some genuine ground and has reliable informational value. It could be done for signalling. But a signal is effective only if the intended target is clear and the chosen medium of transmission aligns with the target with significant precision, so that there’s minimal unintended loss. For precise targeting, you can’t use a dispersed medium. And if a dispersed medium is used, then probably you don’t intend precision. You intend collective and widespread phenomena like mass-opinion, chaos, panic, doubt, uncertainty, or divided opinion amplification. This behaviour manifests everywhere: from our workplaces to WhatsApp groups to other social settings.

Anyhow, I must point out: the em dash above has come from my own keystrokes! I didn’t know of the existence of this character nor notice it as distinct until AI pushed it on the world relentlessly. And it took me some time to figure out how to type it. It is strangely satisfying that I can do what AI does.

The beauty of being one with your story

Many years ago, I tried to write a novel. It was ambitious of me, driven by the belief that “I can also do it” after reading Chetan Bhagat, yet without a good understanding of the effort it takes. I tried to weave a story, combining and building on a few bits and pieces of what I had written on my blog. Those pieces involved a fictional character called LaajVanti, and were casual, funny and relatable for readers with my kind of profile at the time. I tried to write the novel like we do a course assignment or corporate proposals - put together some nice content and write stuff connecting them all - stitch them together, ensure a flow, cook up a storyline and conclude like it conveys beauty.

In corporates we often start with a strawman when there is a boss to review, time to spare, and the broad structure is unambiguous. Writing fiction, however, is a creative process and cannot be forced to follow a set structure. It involves imagination that can suck you into itself, such that you coexist in various contexts with your characters - either being one of them or watching them, standing next to them. It consumes you so much that you literally live in many imaginary worlds for extended period of time, and this physical world just becomes a pathway to those. These other lives in other worlds bring strong emotions - curiosity, intrigue, anger, excitement, joy, melancholy, hope - in forms and depths you rarely experience in real life. Getting there, however, is not so spontaneous. It requires commitment, persistence and internal push to cross some boundaries. Until you cross those boundaries, it’s a struggle, a hustle, some trial-and-error, and mostly shooting in the dark to see sparks and patterns. It requires patience. Lots of patience. You let your mind wander. You let it dream. You’d often wake up without finishing a dream, especially when it was taking an interesting turn. You’d feel disappointed at the broken sleep and try to push yourself back into it, just so you could get to a conclusion in the dream. Sometimes when your sleep is shallow, you mix dreams with your own cooked up details (hallucinations?). And then, you can only sleep so much at a time - a limitation that frustrates you. And not all of it is about your story. But then you push harder, dream harder, free your mind, let loose your imagination, and then you don’t need sleep to be in peace, in dream or in any world you choose to be. You become one with your story.

I experienced traces of it, but I couldn’t cross those boundaries. I told myself that fiction isn’t my thing. I may have lied; I don’t know. I’ll try again.

It is. Is it?

I heard Yann LeCunn recently say, and I am paraphrasing, that for AI to be truly meaningful, it must have the ability to predict outcomes of its actions and adjust itself accordingly. Use of AI for reasoning - work with us to brainstorm, build on ideas - is one of the most meaningful uses of AI. However, often times, AI ends up becoming an echo chamber without us realizing it. It can make your noise sound like music. You may end up loving your voice, singing louder and generating more noise, until the audience tells you they can't bear it.

Working with AI to test and build ideas can often take you too far down wrong paths. Most of these LLMs, if not all, are very good at offering reinforcement to your thought process, adding layers of rationalization, generating confident and seemingly valid grounds for various elements of solution options that you piece together, and then shaping for you the artifacts that you feel proud for having created - and your LLM doesn’t mince words in making you feel so. And yet, if you started with some wrong premise or assumption that was central to the whole pursuit, and built everything on top of it, the process would only lead you farther away from any meaningful solution to the problem you set out to solve.

Posted on LinkedIn on 02 June 2026.

AI as a 'resource' for Research

Impact of AI on research is the most talked about topic in most academic circles and research conferences these days. In one such discussion during the India Strategy Conference (ISC2025) at Indian School of Business this year, I raised a concern that if most research gets 'powered' by AI - which is increasingly the case - the quality of research outcomes will be increasingly dependent on the kind and version of AI one has employed. As AI becomes a resource, ability to carry out high quality research becomes a question of access and affordability.

