I conducted a session on Fri, 15 May 2026 at Gramener All Hands - Remote. Summary: Software is shifting from fixed interfaces and workflows to agents that interpret goals and choose actions dynamically. Products should be designed around delegated outcomes. Here’s the link to the session
I conducted a session on Thu, 30 Apr 2026 at Harvard Graduate School of Education panel. Summary: AI breaks the old link between learning, producing work, and proving competence. Education must redesign practice and assessment around what humans should still learn and demonstrate. Here’s the link to the session Links: Video (92 min) Transcript Audio (92 min)
I conducted a session on Wed, 22 Apr 2026 at Dinner conversation / panel discussion - Edison, New Jersey, USA. Summary: AI makes traditional signals of competence easy to fake. Skills and assessments should focus on valuable questions, validation, accountability, and outcomes AI cannot certify for us. Here’s the link to the session
Lyria (Gemini’s new “Create Song” feature) is helping me in new ways. Earlier this week, it created a jingle for my talk. Yesterday I ran an AI Workshop for IAS officers. As part of that, I asked Gemini: Create a soulful vote of thanks (with patriotic Indian music playing in the background) naming each of these people. … and listed each person in the workshop. The song began… (Listen to the song) … with these lyrics: ...
I deliver about 3-5 talks a month and usually prepare for them. Thanks to AI (but even otherwise), I have a steady stream of new content. So, I just to assemble the story. For example, in my TEDx Whitefield talk “Prisoners of Birth”, I shared the impact of name, gender, lineage, place, and time of birth. I didn’t execute any new analysis. I just cherry-picked disparate analyses into a theme. (Took me three days to plan, though.) ...
I conducted a session on Thu, 26 Mar 2026 at #hackoftheday. Summary: Journalists can use AI to turn curiosity into rapid experiments and explainers. The machine accelerates research and production; editorial judgment decides what is worth publishing. Here’s the link to the session
I spoke today on Design in the Age of Infinite Generativity at the Chennai Design Festival. You can read about the talk in the link about. This post is about my preparation. Tue 10 Mar 2026. Damn! Palani’s asked for the topic. Claude, what should I talk about!? Fri 20 Mar 2026. ChatGPT, tell me who the other speaker are. Fri 20 Mar 2026. Oh, I’ll just pull a bunch of links, use browser tabs as slides, create some slide dividers, and I’m ready! Sat 21 Mar 2026 1:00 pm. I’m NOT ready! The story doesn’t flow. It’s rubbish. Sat 21 Mar 2026 3:00 pm. Let me drop some of the boring ones. I just have 15 minutes. Sat 22 Mar 2026 3:30 pm. Oh, maybe I should listen to what the others are saying, just… you know… … and that proved the best decision ever, because Senthil of Payir showed a re-usable fabric calendar that converts into a bag. It was a fantastic idea, so I got curious. ...
I conducted a session on Sat, 21 Mar 2026 at NIE Faculty Session - Mysore. Summary: AI gives individuals on-demand access to research, analysis, and structured advice once reserved for expert teams. Institutions should redesign work around that new leverage. Here’s the link to the session Links: Transcript
I was at a panel on AI in SDLC at PyConf. Here’s the summary of my advice: Process Make AI your entire SDLC loop. Record client calls, feed them to a coding agent to directly build & deploy the solution. Record your prompts, run post-mortems, and distill them into SKILLS.md files for reuse. Prompting Ask AI to make output more reviewable. Don’t waste time reviewing unclear output. Prefer directional feedback (feeling, emotion, intent) over implementational. Also give AI freedom to do things its way. Learn from that - you’ll be surprised. Learning ...
I conducted a session on Wed, 18 Mar 2026 at IIT Madras Academic Advisory Council - Chennai. Summary: When every student has a powerful AI tutor and solver, conventional closed-book assumptions collapse. Assessments must measure judgment, verification, and application instead. Here’s the link to the session Links: Ideas Ideas Table Transcript
I conducted a session on Wed, 18 Mar 2026 at Office of Institutional Advancement, IIT Madras - Chennai. Summary: AI can automate research, outreach, personalization, and analysis in institutional advancement. The largest gains come from redesigning workflows rather than adding a chatbot. Here’s the link to the session Links: Use Cases Transcript
I conducted a session on Wed, 18 Mar 2026 at Straive webinar - Remote. Summary: Autonomous agents are useful only when their actions can be trusted. Constrain workflows, verify intermediate outputs, and design explicit checks before granting autonomy. Here’s the link to the session Links: Download slides Transcript
I conducted a session on Sun, 15 Mar 2026 at PyConf Hyderabad - Hyderabad. Summary: Students increasingly learn Python by asking AI, copying examples, and debugging interactively. Teaching should embrace these paths while preserving conceptual understanding and verification. Here’s the link to the session
I conducted a session on Thu, 12 Mar 2026 at NIE AI Roadmap - Mysore. Summary: Engineering education should treat AI as infrastructure across the curriculum, not a standalone elective. Courses, assessment, and faculty workflows all need redesign. Here’s the link to the session Links: Story Transcript
I conducted a session on Thu, 26 Feb 2026 at Ashoka University - Sonepat. Summary: Coding agents let humanities students build software without becoming programmers. The valuable skill is expressing intent clearly and critically evaluating what the machine produces. Here’s the link to the session Links: Video (52 min) Transcript
I conducted a session on Wed, 11 Feb 2026 at Applied Materials - Bangalore. Summary: Modern AI is capable enough to handle surprisingly broad knowledge work. Treat it like a smart junior colleague: delegate aggressively, then review where it matters. Here’s the link to the session Links: Transcript Audio (34 min)
