How To 10x Your Value In The Ai Era Kunal Shah

TITLE: How to 10x Your Value in the A.I. Era | ft. Kunal Shah CHANNEL: Thrive by Groww DATE: 2026-06-23 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Thank you everybody for uh coming today. the markets don’t really it didn’t give me the confidence that I’m going to see so many people here but um we have with us Kunal Sha and we discussing wealth creation in the age of AI who wins and who doesn’t um just a little brief you know I I’ve always felt that Kunal is somebody who has very sharp understanding and takes on uh mostly everything that concerns any of us. So, super looking forward to this chat. Punal, I want to just start, you know, there I’m assuming most of the people here are already in the workforce or are prepping to be our mid-career professionals. I think this is a super relevant topic, right? And it sort of just ties back to the entire discussion on jobs and AI eventually. your jobs you know take you to creating wealth. So I want to jump right in ask you where are you at when it comes to jobs and AI? I mean there are two schools of thought. One which says it’s sort of uh you know this entire AI apocalypse is all fantasy and then we see what we are seeing with all of these big companies cutting jobs. So address the elephant in the room. Where are you at?

Yeah. Uh thank you so much. Uh first of all, how many of you use uh any of the apps like chat GPT or Gemini every day? Awesome. And how many of you have uh built one agent of your own so far? Okay, that’s good. Uh how many of you are concerned that you’re going to lose your job to AI? Okay, got it. Not not too many, you know. Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. Um, how many of you think that your colleagues are going to lose their job to AI? Awesome. Awesome. Uh, I think this is a better uh understanding of what’s really happening. So, first of all, uh, let’s break down what is really happening. Uh, uh, I mean, I’m old enough to tell you that I’ve lived a time where internet was not there in most of the workplaces or computers were not there. And what are you saying? You can’t be. Yeah. Yeah. I’m I’m I’m turning 47 in a few weeks. So I No, we we’ve I mean I’m a few years younger but I mean come on. Yeah. When when I went to my first job there were no computers. We had Gmail all the while. Kunal. No, not really. You’ll be surprised how long Gmail has been. Then you’re much older anyway. So the thing is that if we are looking at that time uh internet made information accessible in the air, right? Like now you could just search anything and get anything. AI has made intelligence accessible in the air, right? And this is a very hard to understand concept because intelligence was a unique trait that we attributed to humans as species and now you can just plug it up in the air and just suck it in and and you can actually accelerate materially. The second thing is that we forget that the largest employer of the world is actually inefficiency. It’s and and what is happening is that the at the pace inefficiency is going away right the current jobs are getting displaced or changed materially right now for example uh a lot of people worry about job layoffs I think the thing we have to worry about is per capita income not growing right because there are enough people in India who are still doing liftman job and ATM guard job and they all have jobs right there are there are there are ricksha drivers who are are currently operating without maps and still on the street they make less money than the people who have apps on the phone but they exist. The thing is that the income delta between people who use technology and use AI and versus people who don’t use AI is going to be wide. The the the world has interesting ways to kind of keep people employed. But the the real question we have to worry about is the per capita income growth. Uh now coming to other topics is that a lot of us are waiting for our companies to teach us AI or some workshops to teach us AI or show up at this event and hopefully learn something about things. The truth is everything is up there. If you are really keen to learn, you will figure out everything on your own. And I think the problem is there is a huge shortage of self motivation, self- discipline to get things done because now every single thing is transparently available. You can build anything, you can create anything, you can research anything. The question is how many people are actually using anything of these tools for better stuff. For example, a bulk of people are still using AI for frivolous use cases and and not for what it is truly capable of. It’s like what do you mean frivolous use cases? Well, I don’t know. We are just still editing pictures and videos and and uh uh um I don’t know talking to Chad GPT like a friend and and uh getting rid of our real friends. Uh uh the thing is that this is real. How many of you talk to Chad GPT as a friend? Yeah. All righty. Uh how many of you have friends who have talking to Chad GPD as a friend? Yeah. Already quite a lot. Many of you are going to be shy to talk about it, but it’s quite a big phenomena. How many have done astrology on Chad GPD? Okay, good. How many of you have done therapy on Chad GPD? Okay, good. Uh so are you saying that that’s not a great use case and people should not be using uh so first of all if we’re talking about wealth the most valuable wealth you have is time and what you do