19 hours ago
Looking for opportunities in Agentic AI, says startup investor Ganesh K
Nagpur: Ganesh K, the investor who promoted ventures like Bigbasket, Portea Medical, and HomeLane, is now looking for opportunities in Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based business models.
"The new tech has the ability to disrupt even the disruptors. Generative AI is the basic technology as Agentic AI goes much ahead. In this the prompts can be brief and just objective-based, and AI does the rest," Ganesh told TOI.
Ganesh was in the city to attend a meeting organised by the Vidarbha Management Association (VMA). He also held an interactive meeting with start-up promoters in the city and met other businessmen too.
Giving example of how Agentic AI works, Ganesh said if a businessman wants to buy tickets for the US, today he may assign his secretary to go ahead with the booking on the given dates using travel platform. "The same can be done through Agentic AI, which would operate in different layers. The 'AI agents' would do the various specific searches and throw up the results. It shows everything, from cheapest rates to the flights at preferred timings, and even hotels of choice.
This can also do away with the need for a travel booking platforms as the AI can directly access the airlines' or hotels systems and come up with the best fares. Even the need of human resources may go down," he said.
Ganesh said tier-2 centres like Nagpur are emerging as the next growth centre for AI tech. "One of the biggest advantages is that there is less competition among companies to hire talent. In contrast, in the IT hubs of the country, multiple companies are chasing the same talent pool.
Moreover, the smaller towns have more space for adopting technology as against the bigger cities," he said.
Amitabh Khanna, president of the Vidarbha Software Exporters Association, also interacted with Ganesh. "Visits by such entrepreneurs help boost entrepreneurship in the region," said Khanna.
Earlier, speaking at the VMA event, Ganesh explained how disruption has impacted the automobile industry. Battery-operated electric cars are challenging the traditional combustion engine. "It's no longer about fuel efficiency alone; cars today sell on the basis of features, technology and aspiration," he said.
He stressed disruption does not necessarily need to stem from originality. "Adopting and modifying existing viable ideas to suit evolving market needs is often more effective," he said.
