Everyone’s racing to build the next ChatGPT wrapper. I’m watching it from the inside—having filed patents in IoT and Building Management Systems, and now building Kunwwer.ai—and I can tell you: 90% of what’s being funded right now will be irrelevant in 18 months.
Here’s the contrarian truth: AI won’t replace knowledge workers. It will expose which “knowledge workers” were never actually thinking.
The Hype Cycle Is Eating Itself
When I was building Su-Kam, we had inverters that became smarter over time. Not because we added intelligence randomly—but because we understood exactly which problem needed solving: power cuts in tier-2 and tier-3 cities where grid unreliability was destroying businesses and families. The technology served the problem.
Today, I see founders bolting AI onto products looking for a problem to justify it. That’s backwards. That’s how you build a demo, not a company.
Where AI Is Actually Going
I’ve spent serious time thinking about AI in two domains I know deeply: energy infrastructure and human capital.
In energy, the real opportunity isn’t a chatbot that answers questions about your electricity bill. It’s predictive maintenance, load forecasting, and grid-edge intelligence that makes power more reliable for 600 million people who still experience regular outages. My IoT and BMS patent work pointed toward this years before “AI” became a buzzword.
In HR and talent—which is where Kunwwer.ai is focused—AI is going to do something more interesting than automate recruitment. It’s going to surface potential that human biases consistently miss. A 45-year-old woman from a small town who taught herself Python. A factory floor supervisor with extraordinary systems thinking. AI, properly trained, doesn’t care about your college or your accent.
That’s not hype. That’s a structural shift in how organizations find and develop talent.
The Builders Who Will Win
The founders I’m backing right now share one trait: they’re using AI to remove a specific friction point they’ve experienced personally. Not “AI for X industry.” A precise pain point, with AI as the scalpel.
One founder I recently spoke with had spent 8 years as a factory operations manager. She’s building AI-powered SOPs that update themselves based on production floor anomalies. That’s a real problem. That’s a real founder.
The ones pitching me “AI-powered [existing software category]” with no domain depth? I stop them at slide three.
One Automation You Can Try Today
Stop using AI as a search engine.
Instead: take your next meeting agenda and paste it into Claude or GPT-4 with this prompt: “You are a skeptical board member. What are the three most important questions I’m not asking in this agenda?”
Run that before every important meeting for 30 days. Tell me it doesn’t change how you prepare.
That’s not AI replacing your judgment. That’s AI sharpening it.
The builders who understand that distinction are the ones I want to work with.
#AI #Entrepreneurship
