VP - Marketing and Customer Experience, @Zoho. ❤️ India—SaaS—Coffee—Cooking—Poetry—Uttar Pradesh. Also: beaches, mountains, and villages. Your Zoho guy!
Delhi
Joined December 2007
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Good morning, India! 🇮🇳❤️
While the general mindset around building a business is to move fast and break things, we asked, how do you stay the course and build one for the long term?
At @Zoho, we chose an unconventional path by taking our time to validate our convictions and building a suite of world-class products. None of this could have happened overnight—it has been a journey of patience and perseverance, and one that required staying true to our beliefs, through all the highs and lows. This campaign is a reflection of our approach towards sustainable growth.
Watch video (English): youtu.be/4ivmul54L-w
Watch video (Hindi): youtu.be/lJen7rbL6vg
Website: zoho.com/time/
#GoZoho
My shopping research has a new intern. Or two. These are AI agents, of course. :)
For the last 6 weeks now, my agents across @instinct, Tab, and @hark_labs have been doing a ton of interesting stuff for me (picking up email chains with banks and other services, digging thru loyalty programmes, checking me in on a preferred seat on an Air India flight, adding grocery to my Blinkit cart and checking out, etc.) as well as the boring bits - comparing prices and reading the reviews I never would. I show up only to pay. (It does have a secure wallet but I don't trust it enough. Yet!)
Lately though, things have started to get interesting. Amazon doesn't want my agent there. In the US, I read that Delta and Chase have started blocking agents too, from booking flights and from bank accounts. Of course. An agent walks past the sponsored listing and the "frequently bought together" row. :)
The agent just wants the best product at the best price. That's bad news for anyone who earns from the walk, right? Oh, ecommerce.
Where does this end though? My gut feeling: the blockers bleed customers to whoever welcomes agents, then quietly come back on their own terms. Ads return too, except now the brand pays to be the agent's first pick.
Most Indian D2C brands we know grew up on Instagram and sold on their own websites, well outside Amazon's rulebook. Instagram gave them customers nobody else could gate. (And margins nobody else could take!)
Agents are that door again. A brand that lets an agent read its catalog and finish the checkout will pick up the orders the marketplaces are turning away.
My bet: D2C brands shall get a second wind. Only this time, the customer walking into your online store may be someone's software, with their card on file. Yeah, my agent. Ha!
If you run a D2C brand and are already building for this, I'd love to hear how. Coffee's on me, not on my agent. ☕
Too many AI personal assistants, too little time to assess all of them. Nice work here: assistantbenchmark.com
Zoholics, our flagship user conference at @Zoho, is a chance to put faces to the businesses we build for.
This year's edition brought our customers and partners to our Chennai campus, marking 30 years of Zoho Corp.
#ZoholicsIndia2026 was about Zia Chat (AI interface for frictionless work), our foray into vertical solutions, and building world-class business software from India. Keynotes, Product demos and discussions, audience questions, and a ton of conversations. Oh, and an evening full of music I didn't want to end! This video brings it all back. ❤️
My heartfelt thanks to @pratykumar from @SarvamAI for joining us for this special one. 🙏🏼
Thank you to everyone who was a part of this. And to our teams: a lot of work goes into making a day like this happen. Proud of what we put together. It's time to get back to building. 🙌🏼
#GoZoho
A look back at #ZoholicsIndia2026 in Chennai! 💙
A milestone edition filled with engaging discussions, meaningful connections, and valuable insights into the future of business. The event also marked 30 years of Zoho Corp., making it a memorable milestone for our community.
Thank you to our customers, partners, and attendees for making this edition special. Here’s to the ideas we exchanged, the connections we built, and the possibilities that lie ahead. 🙌
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Himachal’s finally getting its first snowfall of the season . It’s snowing in Lahaul Spiti and the upper areas of Himachal Pradesh. Winter is finally here guys 🏔️
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Other companies announce mass layoffs and it’s treated like just another day in tech.
Zoho skips appraisals to protect jobs, and suddenly everyone’s criticizing it.
As an ex-Zoho engineer, I’ve seen firsthand how much the company cares about its employees. Respect for choosing the harder path.
Sridhar has shared the difficult decision we have taken to skip appraisals this year, given the rising costs and uncertain outlook for the software industry. Every software business will be having this discussion and making difficult choices.
These are real-world situations where there is no single right answer. The decision depends on what we choose to prioritise. These are also decisions AI cannot make for us.