I was countered with an argument that AI is an equalizer. In one sense it is, as it allows one to try his/her hands at high quality research without the depth of skillset that research demanded earlier. But beyond the basic level, inequality starts taking shape because the resource is limited and controlled. Claude Haiku 4.5/Sonnet 4.6/Opus 4.7? ChatGPT Free/Go/Plus? Gemini Free/Plus/Pro/Ultra? We all know that the free ones are extremely limited in capability and reliability. Paid ones have variants offering different levels of capability depending on how much you pay. The pricing is equal worldwide, but the purchasing power isn't. So users are forced to settle, and work with whatever is the best they can get their hands on.

Research outcomes have always been constrained by access to resources. But now, with 'intelligence' as a resource, the race can get too exhausting for many - some running on sand, some even on water - while a few cruising on firm surfaces, breezing through in skates that don't even make a sound. The bodies may be equal, the race still isn't.

Posted on LinkedIn on 27 May 2026.

Claude and its usage limits

I appreciate the makers of Claude for being so thoughtful and responsible to have built ‘work-life balance’ into it. And neatly optimized it for the $20 subscription - it allows the right amount of usage that exhausts - not too soon, not too late - then making you wait to watch reels, until you can resume using intelligence - the artificial one.

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 25 May 2026.

Short-termism is Sticky - Moving from Principal-Agent to Principal-Principal Conflicts

Now this is the other side of the corporate short-termism debate that has gained little importance. If QoQ disclosures to shareholders is forcing companies to think short-term, moving to a less frequent disclosure can create information asymmetries that can harm retail investors / minority shareholders who rely only on public disclosures and media with wide reach. The measure intended to alleviate short-termism driven by principal-agent dynamics is probably going to amplify short-termism driven by principal-principal conflicts!

I recommend reading the full letter below from wallstreetbets community to SEC!

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 16 May 2026

I wonder...

I am sipping coffee at Starbucks, trying to work, and ended up 'wondering' - May be it's not AI that's making us useless... May be it's LinkedIn. It has conditioned a whole bunch of people to start 'wondering' after every little thing they do, or don't, or just go through, or don't... An hour of wondering per minute of activity - that might as well be wondering - then an hour trying to post on LinkedIn what we wondered, often by getting AI to write about it beautifully... Then a few hours checking likes and comments, wondering about those. We even wonder about wondering. Many are wondering - even worrying - whether they are wondering enough. People have started wondering together. There are even courses to help you do high quality wondering. A cursory scan of LinkedIn will tell you that we are certainly getting better at it. AI is playing a huge role in wondering lifecycle management (WLM). It's even executing some of the steps in the workflow. Can it do the whole of it? I wonder. Soon, perhaps. But we should make sure we are always wondering 10 times better than AI. A lot of us post our pics to go along with our wondering narrative. AI can't. But then it can generate a prettier human picture than any of our wondering faces - I wonder whether that would matter. I wonder whether hallucinating by AI qualifies as wondering of some sort. Or is it just a couple of steps behind wondering? Should we worry about it, I wonder. We have to outwonder AI, as wondering is all we got left. I wonder whether we can do it. We have to. It's our 'wonderful' world afterall! But then, I wonder...

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 12 May 2026

Is AI taking away the beauty from research?

Is AI taking away the beauty from research? My response on a group chat of fellow research scholars when this topic came up - “… we must understand what research truly is - a pursuit of reality, in bits and pieces at a time… tools se processing ya synthesis ko research maan lo to hamara stata ya R use karna also takes away the beauty of doing it on reams of paper… who among us has any clue of the math that went in to create some of the models we so liberally apply without the least bit of understanding… we’ve already gone past levels of beauty many beholders would be ashamed to see humans bypass”. The fear, I guess, is the complete redundancy of the myriad capabilities we develop as we learn to do ‘research’ within conventional and widely accepted frameworks, formats and methodologies. This pushes us to think beyond even with regard to those paradigms. Genuine research is constant search for novelty. We should be excited to be equipped with a capability that allows us to venture father and deeper, and unearth the true nature of reality.

