I will take a hundred journalist questions on ai in June. Some of these are being published here so I don’t have repeat ones:
Q1 from Charles Assisi
The “Silicon Valley Tax”
*You calculate that running 500,000 agents will cost an astronomical $2.5 billion annually because “infrastructure of intelligence” licenses aren’t free or cheap. Meanwhile, macro-reports suggest global enterprise IT spend is doubling to $3 trillion.*
Yes I stand by this maths. Of course price performance keeps changing as does the demand side needs. In general either price will remain constant and performance will increase. Or vice versa. But at the rate at which they do for power. Not for Moores Law.
*Question:* If Indian IT giants are forced to rent these core models and compute platforms from foreign hyper-scalers (Microsoft, OpenAI, Google) to fulfill their contracts, what percentage of that expanding $3 trillion global pie actually stays in India? Are we witnessing a permanent structural demotion, where our national champions drop from high-value software creators into margin-depleted implementation and reselling agents for Silicon Valley?
Nothing actually.
There is a bigger problem which I have called out. And that is that access may not be available at all. It has happened much before I had anticipated. Weaponisation of ai will increase with time.
The Internet disintermediates but creates a role for aggregators who are glorified intermediaries. We call them marketplaces.
Ai destroys the marketplaces and resellers and all forms of intermediaries.
TCS has no business case unless they want to downgrade to the business model and valuation of Quess Corpn of Ajit Isaac / Prem Vatsa. Or a Group 4 Securitas. Both TcS and Quess have a similar head count. U can check their valuation in NSE. Team lease founder did a smart thing by entering into the school business.