During COVID, we made a similar decision. We offered free licences to customers, even though it meant losing revenue. This time, we had to deal with the sharp increase in server costs. We discussed these options internally.
Lay off employees. While layoffs are common across businesses, we felt it wasn't the right choice when our business is still growing. We have over a million customers to support and products to keep improving. Cutting jobs could affect both employees & customers. Instead, we want to reduce costs by focusing on R&D to make our products and infrastructure more efficient.
Reduce other expenses. We have decided to cut our marketing spend and are looking at ways to improve efficiency across the business.
Increase prices. Customers are already dealing with rising costs and geopolitical uncertainty. So we don't want to add to their burden. We want to first do what is in our control before doing this.
Skip appraisal. This was a difficult decision, but we wanted to avoid layoffs and price increases. So we made this tough decision.
As a private company, we have to take care of our customers and employees. Publicly listed companies also have shareholder expectations to consider.
There is no one right decision in these situations. Ultimately, it comes down to what we choose to prioritise and how we balance the needs of our customers, employees and business for the long term.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Sridhar has shared the difficult decision we have taken to skip appraisals this year, given the rising costs and uncertain outlook for the software industry. Every software business will be having this discussion and making difficult choices.
These are real-world situations where there is no single right answer. The decision depends on what we choose to prioritise. These are also decisions AI cannot make for us.
During COVID, we made a similar decision. We offered free licences to customers, even though it meant losing revenue. This time, we had to deal with the sharp increase in server costs. We discussed these options internally.
Lay off employees. While layoffs are common across businesses, we felt it wasn't the right choice when our business is still growing. We have over a million customers to support and products to keep improving. Cutting jobs could affect both employees & customers. Instead, we want to reduce costs by focusing on R&D to make our products and infrastructure more efficient.
Reduce other expenses. We have decided to cut our marketing spend and are looking at ways to improve efficiency across the business.
Increase prices. Customers are already dealing with rising costs and geopolitical uncertainty. So we don't want to add to their burden. We want to first do what is in our control before doing this.
Skip appraisal. This was a difficult decision, but we wanted to avoid layoffs and price increases. So we made this tough decision.
As a private company, we have to take care of our customers and employees. Publicly listed companies also have shareholder expectations to consider.
There is no one right decision in these situations. Ultimately, it comes down to what we choose to prioritise and how we balance the needs of our customers, employees and business for the long term.
The business outlook for software is uncertain and AI has raised costs dramatically with a) massive 4-fold increase in server prices which we need for data centers b) AI usage increasing rapidly, leading to much higher expenses, which we are trying to control.
On top of that is the challenging geopolitical backdrop.
We have cut down on our marketing budget. We have also told our employees that we cannot have our usual pay increase this year. I have apolgized for not being able to avoid this.
We will work hard to avoid mass layoffs but the outlook for software jobs in general is grim. We have not been growing our employee count for 18 months now.
Most of our employees understand the situation. I am thankful to them.
We are in the middle of reinventing ourselves. The next 3-5 years will decide how our reinvention has worked. Please pray for us 🙏
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Marketing 101: An ad should sell a life people want for themselves.
No one wants to be this family.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.
The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.
But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.
So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.
TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Unfortunately, we are being blocked by certain oligarchs in order to maintain their monopolistic chokehold on the Indian people. You can guess who they are …
This is a crime against the people of India!
India needs @Starlink 🇮🇳
• 11,256 of India’s listed villages still lacked 4G coverage as of May 2026.
• India had 1.093 billion internet subscriptions in March 2026, but only 440.87 million were rural. Rural subscription density was 48.31 per 100 people, compared with 126.80 in urban India.
• BharatNet had laid over 850,000 route-km of fibre and made about 221,000 Gram Panchayats service-ready. However, its Points of Presence were reported operational at only 80,472 Gram Panchayats in June 2026.
• Only 4.26% of India’s internet subscriptions were wired connections in March 2026. Starlink could give underserved communities another route to high-speed broadband.
• Starlink has already built 20 gateway sites in India, according to SpaceX Vice President of Starlink Business Operations Lauren Dreyer, speaking at India Mobile Congress today.
• Starlink says it has developed India-specific security controls designed to keep Indian user data within India.
• Its satellite network could bring high-speed internet to remote villages, mountains and islands where extending fibre or mobile networks is difficult.
• Better connectivity could help rural schools access online learning, clinics offer remote consultations and small businesses reach more customers. Starlink already supports education and healthcare in remote communities internationally.