Having said that, we can’t deny that research as a profession is going to get deeply and adversely affected, as most researchers will struggle to adapt and evolve with the emerging transformation.

While the top 1% are seeing new paths for themselves, to make it rewarding for the 99% to pursue research, we need shift of perspective and also shift of foundational capabilities. How should that be approached?

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 02 May 2026.

Too much too soon? Lessons from the Wind Industry

Wind turbines became popular and underwent rapid evolution during the 1990s and early 2000s, fueled by climate change concerns that motivated exploration into alternate, clean sources of energy. Governments recognized it and incentivized investments. The technology had existed before, but had potential for massive upgrade to achieve much higher efficiencies. Engineering and R&D in this area got a boost. Every couple of years companies started launching new turbines with higher MW ratings.

For a wind turbine to generate maximum energy, it has to be placed on a site with good wind conditions. In that, all places are not equal. For example, in India, there are places where wind profiles are strong, and others where they are weak. Also, wind turbines need to be in relatively uninhabited places because they generate sounds at frequencies that are not healthy. They need to be spaced apart adequately so that they don't interfere with each other. They are massive, and are installed in large numbers to develop what are called 'wind farms'. They must stay put and be operational for 20+ years for the investments to make sense.

Now you want to place your best machines in the best places. But the best machine is best only at a point in time. While the best place is always the best. And this is where the most logical approach is also a bit silly. The best places are taken up pretty early with machines that were best at that time. However, in an emerging technology-intensive industry that is getting a lot of attention, there's constant race to develop better machines. And each upgrade makes the earlier one seem like a toy. But the irony is that the toy got the better playground. Since the best wind sites are taken, the new, better machines have to settle for poor sites.

The industry tried to mitigate this in two ways. (1) Move offshore, to find great wind conditions - but offshore has its own challenges, (2) Develop turbines for poor wind conditions - which is like developing cars for poor roads as the highways are inaccessible.

As the industry matures, the turbines in great sites get old and up for replacement. And at that point, you can put your new ones in the best places again.

It's a wave, and there's little you can do to beat it, especially in a fiercely competitive market.

Now draw parallels and think about investments in AI based solutions. In a scramble to get onboard are companies investing too much too soon? Are companies creating legacy issues for themselves by jumping to adopt while the technology and its capabilities are evolving too fast? Is it FOMO or smart investing for efficiency and value? May be the truth lies in between.

Most AI startup ideas I came across a couple of years ago based on the shape of LLM's back then are obsolete now. It's probably how any new tech waves emerge and then gradually stabilize - short and quick early on, long and slow as they wane.

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 30 April 2026

Circle of Life

My father worked as a stenographer and typist in the Indian Railways, and he was exceptionally good at it. He doesn't type anymore, except on his mobile phone. Growing up, I saw firsthand how typing was supposed to be done - when it's directly on paper and 'backspace' is not an option - on a heavy contraption called the 'typewriter'. The act had the beauty of playing a musical instrument with all fingers playing their part, where the artist played with eyes closed and mind lost in rhythm and melody.

The other skill he had was writing in something called 'shorthand'. The bosses those days gave 'dictations', which the stenographer noted very quickly in this coded script, that was later converted to regular well typed documents in English. While typing is something everyone does now, albeit without regard to correctness of style or efficiency of it, shorthand definitely is a skill that's non-existent today, if not lost forever. In the late 90s, all organizations were on a rapid computerization spree. So a few years before his retirement, my father was forced to learn working with a computer - the Windows 95/98 desktops. Since his job was drafting documents, he pretty much always worked on MS Word - the software that was as reliable in its infancy as it is now for word processing. The typewriter was replaced by relatively sleek keyboards, still QWERTY, yet with soft buttons. He beat those keys like he was used to on his heavy typewriter. But it was a treat to watch him type - extremely fast, and without using 'backspace' once. He did that till his retirement in 2004. But it was clear as the new breed of computer-literate officers started taking over, that a lot of his work would be done by the bosses themselves. Gradually, everyone knew how to type on a computer. It was not a skill any more. Everyone just did, and did, and got used to it. Life has probably come full circle, as I watch mine and older generations adopting AI based tools, learning to write prompts, doing courses, and telling each other to learn or perish. 😊

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 28 April 2026.

