Shailesh Haribhakti Exclusive 100x Companies Rupee At 85 No Tax Returns

TITLE: Shailesh Haribhakti Exclusive - 100X Companies, Rupee At 85 & No Tax Returns | The BroadView CHANNEL: The BroadView DATE: 2026-06-04 ---TRANSCRIPT--- You’ve seen this ugly patch not once. You’ve seen this movie play out again and again. Are we going to get bad before it gets better?

Niko J, I have an absolutely contrarian view. We are living through the most abundant phase that this planet has ever known. Indian companies with potential can become 100x of where they are. How do you think 2 years from now we will remember summer of 2026? Fantastic question. we would have realized that we need to get out of oil dependence. My son who’s 14 is excited about AI because he knows that by the time he will graduate AI is going to just change the way how he would be approaching his professional career. My nephew who’s 22 is about to graduate and is pursuing computer science. He’s worried I may just put him on a back foot as he may not have a job. What should my son focus on and should have my navy be worried? The real large beneficiary of AI and blockchain would actually be the global will will be the central government or state governments. I can envisage an India which does not need to file returns. I studied the prospectus of SpaceX and the bold manner in which this is described is incredible and everybody is pursuing it now. So in 2030 your summer holiday could be on the moon. I’ll give it another 5 years but yes

2035. Yes. For nearly four decades, Clesh Haribbakti has been the face of trust for corporate India. He has audited companies, investigated frauds, he has championed many boardrooms and more importantly he has advised the regulators to come up with a bulletproof framework which today is the benchmark and pride of corporate India. But today’s conversation is not about titles. It’s about what is coming next for India. At a time when every boardroom is coming under pressure because of macro headwinds, how will India emerge on the right side from AI to blockchain from EV to energy transition when these global forces are at play? What needs to be done urgently? And where is the next trillion dollar opportunity for India Inc. Salish by so nice to have you on Broadview. It’s an honor and a pleasure.

Thank you. I still feel that I have not done justice to you with that short introduction. Nik, you’re too kind. You should only introduce me as a lifelong learner. Everything else is redundant. That’s just the polite side of you, sir. But such an pleasure and honor to have you on the the Broadview. Everybody’s feeling the pinch now. There is this sudden tailwind which has become an headwind. Now you’ve seen this ugly patch, not once. You’ve seen this movie play out again and again. Are we going to get bad before it gets better? Niko J, I have an absolutely contrarian view. We are living through the most abundant phase that this planet has ever known. What is driving it? You’ll ask me. It is the amazing march of the way the phase change transformation is happening in the way that we are building intelligence into everything that we do into everything that we think. Earlier when AI came and chat bots and all of that happened it was more of a internet plus kind of thing. Today because of autonomy and agenticity the entire potential has been blown to the sky and India has a phenomenal role to play. I will elaborate that a little bit and then leave it for you to further probe it if you find it what I’m saying interesting. At Davos, our minister Vashnau mentioned that the most profitable part of AI is going to be the app layer and he got it dead right. Today there is a playbook by which Indian companies with potential can become 100x of where they are. 100x And the way to release that potential is to actually define that playbook. Because what we want to create are living intelligent organizations which are continuously benchmarked superior in terms of execution and building the next phase of chest old growth. Mr. Sri Bakti you sit on boards across the board which is from startups to insurance from manufacturing to power. What is your read of first what is coming next? Because you some would say you don’t have a 180°ree view but you have a 360deree view because of the diversity of the businesses you currently uh are or companies you associated with. So you’re right, Nikon. I think the boards I sit on are my greatest learning laboratories. No question about it. Each one of them is a high-erforming enterprise. Um and I must say that I learn a lot because I’m able to test some of the ideas that we are discussing um through the board interactions through interactions with the CXO suit and making sure that what I’m thinking is not theory but can actually be put into practice. give you two or three illustrations of how comprehensive change can happen. Layering of decision making has been the bane. What happens with layering is that the same thing is seen in multiple by multiple eyes for different purposes. Now think of it that you become a seven eyed person. What are the seven eyes? Enterprise risk management, TQM, ICFR, internal controls, internal audit, sustainability reporting and financial reporting. Take another redundancy. We became very used to hiring contract labor everywhere, outsourced, contracted. We decided that we should allow things to happen outside the corporation. In doing that, we also created an army of people who had to supervise and enhance these