with time becomes even more important than it was before what I worry about is that I don’t know if you know this you must be tracking this data India is now at 35GB per capita per GB sorry 35GB usage per capita per month right now in India. Right. That’s much more than any other country in the world. Right. And 35GB usage requires a lot of time to be wasted. Correct. Right. Uh uh uh short videos and time pass and all of that stuff. The thing is that the uh no matter who we are, right? Elon Musk, Sam Kunal, everybody has only 24 hours. What we do with that time is becoming even more important for wealth to happen, right? And I think it has become extremely easy to also waste time in the world we live in right now. We have the same device that can make us super intelligent or super dumb very very fast within within weeks you can actually see yourself go in opposite directions. So my worry right now is productivity as a concept by the way the word efficiency and productivity does not exist in most Indian languages that vocabulary is not in our core DNA. We don’t value time as much and I think that is what’s that literally like there is no word yeah there is no word for efficiency and productivity in in any Indian language. Wow. Yeah. Most of you can chat GPD and find the answer but you’ll find that is actually surrogate words not actual word for it because productivity efficiency words came from indust industrial revolution where time became valuable and we are still to realize that uh for example most jobs in western world are hourly jobs uh we have never been paid an hourly basis so we are brain doesn’t work in hourly mode so what does all of this mean uh kunal when you know you look at the world right now and I mean we are watching it very closely uh people in the tech world are super clued in. My observation is that it’s literally 1% of the population which is really aware about how stark you know the the chasm is between what we know and 99% people across the world are aware in terms of what AI is going to do to their jobs and wealth creation was obviously a consequence of that. How do we fix this? And I know you and I were chatting about this and you said when has it ever been an equal world in terms of you know wealth etc. But this is really stuck and it’s in your face like you know there is this one constituency which is in Silicon Valley just like how the gold rush happened in California and they are so aware they are the ones who are uh you know beneficiaries of everything that’s happening around AI and then there is rest of the world how do we keep up and sort of even get to partake in that wealth creation which is definitely happening and will happen. Yeah. Uh I I would say China is not too far away. Uh uh and I think uh the gap is getting wider and wider in terms of just the sheer awareness. Uh uh almost it’s become hard to even keep up on a weekly basis what’s happening to the world. Uh and I think the gap is quite wide. In fact, when I meet people socially like what they talk about AI seems so ancient because it was something from last year and and and last year feels like an ancient time now, right? Uh so I think uh first is uh everything comes from intrinsic motivation right uh I I like I said do we feel that paranoia I I think India has a very unique tendency when it comes to these situations right if you see remember co we had only two modes apathy and panic there was nothing in the middle right we didn’t give a damn and then we panicked like crazy right I think I feel we are going to go through the same phase with AI right now we are in a phase of apathy because it doesn’t seem to impacting us. We we seem to be hearing that this is happening in some other markets here and there. But I think as soon as it gets started getting close and and there are some second third order effect of that for example let’s say let’s let’s take an example of a bank. Banks today or financial services form 30 to 40% of India’s market cap give or take right in a bank uh a lot of stability comes from lending and from lending it comes from IT BO jobs would form 30 to 40% of bank’s book right now even if 10 to 15 to 20% jobs get impacted the most safest part of the book starts getting impacted which means the bank’s book starts getting negatively impacted which means 30 40% of India’s market cap I don’t think anyone’s talking about that. Yeah. But the thing is that we don’t think in we don’t discuss second order effects, right? We we we tend to just kind of stay at a surface level and and and our curiosity ends at I don’t know maybe reading something quickly on a tweet and and and the depth of sinking of second order effect is missing. So let’s say something like India, right? A lot of the jobs that were outsourced to India are actually significantly more likely to get impacted versus the jobs that were not outsourced to India, right? Because their complexities were different and therefore you choose to delegate work and and let talk like talk about journalism right now, right? There are kind of things that now you can do let’s say what you would assign a junior person to do now can be done through a chat GBT or an open AAI or or any of the tools right now and therefore the gap is getting wider. So for example to be eligible to be for a job like the college graduates is going to have even bigger struggle than they did before and and you’ll wonder that how many years you have to keep studying to keep being