Notes from the final disruption: Vijay Shekhar Sharma on how a pivot saved his empire

The looming AI disruption is just not Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s first time staring down the barrel of technological upheaval. Now, he’s urging right now’s builders to use the hard-won lesson that saved his empire: adapt instantly, or be erased.

By the point Vijay Shekhar Sharma was getting ready to take his mobile-services firm public in 2010, he already knew his enterprise was dying.

One97 Communications, the dad or mum firm of what would later turn out to be Paytm, was then one in every of India’s most profitable purveyors of cell value-added companies — ringtones, ringback tones, cricket scores, astrology readings, jokes delivered by SMS, examination outcomes pinged to function telephones throughout the nation. It was a thriving enterprise. It was additionally, Sharma had concluded, a enterprise with a clock ticking above it.

“I used to be going for an IPO in 2010, and the problem was, what’s going to occur to the long run?” Sharma advised the viewers on the India AI Affect Summit 2025. “I had seen the smartphone within the US, and I used to be uncomfortable that we must always do an IPO at that time limit as a result of I used to be like, the enterprise mannequin goes to vary.”

The world had not but seen it coming. He had. “The ringtone will now not be a enterprise mannequin,” he stated. And it wasn’t. “Nobody can pay Rs 15 for a ringtone anymore; they’ll stream songs instantly on their telephones.” He recalled telling himself this on the time.

“The world had not seen, however I knew it,” he stated. The ability of the smartphone, he added, was not incremental. “The ability of a smartphone was not that PCO, STD can be over. It was over.”

As a substitute, the smartphone grew to become the gateway to India’s monetary system. “As you understand, the smartphone gave entry to the monetary system to each nook and nook of the nation,” Sharma stated. That shift finally enabled Paytm’s pivot into digital funds and monetary companies.

That element set the tone for every part that adopted. Sharma was not talking as a theorist. He was talking as somebody who had as soon as stood at precisely the form of inflection level many Indian builders are standing at right now: synthetic intelligence is the smartphone. And India, he stated, is as soon as once more in the intervening time of selection.

“2026 begins with a dedication and confidence that AI will convey the potential within the enterprise and the work and the issue that we sometimes wouldn’t have assumed could be solved,” he stated.

Sharma framed AI not merely as a productiveness instrument however as infrastructure for monetary inclusion. Coming from monetary companies, he stated, “I basically imagine entry to credit score creates wealth.” But entry to credit score requires assessing danger throughout hundreds of thousands of small and complicated instances.

“By the potential of AI, we can care for nook instances the place it shouldn’t go, or it ought to go,” he stated. That, he added, might make folks extra financially inclusive than ever earlier than.

On foundational fashions

Through the speech, Sharma additionally cautioned in opposition to viewing the AI race solely by way of the lens of basis fashions. “A basis mannequin is a horizontal succesful mannequin,” he stated. Whereas India “should and for positive have a basis mannequin,” the main target, he argued, ought to be on utilized techniques.

“It is like asking, will you construct autos or will you make engines?” he stated. Basis fashions, in his telling, are the engine. The brokers, the sector-specific fashions, the area purposes constructed on high — these are the autos. And the autos are what the world really wants. “That requirement will go metaphorically ten instances and plenty of extra fold than ever earlier than imagined.”

“The purpose is just not about simply constructing a basis mannequin,” he stated. “The purpose is about constructing the fashions that remedy for us. Clear up for world well being. Clear up for world issues.”

He was not dismissive of the muse mannequin query — he supplied an endorsement of Sarvam AI, the Indian startup constructing a homegrown massive language mannequin — however he insisted the extra consequential frontier lay elsewhere. “The combat is just not about only a basis mannequin,” he stated. “The combat is about AI that works for a sector, works for a section, and solves the issue through brokers.”