contractors which were in-house full-time employees. Now because of AI, it is possible to dream of situations where we can bring this entire capability in house and the amazing productivity and lack of confusion that you can deliver is just astonishing. Just think about it. A labor contract, multiple labor contractors working on a site, you reduce that to one. The fellow is now delivering the same value at less than onethird of the manpower that he was deploying in house. The people who are supervising this mass of 72 contractors has been shrunk to half. And all of these people have become super more productive because there’s so much work to be done. India is building out today. We are constructing infrastructure. We are growing. We are we are at a clip which is absolutely exhilarating. So the the the heat which we are feeling now a lot of that could be geopolitical pressures. It is it could be high oil prices. It could be the natural curve of inflation because inflation has been behind for last couple of years. Uh how do you think two years from now we will remember summer of 2026? Fantastic question. We would have realized that we need to get out of oil dependency. We simply need to do that at a scale and a speed that we now have acquired. We have transitioned to solar power. We have transitioned to wind power. We have not transitioned enough or we don’t have enough capacity for storage and our grids are not in the best shape that they ought to be. Now if you start investing in storage and seamless grid, not just the national grid but micro grids, grids which are taking care of just a cluster of large users and we clean the whole situation. We will need thermal power as a backbone. We will need that as a you know a insurance against power not being available 24 hours a day and there the solution is to move into CCUs and make sure that CCUs becomes economical and that’s where the attention and the investment is going. But just imagine we will remember 2026 as the year in which we finally pivoted to renewables to EV to autonomy and to AI. So the playbook has ABCD sir. I will use the first alphabet here the A A A is autos that’s traditional A is AI that’s the current trend. Let’s discuss both. uh AI you briefly mentioned the entire ecosystem of AI which is getting created but then there’s an ugly side which is what you’re calling as redundancy is actually a job loss what we are talking about productivity is somebody’s wage bill what we are talking about innovation while India is lacking in terms of the AI layer right now in terms of getting their entire infra infrastructure right so is well AI is like electricity Mr. Sorry bakti. The point is that I don’t know when will we start benefiting from the productivity of an electric bulb. Again, excellent question. Let’s stop thinking scarcity and stop thinking that the only thing people will be seeking and people will be giving is a job. Let’s for a moment step out of that thought process. We can create an amazingly large army of entrepreneurs. Our highly qualified people who have had experience in industry are so trainable, so reskillable and so ready to become entrepreneurs that we will have no difficulty in making sure that everybody has a productive activity to be engaged in. Yes, we will have to open our minds to new learning. We will have to make sure that all of us become self-arning machines if you like. I would prescribe that everybody each one of us should spend a minimum of 2 hours a day in self-arning. It is so critical. But if you do that then everybody who is today doing a redundant repetitive nonvalue ad activity wrongly looking at the same thing six times what’s the point instead all these people will be released to do innovation to create bigger value to grow the GDP we must think of this as a only way in which we can accelerate the pace of our growth and make sure that that gets diffused to a large number of people. Now let’s take automobiles which you mentioned in passing in connection with this. I believe that we need to rethink mobility completely. The cost or the delivery everything. Okay. What will be the true definition of mobility? It should be that I can get from wherever I am to wherever I want to go at the lowest possible cost. Every good which is produced must equally be able to reach where it will become the most productive at the lowest cost. So we need to reinvent mobility completely. We have not even thought about EV tall tolls. We have not thought about uh drone based deliveries at scale. We’ve not thought about single person airplanes. We’ve not thought about so much which will ultimately define mobility. In 5 years time from today, it might become more or less irrelevant for people to get a driving license in many parts of the world because with autonomous movement, autonomous cars, robo taxis are coming at scale. You see that a reality in India? Absolutely. So it’s not science fiction. Not at all. It’s reality. It’s in 24 cities in the US. Yes. Yes. There’s no reason why it should not come to India. No reason. So the cost of mobility which is about 7 to 8 km in India is just going to skydive. That’s a very powerful trend. Changes everything for India. Absolutely. Because again we are large land mass. Absolutely. It is different. And look at the trucks. We will now have these autonomous trucks. So the world actually experienced a car autonomously starting from California filling itself wherever it was necessary and reaching New York in the world of finance and