eligible for a job because now uh uh there are these tools that can do things that are basic task oriented and that’s where the judgment comes in right so but by design it’s super scary right I mean that entrylevel trap um how do you fix that because what you’re saying is what all industries are talking about is just that not too many people have actioned it yet. But I mean, I’m assuming between the ages of 20 and 25 is actually when you hone skills to become a middle manager, then you know, you rise up the ranks. If you don’t get those people into the workforce, how do they even get to the second and third stage? Yeah. Uh and and Sam, we’re talking about this today in May 2026 when AI is evolving exponentially every month. So by the time we talk about this in a year’s time from now the issue may get even more stark and I think the the the issue is who’s supposed to fix it. uh we have gotten addicted to somebody else solving this for us that government will come and solve this for us or my company will come and solve this for us or my parents will come solve this for us right uh and and and I mean it’s funny but a large majority of Indians are still doing arrange marriage right uh the point is that this is the real issue that we are in a time where everybody’s on their own and they need to operate with very high agency solve for themselves become very very good at thing because now the time you need to become good at something has completely shrank through all of these tools. It’s just that are you doing something about your time or not? And I think it’s also the time you can waste your time the most. So the reason I worry about India specifically is that when you have such large data usage, when you have a large young population, right, when you have jobs that can potentially get impacted through any of these tools that are coming in right now at entry level, we we are looking at the the impact to kind of get more severe unless we kind of create a missionoriented mindset saying that we need to ride this wave. what is that that you know what is that space that we’ll have to create because for the longest time the services industry had the cost advantage in India uh you know and the IT and you know BO industry is that if that goes away where where are you where are we putting our graduates it’s a good question you know there’s a line I I used to run a BO company before uh uh which was a large outsourcing setup out of India for US companies and I remember this line that all the American community used to say that uh do what you do the best and outsource the rest. The thing is that the word outsource was not outsourced to a country. It was outsource. The thing is that the word outsource will get replaced to agents. Outsource will get replaced to AI. Outsource will get replaced to robots and so on and so forth. Right? And people will keep doing the best stuff themselves. Right? Now the question is that have we built resilient industries and capabilities that can survive and and the thing is that we have multiple issues to start with right for example the the female per capita growth like is not happening right now our per capita income is kind of lagging because female partition of labor is not to the level that the world is expecting us to have at right uh and and we can say that it’s improving but the data is not showing let’s say bank accounts or oh what percent of women take a loan what percentage of Sorry. What% of loan takers are women? What percentage of uh what what number do you say I would be I would say my guess would be sub 10% right now uh uh would be sub 20% for credit cards uh uh for aum uh uh across wealth would be even similar smaller numbers. So I think how do you expect the country to get richer with one gender working right and it’s never happened unless you find oil uh which will magically make all of us rich but it’s unlikely to happen. So we we have to figure out a way to that every country has grown. What do you think are three actionable things at this point uh that one can look to do? I know you spoke about taking things in your hands. You should be building things. You should be using AI to kind of do things which are more productive. But um what should a 24 year old be doing right now? I think first of all they have to accept that uh they cannot say I’m not very good with tech. There is not a single human being that can afford to say I’m not very good with tech because every job is it’s also you know India is so diverse. It’s also about the opportunities that come your way right. It’s it’s not so equal and and the access to tech etc. is also I disagree with that completely. We have the highest smartphone penetration. We have the cheapest data. Uh uh if you can use something to waste your time on short videos, you can also spend some time learn some tutorials on the internet. So that’s a argument. Uh uh and and we’ve gotten used to the excuses all the time. Like everything is excused. I’m just saying devils. I I know. But there are no I mean unfortunately devil is AI or not us anymore. Uh uh it is also the opportunity that can accelerate us. Uh my my other thing I would say is that we have to truly understand and become significantly more ambitious than we are. Right? I think the other issue is that we are looking for shortcuts to get wealthy versus really building substance in ourselves to become wealthy. Right? And and I worry about this for the country that if everybody