A truly open mind stays open for life

One of the major challenges in developing a truly rational and coherent opinion about anything, that a significant majority of people shares, is that the contemporary sources push different kinds or different versions of information to each person. It's carefully filtered, increasingly customized, and artfully moulded such that it is most engaging, pleasing, entertaining, even enchanting to the person consuming it. In a recent podcast with Trevor Noah, Ian Bremmer mentioned about this as the major constraint to bringing about any ideological or political revolution that is truly constructive and has mass support, or that's intended to take out a corrupt system which uses its power to control information - both the nature and access of it.

While we generally tout diversity of opinions as a strength, when opinions are not rooted in critical and holistic analysis of topics or issues, they become biases. And when biases achieve a level of deep-rootedness through constant reinforcement, you just can't get people to agree on anything, in spite of the vast and deep level of passion that they have, and the conviction and apparent chain of logic, often quite persuasive, with which they all seem to argue.

In high-school math, before theorems - which are scientifically derived - we are taught axioms - which are to be accepted as true. Axioms form the foundations, and theorems are built on top of these axioms and other theorems. The information structures around common people are composed of highly distorted 'axioms', and opinions based on those are therefore biased, ill-informed and misleading - theorems based on false axioms provide an unreal view of the world. And such views differ person-to-person.

Critical thinking at foundational level would help mitigate formation of these baseline assumptions. A teacher must push minds back to question basic assumptions, before helping lay blocks to build more mature ideology. A truly open mind stays open for life. A mind trained to close itself tends to search for cozy rooms to shut itself inside. It's therefore of utmost importance that students are taught - encouraged - to observe the world with open mind, while being protected from biased information structures through inculcating critical thinking very early on.

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 27 April 2026.

"Humans in the Loop"

This snapshot from "The Diary of a CEO" podcast is symbolic of the humongous human effort being invested at training this giant machine called AI to do everything that humans do. People who are getting excited at this are seeing opportunities to help shift work to AI, and make money in the process. And most of the others feel threatened - if their work will be shifted to AI, how will they make money? And then there are these innocent workers in the pic, trying to earn their daily wage in the process, with cameras and sensors tied to their body to capture their movements and help robots learn how to go about... they are not thinking beyond, coz they never did, never had the luxury, never dared to, coz it doesn’t help anyway.

A version of "Humans in the Loop" indeed. Seen that movie?

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 18th April 2026.

Importance of ethics in research

Research, the way I understand, is to uncover the nature of reality. Irrespective of what I believe, what I think and what seems to be, research is finding a path to establish the true shape of reality - whether it’s the physical world, sociological phenomena or the metaphysical. It has to be an honest endeavour grounded in right and correct data, robust analysis and transparent presentation of results. It needs humility to acknowledge its limitations - known and unknown. Our understanding and explanations of the nature of reality - the theories - help us make sense of this world, yet can never claim to have fully solved the puzzle. But to get closer and closer to developing an understanding we build on prior research and add incremental blocks to construct better explanations. It’s therefore the responsibility of each and every researcher to be uncompromising in his/her data, approach, results and interpretation - so that future research finds a stronger base to build on and past studies get the honour and respect they deserve.

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 24 March 2026

How to forge better leaders?

Managers are expected to be almost perfect - clear communicators, good with people, sharp with data, and composed in how they present themselves. There is a visible checklist, and they are constantly measured against it. If they fall short, it shows quickly.

Leaders, on the other hand, seem to operate under a different lens. They can be unconventional, intense, sometimes even a bit irrational, and yet, this is often read as vision or conviction rather than a flaw. Part of this difference comes from where expectations sit. Managers are expected by others to meet a standard. Leaders, in many ways, shape the standard themselves, and the rest of us adjust to it.

This difference becomes sharper when you step outside firms and think about countries. In firms, you can choose, or at least attempt to choose, the leader you want to work with by moving to another firm. But you rarely get to choose the leader directly. In a country, you live with the leader, whatever the process that brought them there. In a democracy, sometimes the leader reflects your choice, but often they don’t. You don’t really opt out - you adapt, engage, or endure.

