A thesis for AI in India: Solving the drudgery tech left behind [Part 1]

Today, we’re introducing a thesis for understanding AI applications in India. While knowledge workers globally are using AI to delegate routine tasks, we believe the real opportunity in India lies in elevating AI to the role of a project manager, one that orchestrates complex workflows rather than just supporting them.

In a cramped office above his textile factory in Surat, Rajesh Kumar does what millions of Indian business owners do every day: everything. He's on his third phone call this morning - first with a supplier about delayed fabric delivery, then with a worker who didn't show up, and now with a customer complaining about order quality. His laptop sits unopened, and the growth plans he drafted last year haven’t been executed for the third quarter in a row. He's trapped playing every role except the one that matters most: the architect of his business' future.

This is the reality for India's 63M+ MSMEs. They employ over 500M+ workers (more than the entire population of the EU) and yet operate in a constant state of barely controlled chaos. The problem isn't a lack of ambition, and it clearly isn’t the lack of workers either. 

It's something more fundamental. We have an abundant workforce, but lack workflows. We have people who can execute brilliantly, but not enough who can design what to execute.

We have the hands to build and the vision to dream, but we're missing the crucial middle that connects the two. While tech has digitised our businesses, it hasn't solved the core problem: software can track what happened yesterday, but can't design what should happen tomorrow.

Enter AI- not as a replacement for workers, but as the leadership layer that Indian MSMEs have always needed.

The gap between doing and designing

The distinction is crucial. India doesn't lack supervisors – taskmasters – who ensure work gets done. Walk into any small factory and you'll find foremen watching over workers, checking quality, and managing attendance. What we lack are those who can step back and ask: Is this the right work? Could we sequence it better? How do we optimise resource allocation? What should we build next?

In successful economies, this thinking layer - call them planners, coordinators, or system designers - makes up 15-20% of the workforce. For the sake of this newsletter, we’ll refer to this category of workforce as Project Managers.

But in India's MSMEs, this entire layer collapses onto the owner. Rajesh becomes supplier coordinator, HR manager, quality controller, and strategist - a superhuman job description that guarantees subhuman results. The numbers display this too - Indian manufacturing workers produce $7,000 annually versus $80,000 in developed economies. Place the same Indian worker in an MNC with proper project management, and productivity triples. The bottleneck is not capability; the bottleneck is system design.

Technology's partial victory

Over the past two decades, India has made remarkable strides in tech adoption. We've become the world's back office, our IT services industry is globally competitive, and we've built digital public infrastructure that's the envy of many developed nations. The UPI revolution alone shows what's possible when technology aligns with Indian behaviour patterns - processing 9.3B+ transactions monthly and transforming how we handle money.

Even for MSMEs, tech has successfully digitised many of their businesses. ERPs track inventory, mobile apps coordinate deliveries, and payment systems have gone cashless. These advances have brought transparency, reduced friction, and enabled scale. A small Kirana store owner in Mangalore can now accept digital payments, track sales on an app, and even list products online, as easily as a businessman in India’s Tier 1.

Yet a curious gap remains. While technology excels at recording what happened, it struggles to determine what should happen next. This is where traditional technology hits its limits. Most business software is essentially a sophisticated filing system - excellent at storing and retrieving information, but incapable of the creative thinking that project management requires.

But why is project management a scarce resource?

This scarcity isn't just about cost, though hiring skilled planners is expensive. The deeper challenge is that project management requires a unique combination of skills that are rare in any economy: analytical thinking, systems design, communication ability, and cultural understanding of ground realities.

In large corporations, entire departments handle workflow planning and resource optimisation. They use sophisticated tools, run simulations, and employ specialists for different aspects of project management. But for Rajesh in his leather workshop, hiring even one dedicated planner would eat up most of his margins. The economics simply don't work.

Enter AI - Our scalable thinking layer

This is where AI represents a paradigm shift. Unlike traditional software that stores and processes data, AI can be harnessed to think by analysing patterns, predicting outcomes, and designing solutions.

What makes modern AI particularly suited for India's project management gap is its ability to understand context and work with unstructured information. When a construction foreman sends a voice note saying "कल वाले काम के लिए सीमेंट खत्म हो रहा है" (“the cement is running out for tomorrow's work”), AI doesn't just log this information. It can understand the implications, check the project timeline, calculate required quantities, identify suppliers, and create an optimised procurement plan.

Additionally, AI works with Indian reality rather than against it. Voice-first AI interfaces bypass literacy constraints entirely - workers can report progress, ask questions, and receive guidance as naturally as talking to a colleague. More critically, AI can also provide this project management capability at near-zero marginal cost. The same AI system that helps optimise one construction site can simultaneously assist thousands of others. The scalable economics make sophisticated planning accessible even to tiny businesses operating on thin margins.

For business owners like Rajesh, trapped between vision and execution, AI offers the ability to finally work on the business, not just in it. As India races toward a $5 trillion economy, the question is how quickly we can deploy it to bridge the planning gap that has constrained our productivity. 

In Part 2, we'll explore how innovative companies are already proving this model works, turning AI into the project managers that Indian businesses desperately need but could never afford.