thinks there is a lottery out there and I’m speaking at a grow event uh it sounds wrong when I say this but uh uh uh uh it is if you’re expecting that some of these apps and investing will kind of get you wealthy the answer is no. The mathematical odds of that are absolutely against you. You have to build substance in yourself right and the worry I have is that all of us have built a little bit more gan before we build substance right we don’t understand things deeply but we have opinions about everything uh and it’s become it’s extremely easy to have opinions about things right now right it’s very hard to build substance because substance requires you to have sacrifice uh and I think sacrifice has become a harder problem for us like we’ve become for example uh uh it’s controversial I know that Naran Morti got a lot of flack for saying that we not working hard enough. But how can a poor nation afford to work 5 days a week? I don’t know. We have it. We at Kred we have 5 days a week. But I’m asking a question that how can we afford why have you not been able to implement six days? No, I’m just saying that we don’t need to uh as a company we have found a way to otherwise build productivity and hire certain type of people. What I’m saying is that how do we accept to uh uh that we want to get significantly wealthy but we want to and and by the way here’s the funny part. uh we compare ourselves to the western world and say we need to have 5 days a week but we also have 25 holidays which western world doesn’t have. The question is that we we live in this convenient reality but the thing is that the world is moving much faster. People’s incomes are growing faster. Their per capita income growth is happening and and my worry is that as a collective society if we don’t take the things in our hands the the worry is that every time the question is what should we do? We should stop worrying about what we should do people should be doing what they need to do. Right? we are expecting some government scheme to come up or some program to come up or like you you think like startups can happen by creating a government scheme. Uh so are you are you saying that you know more people should sort of do their own companies and uh you know start whatever it takes become significantly more ambitious become significantly more skillful become significantly better understanding things not look for shortcuts to get rich not look for shortcuts to know something and constantly be willing to create sacrifice because without sacrifice nothing of value is created but do you think I and you have a lot of viewpoints on how society kind of influences all your choices, right? Um do you think it’s just got to do with the way people are brought up? The way you know I mean we have what 1.5 million engineers who pass out every year. Now they are conditioned to go to an engineering college. Most of them are unemployable. I mean that’s sort of a conclusion which has been wrong long wrong back. How do you kind of suddenly change the way they think? Um and if I if I point out at instances of your life where something majority it did not come from pleasant places something that did not work in your favor and that changed your trajectory right all of us have been through the exact same journey and and we can’t pinpoint exactly but there were these very important events. But do you think it’s now like the I I think we I think we are going to definitely have to let people go through that pain and that’s when any country evolves right uh if you saw when Japan took off it after a major setback right so I think uh constantly protecting people from setbacks and reality uh has stopped the progress for the country I believe that and and that’s true for why do people who were successful like struggle to have kids who can be successful because they take away the exact same thing that made them successful which is struggle right and that’s exactly what we’re doing to more and more people that we we’ll find a way to like create protection we’ll create this and and and now some of these things are important for example a 60 70% of population is already in some protection that we give in some some kind of a support and and that’s not a choice we have to do that right but the truth is that for the rest of the 20% 30% especially the educated uh cohort especially people who have access to all of these tools and the privilege they need to take a lot more risk right and I think when I say the risk is it’s about actually building something with substance and it doesn’t have to be I’m saying that oh everybody starts to become an entrepreneur it doesn’t work by but the thing is that sometimes that experience makes you better at job if you fail at doing something right so I think we are I I think what I would say is that we are living in a time where we need to take this mission as a personal mission and don’t wait for some India tagline to show up and we’ll show up under wearing that flag. This is a personal event. And by the way, I also believe AI is a time where we will truly truly truly become 10x. I think every single person over here has the opportunity to increase their income by 10 times. It was never possible before. This is real really true now. It’s just that how do you apply and how do you meet such people and another thing you talked about we we we are the average of five people we spend time with right India has another unique problem that we find it very