I conducted a session on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 at Deloitte TXA Academy - Hyderabad. Summary: Agents turn LLMs from answer generators into workers that use tools, execute multi-step tasks, and recover from failures. The challenge is control and verification. Here’s the link to the session Links: Video (67 min) Transcript Audio (67 min)
For those who missed my Applied Vibe Coding Workshop at NPTEL, here’s the video: You can also: Read this summary of the talk Read the transcript Or, here are the three dozen lessons from the workshop: Definition: Vibe coding is building apps by talking to a computer instead of typing thousands of lines of code. Foundational Mindset Lessons “In a workshop, you do the work” - Learning happens through doing, not watching. “If I say something and AI says something, trust it, don’t trust me” - For factual information, defer to AI over human intuition. “Don’t ever be stuck anywhere because you have something that can give you the answer to almost any question” - AI eliminates traditional blockers. “Imagination becomes the bottleneck” - Execution is cheap; knowing what to build is the constraint. “Doing becomes less important than knowing what to do” - Strategic thinking outweighs tactical execution. “You don’t have to settle for one option. You can have 20 options” - AI makes parallel exploration cheap. Practical Vibe Coding Lessons Success metric: “Aim for 10 applications in a 1-2 hour workshop” - Volume and iteration over perfection. The subscription vs. platform distinction: “Your subscriptions provide the brains to write code, but don’t give you tools to host and turn it into a live working app instantly.” Add documentation for users: First-time users need visual guides or onboarding flows. Error fixing success rate: “About one in three times” fixing errors works. “If it doesn’t work twice, start again-sometimes the same prompt in a different tab works.” Planning mode before complex builds: “Do some research. Find out what kind of application along this theme can be really useful and why. Give me three or four options.” Ask “Do I need an app, or can the chatbot do it?” - Sometimes direct AI conversation beats building an app. Local HTML files work: “Just give me a single HTML file… opening it in my browser should work” - No deployment infrastructure needed. “The skill we are learning is how to learn” - Specific tool knowledge is temporary; meta-learning is permanent. Vibe Analysis Lessons “The most interesting data sets are our own data” - Personal data beats sample datasets. Accessible personal datasets: WhatsApp chat exports Netflix viewing history (Account > Viewing Activity > Download All) Local file inventory (ls -R or equivalent) Bank/credit card statements Screen time data (screenshot > AI digitization) ChatGPT’s hidden built-in tools: FFmpeg (audio/video), ImageMagick (images), Poppler (PDFs) “Code as art form” - Algorithmic art (Mandelbrot, fractals, Conway’s Game of Life) can be AI-generated and run automatically. “Data stories vs dashboards”: “A dashboard is basically when we don’t know what we want.” Direct questions get better answers than open-ended visualization. Prompting Wisdom Analysis prompt framework: “Analyze data like an investigative journalist” - find surprising insights that make people say “Wait, really?” Cross-check prompt: “Check with real world. Check if you’ve made a mistake. Check for bias. Check for common mistakes humans make.” Visualization prompt: “Write as a narrative-driven data story. Write like Malcolm Gladwell. Draw like the New York Times data visualization team.” “20 years of experience” - Effective prompts require domain expertise condensed into instructions. Security & Governance Simon Willison’s “Lethal Trifecta”: Private data + External communication + Untrusted content = Security risk. Pick any two, never all three. “What constitutes untrusted content is very broad” - Downloaded PDFs, copy-pasted content, even AI-generated text may contain hidden instructions. Same governance as human code: “If you know what a lead developer would do to check junior developer code, do that.” Treat AI like an intern: “The way I treat AI is exactly the way I treat an intern or junior developer.” Business & Career Implications “Social skills have a higher uplift on salary than math or engineering skills” - Research finding from mid-80s/90s onward. Differentiation challenge: “If you can vibe code, anyone can vibe code. The differentiation will come from the stuff you are NOT vibe coding.” “The highest ROI investment I’ve made in life is paying $20 for ChatGPT or Claude” - Worth more than 30 Netflix subscriptions in utility. Where Vibe Coding Fails Failure axes: “Large” and “not easy for software to do” - Complexity increases failure rates. Local LLMs (Ollama, etc.): “Possible but not as fast or capable. Useful offline, but doesn’t match online experience yet.” Final Takeaways “Practice vibe coding every day for one month” - Habit formation requires forced daily practice. “Learn to give up” - When something fails repeatedly, start fresh rather than debugging endlessly. “Share what you vibe coded” - Teaching others cements your own learning. “We learn best when we teach.” Tool knowledge is temporary: “This field moves so fast, by the time somebody comes up with a MOOC, it’s outdated.”
In my Mining Digital Exhaust workshop on Saturday, One discovered that they cycle when life is unstable, not for fitness. Another found that their buys are good but sells are bad trades. I learnt that I watch YouTube most at office (12-4 pm), not at home. How? A fairly straight-forward process: Export your personal data. (Use Chrome Devtools Protocol to scrape.) Upload to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, … and have them analyze with code. Have them narrate in the style of your favorite author. Models are super smart, but everyone has equal access to them. Your personal data is unique. Combine them to get something powerful. ...
I conducted a session on Fri, 05 Dec 2025 at SCDM India Conference 2025 - Hyderabad, India. Summary: LLMs can automate expensive clinical-data work from protocol checks to anomaly detection and enrollment analysis, provided verification is designed into the workflow. Here’s the link to the session Links: Story Transcript Audio (30 min)