Mishik Sharma

India has one of the largest school-going populations in the world — a fact that has long challenged teachers, bureaucrats, and reformers. The problems are well known: overcrowded classrooms, overburdened teachers, and a gap between curriculum goals and real comprehension levels. ChatGPT EDU ChatGPT EDU is basically an AI 'tutor' that can be deployed at scale, across digital devices. This AI tutor doesn’t spoon-feed, but engages students intelligently in completing their assignments. Instead of doing the work for them, it pushes them to think, reflect, and revise. That’s not coaching. That’s scalable tutoring. And in a country like India, tutoring is big business — not just in metros, but in tier-2 towns and beyond. But most of it is offline, expensive, and exam-focused. ChatGPT EDU represents something else entirely: daily academic companionship, delivered through AI, and guided by the classroom teacher. Why the Classroom Is the Right Entry Point If OpenAI (and other AI player...

The Real Spy Game Is No Longer Cinematic There was a time when espionage movies reflected the covert realities of the Cold War: double agents, secret messages, trench coats, and tense negotiations in dark alleys. That era is long gone. Today, real-world intelligence operations are more about clouds than cloaks—cloud servers, that is. I recently watched two new spy dramas—"Black Bag" and "The Amateur". Both were gripping, thoughtful, and full of modern anxieties. Yet, they still clung to the same old tropes: lone spies going rogue, last-minute gunfights, and impossible cross-border infiltration. The reality of espionage in 2025 is far less romantic—and far more frightening. Today’s Spying Is About Technology, Not Men in Suits Let’s state this clearly: spying today is a technological game. It is not human-first anymore. Mass data collection via satellites, drones, and fiber-optic taps makes the “field spy” almost irrelevant. Artificial intelligence tools scrape throug...

As the world hurtles deeper into the AI age, a quiet collapse is threatening one of the oldest institutions of modern civilization: the university. For generations, universities were the gateway to prosperity, offering knowledge, status, and above all, employability. But today, that promise is wearing thin—and fast. Across industries, AI is automating entry-level white-collar roles that once offered fresh graduates their first foothold in professional life. Whether it's coding, financial modeling, legal research, or content creation, AI tools are rapidly outperforming the tasks traditionally assigned to junior employees. In doing so, they are rendering many university degrees—including in lucrative disciplines like Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Finance, Economics, etc—increasingly irrelevant to the job market. This isn’t a distant dystopia. It’s already here. A Dangerous Gap Between Campus and Market The fundamental problem lies in the widening gulf between what univer...

The news of TCS planning to lay off 12,000 employees by the end of this year has sent ripples across India’s tech and business media. In a sobering trend, more than 1.25 lakh IT professionals have reportedly lost their jobs in India since early 2023 — largely attributed to the accelerating AI-fication of routine tech roles. This development, while unsettling, is not entirely surprising. AI is increasingly automating mechanical entry-level and even mid-level IT work: testing, low-level coding, monitoring, support, BPM tasks — the bread & butter of India's IT giants for decades. But that’s only one part of the story. The other side is less discussed, but far more telling: GCCs (Global Capability Centres) — especially mid-tier ones — are hiring aggressively, not retrenching. While Indian IT firms are trimming their workforce in response to shrinking profit margins from commoditized work, GCCs are onboarding niche engineering talent — AI engineers, chip designers, data scientists, ...

India's data center industry is booming. With about 1 gigawatt of installed capacity today and projections of tripling by the end of this decade, it’s clear that the infrastructure backbone of India’s digital economy is strengthening. But a closer look reveals a glaring imbalance: vast majority of this growth is clustered around metro cities like Mumbai and Chennai,  At the same time, a quiet revolution is brewing — some forward-looking companies are setting up edge data centers in Tier-2, Tier-3, and even Tier-4 towns. This presents a powerful opportunity: to democratise access to compute power and allow regional AI startups to thrive in places that were previously digitally peripheral. But infrastructure alone isn’t enough. The real question is: how do we make AI relevant and productive for Bharat? Rethinking the AI Value Chain Here’s a cascading vision of digital empowerment: Data Centers → Cloud Providers → Local AI Startups → Local SMEs, Farmers, Institutions Data centers hous...

In just a few years, artificial intelligence has gone from research labs to our personal pockets. Millions now interact daily with mass-market AI applications like ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Perplexity etc—for help with homework, emotional struggles, writing emails, exploring news, and even preparing job interviews. Much of this access has been free. Powerful tools backed by expensive compute infrastructure and knowledge retrieval pipelines have been made available to all—democratizing capabilities previously available only to experts. But this model is on borrowed time. The Problem with Free AI While enterprises and governments pay for large-scale access to AI services, individual users—by far the largest in number—mostly ride free. And their usage is not trivial. A single detailed query may require access to multiple content sources, inference from large models, memory storage, and server-side rendering—none of which are costless. As the global user base swells into the ...

Social media, at its core, is radically different from all other forms of media. Unlike news media, entertainment media, or sports media — where content is created by centralised producers for mass consumption — social media flips the script. Here, users create content for users. It’s participatory, decentralised, and democratic in form. But here's the contradiction: while the content model is social, the business model remains extractive and centralised. And this mismatch, I believe, is what lies at the heart of today’s growing disillusionment with mainstream social media platforms. The Platform-User Mismatch Social media companies still primarily make money the traditional way: by harvesting attention and selling it to advertisers. It doesn’t matter whether you're a niche creator building meaningful conversations or a rage-bait troll gaming the algorithm — if you generate engagement, you’re profitable. But this has consequences: Creators burn out or get algorithmically sideli...