hard to let go of people who are not growing right and we continue because are you talking about from the corporate and the company generally life we are we a very social uh society where it is considered to be a bad thing that we move on for better choices in terms of who we spend time with right but the truth is you will be average of five people you spend time with. So the question is that if you feel bad about leaving the five people you spend time with to grow then that’s going to be limiting your own growth and and nobody can be blamed for that except you. You know I want you to talk a bit about I I know you said you should not be waiting right now for government to be doing something for your company to be doing something but how prepared are companies at this point because I mean we seeing a lot of news coming out of the US 10% 50 I mean actually the biggest tech companies which are deploying crazy amounts of capital in AI are also shedding workforce and very profitable companies very very profitable companies like you know alphabet meta I mean and and then there’s a long tail there where do you see India is I mean obviously you’ve you’ve seen the debate where uh and and this is relevant for a crowd like this which is investing in the markets that you know the FI outflows have been record high and one of the theories is that there is no AI play for India for any of these investors to stay on so in a country where there is no really big lab or a foundation lab like you know open AI or anthropic um there is very little uh you know on on any of these stacks that is playing out how does the workforce suddenly independently become very AI native yeah it’s a very good question so I think Sam what’s going to happen is this is a little bit like game theory problem right uh let’s take an example of banks because it’s an easy topic for us to discuss Right? Let’s say one bank decides to really accelerate on AI. The real metric that will move is revenue per employee will go through the roof. Right? Today, if you look at across banks, the revenue per employee is very similar across all banks. Doesn’t matter what their business is. As soon as AI becomes important, the leverage or revenue per employee will shoot up. Now what happens is if bank A’s revenue per employee becomes 2x suddenly they will dislodge all the market shares on everything else because they figured out a way to become hyperefficient and suddenly every other bank will be forced that’s exactly what happened when computerization came or uh internet banking came it just one bank took the leap and suddenly everybody else canal I just feel that took very long to play out this is just happening at some crazy speed so so that’s a point India uh if you look at what percentage of India’s market cap is protected sorry what percent of India’s public market profit pools are protected by some regulation some license or public government companies the answer is a very large chunk of it so the impact may not be felt as quickly in the sectors that are protected through these categories right but the thing is that we will not be globally competitive anymore in many of these categories unless we are only dependent on local market So in an international market for example if your manufacturing is not moving at the same level of AI then people will stop outsourcing to India on manufacturing. Same for it outsourcing same for many other categories. So when it comes to global maxima AI will matter when it comes to local maxima it will not matter as long as there is some protection through regulation right so you may take a while for it to play out over here because we are in a this but the thing is like I told you if one sector gets impacted on jobs but that’s already happening in it right I mean you It’s sort of a global thing with what’s happening with software and which is playing out here. But yeah, I mean no India specific sector you and I can discuss right now which is uh where you you can actually see impact of AI very evidently as of now. Yeah, I would say the only place I see some evidence is I would say the tech startups and tech unicorns. I see impact right now. uh and and all of us when you say impact as in they are the ones who are uh Misho said for example let’s say 90% of code at is written by AI and credit now right now this number would have been maybe 5% a year ago right now 5 to 90% in a year’s time is an absolutely crazy jump to make but the thing is that they are still exploring building agentically and and and what you’ll notice Sam is very specific thing is happening 10% of every tech startups employees are becoming a completely different species to the 90%. Absolutely. Because their productivity is now at this exponential scale and and they are actually finding every single person around them and every other process to be slow. Right. So what you have to start doing is that if you to build an org around those people number one or you’ll be disrupted by people who are built by only those people, right? So I think we’re we’re entering a time where recognizing these people and and we used to make this jokes about what is a 10x engineer and what is 100x engineer now you see it all the time right so I think we we are entering a time where and and very very fascinating thing when I speak to this 10x people right now and ask them what can I do to make your life better they’re saying can you remove my meetings can I stop dealing with this other