Which makes you wonder what exactly we are preparing people for. Much of management education seems designed to produce well-rounded, reliable managers - people who meet defined expectations. But leadership doesn’t quite emerge from checklists. It comes with ambiguity, intensity, and a willingness to push beyond what is already defined.

Can management education add a stronger ingredient of true leadership into its recipe, so that the ability to handle ambiguity and difficult situations is matched by equally strong wisdom, analytical depth, and grounded judgment? So that we see fewer leaders driven by impulse, and more who combine conviction with clarity. Work-ex seems to be a bad teacher when it comes to leadership.

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 26 March 2026

AIs and opinions

We expect that opinions based on data and facts would be reliable, although not indisputable. Since these are still "opinions" they are bound to contain giver bias that would spring from intuition, experience, judgement or quirks. It's human, and we understand the mechanism.

When it comes to AI, though, it gets troubling when we get opposite opinions from different tools. Being "tools" and driven by "computing", we are inclined to trust what they say, not as "opinions" but as some version or degree of "truth". But what if after consuming all the data, ChatGPT suggests, even encourages, that you do something, while Claude tells you that it's stupid, even suicidal, and you shouldn't do that ever. The data is the same. Are the tools acquiring "personality"? They are expected to, given the effort to mimic human faculties. But with humans, we have a way of figuring out. With AI, we have a totally different kind of quagmire to deal with that's neither unique, nor consistent, nor revealing in the way humans are. And in the background, it's being built, taught, designed, tweaked and tinkered - all by humans. And worst of all, it's not allowed to say "NO".

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 16 Mar 2026

Problem definition - Attention span or too many options?

We keep hearing that attention spans of people have come down, especially the younger folks can’t seem to focus on any one thing for long. It’s usually blamed on addiction to short sized content like tweets, reels, shorts and bites. In his recent podcast, Trevor Noah had a different perspective on this. He said it’s not the attention span that has come down. It’s actually the availability of many alternatives at any moment that are competing for our mental resources, and the availability and access to choices makes us want to switch when something seems not so great. Our tolerance for anything not so captivating at any moment has become low because of infinite range of alternatives we can easily divert our minds to. Something truly mesmerising can still tie us down for a long time, but such things would need us to be in an isolated setting so that we don’t get distracted with other equally good or better options, unless the thing is really unique, exceptional, out of the world and without a close and easily accessible match.

The framing of the problem determines what is seen as the root cause and then how you go about solving it.

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 15 Mar 2026

Strategic thinking has many layers

Glorification of fail-fast and iterative approaches in business have misled many leaders into believing it applies in every context. Ability to adapt is subject to prior conditioning that must have involved failure and calibration. A true leader has to be confused on where he/she stands, yet mask the confusion with sincerity of effort. This is at the root of a genuine leader's chosen strategy.

Strategy can, and has to, emerge, but it's important to have a sense of 'by how much'. One can't endlessly trust 'learn as we go'. Most projects in the world, especially those with the highest stakes, are waterfall, rather than agile. The real agility, in fact, is required in the leader's mind - yet only to a certain degree.

Most leaders fit their favorite approaches in every context. And to back them there's always some leadership gyaan and a school of thought. However, competing schools of thought exist for a reason - not every approach applies everywhere and every time. Like a chef, a leader must know his/her recipe well - the ingredients, their proportion and the process - based on who's eating. Some times it needs careful balance, even variants, based on different tastes and preferences. But unlike with a chef, a leader must also understand that the volume of the dish changes the recipe as well.

One can't afford to experiment if the stakes are too high. Yet a leader must choose. How? The system typically offers 2 options:

Trust his/her gut? - that's a function of conditioning and may be corrupt.

Take calculated risk? - follow the process, decide action plan, identify risks and have a mitigation strategy.

The former is noisy, has a casino-like charm and has high rate of failure. The latter, done repeatedly, leads to stronger and more sustainable outcomes.

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 12 Mar 2026

We are all Spartacus!

I recently finished watching Spartacus on Netflix. It's a truly inspiring and eye-opening saga involving love, honour, respect, pride, revenge and death. The context, at the core, is master-slave relationship. That slavery was practiced to such an abominable level was difficult to believe initially as I started watching. But gradually I could relate more and more to it. I began to see that while we moved past the raw nature of it, we embraced the core tenets into how we conduct our economics in this world.