something which you’ve represented there is a mass army which financial firms today need the auditors the CFAs the CAS AI is going to be disrupting a lot of those basic entry- levelvel jobs uh and that’s a very large part of what the Indian youth today is focusing on. Some are studying, some are dreaming and some are about to become CNCFs. Is that basic chain coming under pressure because of AI? That chain is transforming. What change do you see? It is reinventing itself. How? What is required? You need to have worldclass SOPs. Okay, which need to be established. You know there are six Ds of disruption and of the digital world. We are at the first stage. We need to first completely digitize everything. It’s only then will we be able to ride on all of this. Now we can accelerate it and we can accelerate it because we have intelligent people who are available and I see that as accelerating at a phenomenal pace. So the letter B actually represents blockchain. It’s a chain. Uh and historically you would refer to B as biotech. Uh we’ve not had great inroads in biotech but blockchain is where I understand that crazy amount of innovation is happening. Absolutely. What does the letter B represent for you? Blockchain and let’s not forget that we are also making taking significant strides in biotech. But I I know blockchain far more than I know biotech. So let me focus on blockchain. Every population scale digital public infrastructure will get curated, will get more trusted, will become more used. If there is the element of a blockchain which makes sure that the pipe which is conveying the value from you to me, from me to you, from you to everybody in the world is safe. And we have to conceptualize that blockchain just delivers that. We got confused about blockchain because we started associated with Bitcoin. Yes. And there was a huge debate about whether Bitcoin is good, bad, is speculative, it go up and down in value and what will happen. We need to get out of that mindset. And in large population scale digital public infrastructured driven processes, we need to bring in blockchain everywhere in all SAS products which we used to deliver uh and we still are going to deliver for the next maybe 3 four years until AI fully disrupts the SAS model. We will need blockchain to create the trust. Look at the whole idea of patching all the vulnerabilities of the world. How will you make sure that that patched environment will stay safe? You need blockchain. It’ll need to work with methos or whatever else people are going to use to make sure that all the vulnerabilities are discovered and then corrected. You need the blockchain. It is largely conceived that blockchain and the impact of that would be limited to financial sector but that’s not true. Not at all true. Where do you see the transformational change happening in which sector of the government? Government. Okay. In a big way. We often don’t realize that almost every end of a value chain somewhere connects us with the government and this is universal and it will be so for the for our forthcoming lives. So can I say AI and blockchain the productivity gains are actually going to be seen across the world at governments these are large absolutely uh they are absolutely fat in terms of their total expenditure and while we tend to focus on innovation the private sector gain the next startup the real large beneficiary of AI and blockchain would actually be the global will will be the central government or state governments so let me give you three startling examples I in Inis and India which does not need to file returns does not file returns at all. Okay. You will get a computed tax amount and you have to do your own accounting which you do anyway and say this looks reasonably okay and once you tick it the money will be transferred from your bank account to the government. It’s like science fiction right? No, we’re going to deliver this. Okay. Okay. This is the moment that we are working towards. Okay. Take all taxes, all tax administration. Today, how much frustration is caused? Because we need an army of people managing direct tax, another army of people managing indirect tax. Then there are local state government taxes and levies and all of that to manage it. It’s an army. Now everybody is in a highwaist paradigm. All of this can be collapsed. I’ve just written an article two days ago to show that the third thing that can be collapsed is all the litigation. It is just waiting to happen. All that it needs is to deploy known technologies and we will see outcomes which are dramatic. Every state government will benefit. You want to do asset monetization at scale at scale. You want to do inits and reads at scale. How will you do it? The only way to do it is through the deployment of all of this tech, UPI, everything that surrounds it. But UPI is scale. Aadhaar is scale. Uh all population scale. Yeah. So India needs because of a sheer population a mass technology which can be scaled up which is also safe. And which is also safe. So you need blockchain. Uh you know you’ve got me perhaps tempted to ask a question which I was saving for the last but to ask it right now. If I imagine an individual’s life in a city like Mumbai or Delhi 2000 I’m taking the clock really back here 2000 it was a novelty to have a mobile phone you had seldom access to internet uh air conditioning was still considered to be luxury lot of these factors today have become necessities absolutely right uh 2030 how will life change how