people in my team can I stop having people report to me I’ll do this work myself I don’t want people reporting to me. Uh, can I not talk to my manager? Can I uh uh uh uh uh just work for 5 days non-stop and not work for 5 days? I’ll get 3x more work done. These are these are conversations I’ve not heard before. These are all real conversations right now. Did you uh you know I’m I’m just curious how much of this is also translating into the output being better because again this is also a conversation which everyone’s talking about that you know if you look at the adoption it’s very high but there are companies which are still not sure if you know the output is as good as the kind of monies that they’re putting you know to have anthropic or it’s a little bit the India traffic situation right u if you only make 10% of the cars capable of running at 1,000 km/h but they are kept in the same traffic where every other car is operating at 10 km/h then you will say traffic has not moved fast and therefore companies that are only hiring thousand km/h cars are moving much faster if you keep very high displacement people with low displacement people are low dispersement processes you will not see the impact and that’s what you will see in large companies in fact large companies are at massive disadvantage right now because they’re exactly like the India traffic situation right now what an analogy but you know just to kind of wrap things up here Canal if you were say a 24 25 year old at a time like this how would you do things you know differently um looking at the job situation, looking at what AI is doing to industries across the board. How would you plan your future in a way that you can build wealth? Um, I know it’s sort of such an uncertain world. We we don’t know what’s going to happen in 6 months, but if there were, you know, there were a few things you could tell this audience. Yeah, I think uh few things that I advise people uh who are in my social circle who are this age. I I tell them that this is the best time to become extraordinary at learning anything in a very short period of time. If anybody tells you I’ll take three years to learn something, they are anyways not going to make it. You have to assume that any topic, any complex topic now, you should be able to learn in days and weeks. Uh and I’m not saying you’ll become a doctor in two weeks. I’m I’m very specifically talking about very specific skills you can learn. Number two, uh who are you surrounded by? You your average of five is a real thing and and if you’re not surrounded by people who are compounding, think of think of people around you as also stocks and they have a growth rate. If their Xirr is not high, your X will not to be high as well. Just remember that all all of you understand that language or speak in that language, right? Uh third is you have to think of yourself as a stock as well right what is your growth rate right and nobody’s coming to solve your growth rate you have to solve it for yourself right as an investor do you go and help the companies that you have invested in no you don’t same way nobody’s coming to help you right so increase your own growth rate uh few other things uh think of yourself as an app right if you have bugs fix it if you have features enhance it but keep releasing more often keep evolving if you’re going to stay the same. Uh the world is not going to be waiting for you. The world is changing much faster. U another thing I would say you are better off learning from younger people than older people when it comes to technology. You are better off learning from older people than younger people when it comes to values. So use these things correctly. Don’t go in the wrong places for wrong things. Right? uh when it comes to uh making choices on career this that just remember uh be extraordinarily okay to adapt right I I’ll end with one analogy uh I was researching on uh AI tools that which species survive for 100 million plus years without changing too much like what what was the common thing in them and the answer was crocodiles sharks and some crab uh and the three common things was the following ability to change metabolism at will. They can be at this much uh energy or this much energy at will. They can choose to do that. Second was very high strike rate which means when they go to attempt for a food they get very high conversion. They have the deadliest bites. Right? But they are mostly chilling otherwise. Right? And the third was extreme adaptation. They can survive ice age this that climatic catastrophes. So I think you have to think of these if you want to be apex predator this is the exact same things you have to follow and understand that the exact same things that will keep you there if you struggle with any of these three things you will struggle for example metabolism in this world means oh my kcha is only this much you have to be able to accept that oh I’ll have one10enth of the kcha and still survive and actually crush it second is that you will have very high conversion rate or things you attempt when you choose to attempt something you will absolutely grab this opportunity so my my other thing is like don’t waste time at events, right? Like like there’s no time left, guys. Thanks, uh, Kunal. I I think if uh people out here can even do a couple of those, they will hopefully come out shining. Thanks so much. Thank you guys. Awesome. 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