I realized my usage of the word "we" squarely implies that I'm putting myself on the master side. 'We' practiced slavery. 'We' put an end to it. 'We' embraced all as equal. 'They' are human too! It's funny - I speak the language of the master, yet by feelings I resonate with the slaves. Ways of the world...

I learnt from Spartacus that there is honour and pride ascribed to being a gladiator, which is meant to offer a semblance of meaning to their assigned purpose - of fighting to survive in the arena, while spectators get entertained by the sight of blood and the act of killing. It masks the sheer stupidity of what they are made to do while their masters - the domini - seek power and make money - coin - at their expense.

Slaves are branded with marks on their bodies - like "B" for those belonging to the House of Batiatus - a ludus for training gladiators. They are supposed to feel proud about it, as the house looks after them, nurtures them with food and place to stay, trains them, and gives them opportunities to fight, earn fame and recognition for their valour. The best fighters get rewarded with titles - the undefeated Gaul, the bringer of rain, and so on. If the dominus is generous enough, he may reward a gladiator with freedom. But such a freedom is fragile and can be taken away at any moment. Such freedom is still better than trying to break free from the master, coz then the gladiator deserves to be punished by being killed, brutally, in front of all the other slaves, so that nobody else dares to even bear the thought of escaping.

And yet, craving for freedom is deep in all humans. So are emotions - love, pain, hate and revenge - especially in that order, they can make any human take on the mightiest.

Gladiators are seen to exemplify true human fighting spirit involving exceptional courage, endurance, fearlessness in front of near-certain death, along with hope, passion and brotherhood - ingrained by conditioning and shared pain. Yet it's an irony that this spirit is evoked under hopeless enslavement leading only to brutal death in a constant cycle of kill-or-get-killed - games that are recreation for most, adrenaline-rush for some, and patriotism for a few. The free masters claim all the comforts yet commit to no such values, while keeping slaves tied down by duty, honour, hope and hopelessness... and God! It's all God's will, isn't it?

Times changed. Power and access to resources no longer necessitate their seekers to physically enslave people. Control changed from physical to mental. The chain of control doesn't have an ultimate top or bottom here. It's a chain that's endless on either side. It's not circular, but it does have various loops. Ways changed. Sight of blood became less exciting (for most but not all, it appears now). Everyone lives, mostly. Yet, on different levels still, aren't we all playing Spartacus?

Strategy must be understood, respected, shared and imbibed across the organization

Aspirin, to be effective, needs to first dissolve in water. So does Strategy. You are unlikely to achieve your visions by throwing plans and roadmaps at your workforce. Strategy has to be understood, respected, shared and imbibed across for it to truly drive organizations. Under the pressure and in the busyness of delivering short-term outcomes, leaders often fail to recognize that they are not truly leading, but are just filling positions that satisfice. Employee engagement has become more about making employees feel “happy”, while making them “motivated” and “proud to be part” has taken a back seat. In fact, if you “ask” these employees, they’ll “tell” you. But most leaders don’t care enough. Without adequate importance given to strategic alignment within, organizations just fool themselves and their shareholders with vision statements and fancy roadmaps never to be walked upon.

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 14th January 2026

Cycling in 2025 was about 3650

 Oh, the joy of hitting seemingly arbitrary targets! An average of 10 km of cycling a day meant 3650 km a year, which seemed like a nice goal with a good stretch, considering two successive years of 3Ks earlier. Commitment breeds consistency, both essential to keep you on track - you outperform vis-à-vis your goals sometimes, and need to push harder to cover deficits more often.

2025 was eventful with lots of travel, learning, and unprecedented experiences. And the rains took their own sweet time to retreat. With everything going on, I had a constant tug-of-war with my daily and monthly milestones, but glad I eventually pulled it off, and then did some more!

Thanks Shruti Rao for gifting me this beautiful bike 4 years back. Each year, cycling teaches me a lot about staying committed and being consistent. Hope 2026 brings more of it, along with all the excitement the world is ushering in!

Happy New Year.

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 1st Jan 2025