• Portable Starlink terminals have supported disaster response around the world. They could give Indian emergency teams backup connectivity when floods, earthquakes or storms damage ground networks.
• Direct to Cell could also help ordinary 4G phones connect beyond tower coverage, subject to Indian approvals and mobile operator partnerships.
• The government itself identifies difficult terrain, low commercial viability and infrastructure constraints as reasons for remaining coverage gaps. This is exactly where Starlink could help India reach more people.
• India should complete the remaining clearances and spectrum allocation so Starlink can begin commercial service.
• SpaceX’s Vice President of Starlink Business Operations, Lauren Dreyer, said that Starlink is ready to help achieve Prime Minister Modi’s vision of 100% connectivity across India. She highlighted its potential to connect remote classrooms, support telemedicine and restore connectivity after disasters, adding, “With Starlink, people can get connected within minutes, not years.”
India’s hardest-to-reach communities deserve reliable internet too.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Amazon shutting down consumer agent access (now both Muse and Instinct) is both completely rational and a big mistake
They have plausible reasons:
1. Advertising accounts for ~10% of Amazon revenue, but an estimated 50-60% of operating profit because it's so high margin. People purchasing via agents = fewer consumer eyeballs to monetize
2. Amazon knows from experience how dangerous it is to give another platform a lever to ramp up / down your distribution 👀 They've done this to many retailers themselves
3. They are in a very good spot re: near-term defensibility - with ~250M Prime subs (who are habituated to buying on Amazon) + a massive logistics and distribution network that you can't vibe code
However, this logic is short-sighted (IMO). Agents are inevitable, especially for the kind of purchases people make on Amazon (low consideration, frequent, fairly urgent or recurring).
I don't think Amazon is going to come out with a first-class consumer agent on their own...and in the meantime, why anger your valuable users and make them even consider alternatives?
It's almost never a good idea to be on the wrong side of innovation. I'd much rather see them continue to greenlight agent traffic (it's pretty minimal now!) and work on adjusting to an agent-first world in the meantime.
Not trying to be a coffee snob but the #1 hack of loving your black ☕ a lot more is to let it cool down for a while before you start sipping it. Esp. true with the lighter roasts. 🤓
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
We are slowly removing coincidence out of our lives. We don't pick a restaurant before even checking the ratings. We don't hear music before the algorithm ever predicts we'll like it. We don't even take a route before maps removes the wrong turn. Barely meet someone even before checking their profile. And none of that is necessarily bad. But that's what makes it interesting because every tool nowadays removes every tiny bit of uncertainty, but uncertainty is where a lot of your favorite memories came from. The place you found by accident, the friend you met because the plans changed. The street you weren't supposed to be on that ended up having the best restaurant you've ever been to. We've optimized our life so well to the point where nothing unexpected ever has room to even happen and a life with no accidents is easier to manage, but it's just harder to remember.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
This was almost way too easy, @natfriedman @alexandr_wang 😮
I turned my Xteink eReader into an always-on Muse pocket display for Calliope (my Muse) to display itself and show status updates.
And this attaches with MagSafe to my phone, so I can always see relevant updates from Muse by just turning my phone around.
The setup flow in the Muse app was super smooth and you can just ask Muse to load or automate content on the display.
I genuinely love the hacker-friendly aspect of this. Well done.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
A salute to flydubai’s brave Indian pilot, Captain Smit Machchhar. Stabbed and wounded, yet he stood his ground. With the courage of "Arjuna" in the face of danger and the resolve of "Hanuman" when duty called, he fought back, opened the cockpit door, and gave the passengers and crew the chance to prevent disaster. He helped save 174 lives.
Tonight, from the UAE to India to Israel, people are united in gratitude, wishing Captain Machchhar a swift and full recovery.
A hero to his passengers, to aviation, and to people everywhere.
Salute, Captain.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Never forget the words the western press used for what happened in the cockpit.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
A very pleasant weather this weekend does not mean early winters in north India.
Establishing cyclonic circulation starting next week will initiate rapid withdrawal of monsoon from 70% of India by 3rd/4th October.
Dry north west winds will take over, "October Heat" is a thing and it will grip north west India specifically Rajasthan(39-42°c). Punjab, Haryana Chandigarh, Delhi NCR, West UP to experience maximum temperatures in the range of 37 to 40°c during 3rd - 8th October.
Good part is, the humidity will go down, high day temperatures with sunlight will keep the afternoon hours slightly hot. Nights will be bearable.