will life change for all of us. What do you think what is considered to be luxury or perhaps optionality will become part of our lives? I’m going to allow my imagination to run wild. Uh I’m not going to talk about technologies that don’t exist only that which is being experimented with. So we will have a Dyson swap. Okay. We will have conquered space. Okay. as a place where we will do massive amount of value at okay data centers will be in space no need for cooling sun-synchronous orbit so solar power running data centers zero latency transfer of compute which will be the you know the biggest resource constraint on compute today is energy now this is a solution so I see this actually getting into place. I studied the uh prospectus of SpaceX and the bold manner in which this is described is incredible and everybody is pursuing it now. Google is pursuing it, Amazon is pursuing it, all the big boys in the world are pursuing. Basos has already hinting about it even though he’s not hinting. He’s putting his money on it. Okay. Um and my sense is that we will have by 2030 so almost everything that we see as a problem today unsolved will be solved. So in 2030 your summer holiday could be on the moon. I’ll give it another five years. But yes 2035 yes. Okay. I’ll put the C here. And again very crucial. A year ago I would have said crypto. Today I’ll have to say currency. Right now there is stress on our currency. Now the conventional wisdom is dollar should lose its power. US economy is getting from bad to worse and perhaps hollow also because of its debt levels. But the grain of the truth sir here is that Indian currency is still depreciating uh and it has depreciated this year at a pace which is quite scary. When do you see the tide would turn because the major factors which drive the strength of an currency are against the dollar but the world still wants to the world’s obsessed with dollar. They still feel that a dollar denominated asset even though there is a question mark about their liability ability to pay is getting weak. So it’s like this the hedgemony of the dollar is diminishing. Bricks payment rails are being laid as we speak. The China uh trade related transfers are happening. Jeffrey Sachs talks dramatically or no Ray Dalio talks dramatically is talking about it about the fact that the first sort of toll that was collected by Iran was collected in yuan instead of in dollars. So he says that’s the beginning of the end of the petro dollar. The petro dollar is what has given the dollar the luxury to just keep on issuing dollars at will which they did and the whole world still wanted more and therefore the dollar retains its value. Now with the full adoption and percolation and the phase change transformation resulting from AI adoption at scale and everything getting digital which is the first T. We will see deception which is without knowing there is a compounding happening once it acquires a single digit that compounding will become visible. Mhm. So can I say the natural direction for rupee and barring you know leverage factors and financial compulsions in five years is only one thing no complexity no complexity the minute the world realizes that we are moving to energy sources that are available to us ubiquitously and indigenously the rupee value will start rising simple so 5 years complexity so 5 years my direction is more 85 not 115 100%. 100%. But 5 years from today who knows we may not need any currency or you think major changes are coming in terms of transactions major major I mean this is an area that will be disrupted maximally like I talk about disruption of education and health and all of that mobility. uh this is an area payments. I mean these are all fictions that we’ve created in our minds right I’m going to put the D here and the D right now is perhaps the most talked about D in the world which is defense geopolitics the world has moved from just in time to just in case uh there is a large play in Indian public markets in terms of defense But things are changing there also. Sir, uh the wars are being fought not with bullets but with drones. For somebody who wants to learn from your wisdom and what they want to know perhaps a hint from you. So that I don’t know the answer to that only you know and I always will defer to you. uh but let me talk about why wars will become unnecessary. First of all, all wars will not be fought in man-to-man or woman to man or whatever combat of human beings will be fought through technology. Drones, ICBS, uh missiles, everything will be automated. It’s all going to become fully ITdriven, fully driven by AI. So, we all know that without Starink, the Russia Ukraine war would have been over a long time ago. Um and and so my take on defense is that technology is going to overwhelm it and there’s going to be a 3, four, 5 year arbitrage period during which this transformation will happen in the way we fight wars. But then we’ll start realizing that in an abundant world where there’s so much all that is left to do is distribute. So I’ll keep the letter E or alphabet E per at the top. Okay. Because ultimately what matters whatever you’re discussing sir how will that translate into they ch do change right? Uh what is sunrise today could be sunset tomorrow. Uh what will glow and grow would be a combination of vision demand and again technology. India of 2020 the earnings were largely driven by commodity then came TMT today it’s financials five years from now what would the where the driving power