An AI that doesn’t get tired.  

An AI that doesn’t talk about work-life balance.

An AI that knows it all.

For centuries, humans have woken up in the morning and gone to work. What if they no longer have to? Serial entrepreneur, and ideas man Kunal Shah, founder of Cred, is peering into his crystal ball to tell us what the future of human industry will be.

Meet the Start-up Savant

India’s socio-economic ideas have always been driven by welfarism. Jobs, therefore, aren’t just opportunities, they’re maps towards a better tomorrow; dystopian toolkits, last chance salons for a significant part of the population. The emergence of a new form of intelligence, Kunal Shah believes, threatens to irreversibly alter the nature of work, productivity, and maybe even human purpose. 

Shah is a serial entrepreneur. From selling pirated CDs as a kid to selling mehendi (henna), importing computers to running a BPO company, he has seen the Indian consumer cycle evolve inside out. He founded one of India’s earliest fintech startups with Freecharge. A graduate in philosophy, he is at the moment founder and CEO of Cred, an exclusive payment network that serves creditworthy customers. At heart though, Shah is a prophet, a prolific angel investor and the seer who sees trends and disruption from a distance. Next on his plate: AI.

The new Electricity

Industrialisation. Nuclearisation. The internet age. The world has witnessed biblical shifts and lived to see the day. But nothing compares to the promethean capabilities of AI as it positions itself as the centre of our lives. “Inefficiency employs the most people in the world,” Shah claims repeatedly. What if you could then replace human error with perfection, fatigue with the ability to work endlessly. Flaws with a flatlined, eerie productivity. Like the post-electricity lift, Shah argues, global GDPs will shoot up. But who will cash in?

There are cultural dilemmas to consider as well. In a way we are not just nurturing our replacements but also the devices that might fundamentally alter behaviour, emotion, social fabric, and humanity’s sense of self. Employment and economy is a tiny speck of this multi-faceted question. The only certainty Shah argues is that we can’t avoid discovering the answer. 

The Day after Tomorrow

What becomes of India’s start-up storm if 90 % of all work is automated? 

What do we innovate, invent or invest in? Will this imminent economic explosion affect us equally or like history, will the wealthy have their cake and eat it too ? In an era of ambitions around self-sustenance and financial autonomy, can India dictate to the world the terms of engagement? Or will it simply have to play by someone else’s rules?

At SYNAPSE 2025, Kunal Shah will open his diary of aphorisms, separate the philosophy of technology from the practicality of the market, pitch the magnitude of a creation-level event, how it will alter the essence of work, and exhibit why training AI is like “parenting a high IQ child” – without knowing what they will grow up to be. 

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