Every major shift in how work gets done has produced the same person: the one who waits for institutional permission to begin. The printing press did not wait for the Church to approve wider literacy before reshaping European society. The internet did not wait for schools to build it into lesson plans before transforming every industry. AI is not waiting either.
You are probably looking for an AI story that is not about ChatGPT or the robot apocalypse. Your readers are exhausted by those. The story I am writing about is different: it is already happening, it is local, and the people living it have not identified themselves yet. That is what makes it worth covering.
I have been watching this wave from an unusual vantage point. Twenty years of building businesses before AI became a conversation: agribusiness in India, sporting goods in Sweden, a Fortune 500 in Scotland that had a job description saying no Asians. I got hired anyway. Built an $85 million category. I see the same failure pattern now in the US companies I work with. Then came AI, and I started watching it repeat everywhere: the tool gets bought, the implementation gets skipped, the people get blamed.
That pattern is not unique to India. A US-based SaaS company outsourced their AI implementation to me. Not because they couldn't find someone locally. Because they wanted it built, not planned. The gap between buying a tool and changing how work gets done looks identical in Dallas and Delhi.
The desk-level adoption that nobody is writing about is already happening. A numerologist in Mumbai building a client practice with the depth of a trained consultant. A spice exporter in Jaipur filing overseas correspondence through ChatGPT while telling me his company will wait for the children to join before they try AI. He is already using it. He just hasn't told his company yet. The teachers who will change how AI is taught in schools are not waiting for curriculum reform. They are the ones who started using AI in their lesson preparation last month and found that it works. Your reader is doing the same thing. They just haven't said so out loud yet.
Japan filed COVID-19 case reports by fax in 2020. When the government tried to phase out fax machines, four hundred formal objections came in, from ministries, not frontline workers. The resistance is never where you think it is. It is in the structure, not the people. That pattern is what I work with every day.
The gap between private use and public acknowledgment, between the desk and the boardroom: that is where I work. This is happening in both countries, at the same time, in the same way. Nobody has written it yet. If this fits what you are working on, I am available. Reach me directly at priyankkawadhwa@gmail.com.
