India is built for AI agents. So why isn’t it using them?

Sometime last month, the world got its first real encounter with AI agents with Instinct, an app you can text on WhatsApp that can go and do things like cancel subscriptions, book a trip, buy the groceries. Investors valued it at around $2.5 billion within weeks. Last week, Meta followed with Muse which is taking over the US right now. In today’s episode, Praveen argues that the personal assistants story should have been an Indian story first. India has UPI, WhatsApp on every phone and a culture of delegation from drivers and cooks to RTO agents, CAs and the cousin who knows someone at the passport office. And yet personal agents haven't taken off here. To understand why, he has two returning guests on the show. Shreyas Srinivasan, co-founder of Alt Inc, which is building a social layer for AI so people can find others like them through how they use it. Founder of Insider, which Paytm acquired and later sold to Zomato, and former Chief Product Officer at Paytm. Dharmesh Ba, founder of 1990 Research Labs, a consumer-intelligence lab that helps companies with engagement and retention problems through primary research. Previously built Business Hero, WhatsApp automation for small businesses. He also writes the popular substack titled The India Notes on Indian consumer psychology. Both of them are power users of AI assistants. Shreyas runs OpenClaw, Hermes and Instinct and says he's "dated all of them", yet struggles to find uses for them. Dharmesh uses his in-between his therapy sessions and to mine eight years of Indian consumer interviews. Praveen surfaces The Ken's The Great Rewiring survey, in which subscribers listed the chores they want gone: "Madam, OTP?", telling the cook what to make, the school's Friday dress-up theme, managing parents' health. Shreyas argues most of these are solvable today on a general-purpose model, that power law will leave three or four general agents standing, and that UPI gives India no real edge over credit cards. Dharmesh argues that in India trust sits with people, like the hardware-store owner in Erode taking ten calls an hour, and that specialists will win wherever social standing is at stake. In the end, they also talk about the companies themselves. If an agent has no attention to capture and no friction to charge for, what happens to India's marketplaces and startups? Everyone has a theory, to listen which one you agree with, listen to this episode.