of earnings will come from it’ll come from DPI at scale it’ll come from enterprises which are super productive it’ll come from people who have a larger slightly larger share of intelligence harnessed and therefore able to do work for rest of the world. Mr. you’ve served on some of the most prominent boards. You’ve been associated with uh perhaps deep dive into the Indian financial sector. You’re you represent the ethos of Indian corporate culture. At what point in time you said that look I’m going to call it quits or I will never call it quits with the chance once you sold your practice. Yeah. To hang up your boots. So I look at it slightly differently in a I look at it that one has to reinvent oneself every few years. How do you do that? So I just give up what I’m doing fully completely entirely retrain relearn take fresh card and move forward. How do you do that? Easier said than done for all of us. So uh 8 years ago I sold the accounting practice which we had developed uh my father and I had developed and um since then I taught myself sciences all the sciences and moved into sustainability and then into AI because science was important to get into sustainability and AI and if something new comes up in the world then that’s what I’m going to learn. What’s your starting point for learning something new? Why? Because there was a time when information was scarce today ubiquitous. Yes. How do you start and what is the basic thought when you are trying to understand economics? Fantastic question. You just need to have your intuition very focused on what is truly changing. So you know AI I didn’t see it as a chatbot as a tool as a I saw it as a phase change transformation. He just say when a caterpillar turns into a butterfly it’s not going to ever go back and become a caterpillar much less become a l. So this is what it is and because it is sustainability is the same thing. I mean we are going to make sure that this planet will continue to be our most welcoming home and we will do it. We forgot we are not doing all of this sustainability work to save the planet. We’re doing to save ourselves. You must become very clear about that. And and I see that happening with AI that we will use and harness and adopt AI to save ourselves from getting bored from doing stuff which has no meaning from doing less value added stuff and moving into more value added stuff. You know the advantage in this avtar is that we even if I extend the interview I always said that look we can accommodate it. So in television of course you had uh you know posity of time. So I’ll take the liberty of extending this uh lovely discussion by just two more questions. My son who’s 14 is excited about AI because he knows that by the time he will graduate AI is going to just change the way how he would be approaching his professional career. My nephew who’s 22 is about to graduate and is pursuing computer science. He’s worried that AI may just put him on a back foot as he may not have a job. What should my son focus on? And should I my nephew be worried? You know your son and your nephew should both focus on becoming entrepreneurs. I’m now speaking to university administrators, senior professors, whoever I can speak to and saying that our task is no longer to get people ready to do a job but to be value creators in every sense of the word. Even if they for example spend 2 three years in an enterprise they should be entrepreneurial creating completely fresh new value because now they have intelligence available to them as electricity you will have a polymath sitting in your pocket at all times and how you access and what you access is left to you that’s what I would like to tell your son and your nephew that So much power will be coming to you. It’s only it’s like sunlight. How much can you harness it? Actually that’s it. Before we wrap sir, you are a voracious reader and there is a selfish harbakti recommended long list of books. Uh give me a book or if I may request you to please share a name with us of a book which you’ve reread and reread and reread again. A book which you plan to read and a book you’ve just finished reading. Okay. So a book which I’ve read and reread and reread is the Bhagwat Gita in various shapes, various authors, various contexts and all of that. And that continues to educate me all the time. The book that I am reading right now uh is we are as gods. It is a book which is talking about the abundance revolution and where it is going. And uh I must say that I’m uh very influenced by the thoughts that are expressed in books like this. And then a book that I know people should start thinking of getting is go back to the classics. Go back to Homer. go back to Odyssey and Iliad and look at those lessons. I just reread Odyssey and Iliad last month and it gave me a amazingly new perspective and great excitement. I could connect it with what is happening today and it was nice a retro and a future kind of fusion which made it very interesting. U Mr. Bakti you’ve done something which is very rare. You’ve managed to really connect the dots for us which no one has managed to do it on this show from talking about tech to the future of world to understanding of opportunity to what should be the big rate of change. It’s been such an um wow discussion that all I can say is thank you and it’s just been such an honor sir to have you on the show. Thank you for asking all the fantastic questions. Thank you sir. Thank you. Went up really well. Went up really well. Thank you.