By Dinesh Gulati, COO, IndiaMART InterMESH Ltd
A PwC report states that AI will contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. In India alone, 60% of Indian startups have adopted AI in some form in 2025 (NASSCOM data). We are witnessing a rapid evolution of AI from a tool to a company resource, and the days are not far off when AI will be the new co-founder to every startup. Automation, deep research, and summarizing unstructured data are some of the tasks AI has been doing regularly, but the transition from a back-office tool to an active partner in decision-making, growth, and innovation is now becoming a reality.
Beyond office automation
A great cofounder brings complementary expertise, be it technology, finance, or business strategy, and acts as a great sounding board. Taking crucial decisions on the basis of experience and intuition is another skill set we look for in a co-founder. Over the last couple of years, AI has already been acting like a silent partner, available around the clock.
Some of the key tasks that AI is helping entrepreneurs with in their journey include:
Prompt & fast: From Ideation to Market Launch, AI has been a much faster tool to help with market studies, competition mapping, product designing, modeling, and projections. For any new product launch or a new market, AI has become a prompt and efficient GTM tool helping design the product, brand, communication, sales-channel strategy, thus building strong CRM and help in scaling fast post launch.
The genius marketing intern: Social media captions, image/video that resonate with your brand’s vision, trend-based research, initial drafts for blogs, emailers, and understanding the real-time engagement – all of this at the click of a few right prompts. Today, 42% of marketing and sales teams report regularly using generative AI, and it is bound to increase further in the coming years. As a startup, you no longer need a CMO or marketing mastermind co-founder, just a good prompt genius.
AI as the fractional CFO: The routine finance tasks, such as reconciliations, invoice processing, journal entries, monitoring payment cycles, understanding ideal supplier payment timings, late payers, inventory alignment, and many more, are already being automated by AI. On the strategic end, AI can identify the areas for budget reduction, flag anomalies, possible compliance breaches, along with possible solutions to make the whole finance function efficient. Need for a finance genius co-founder suddenly feels not so much of a need, is it?
HR & Operations assistant: From the talent acquisition department drafting job descriptions and screening relevant CVs, to HR and admin simplifying the payroll, appraisals, and employee-led engagements, AI is already pulling in most of the work in silos. The recruitment process costing can be reduced by up to 30% and time-to-hire can be cut to half, using AI. Taking it a notch further, AI can also predict who is at risk of leaving and why, studying employees’ performance and productivity patterns.
Data to decision-making consultant: AI’s ability to analyze massive datasets can do wonders in business operations. By combining intuition with intelligence, it can forecast customer demand, cash flow, market trends, understand customer feedback, and recommend possible solutions, and help you avoid ‘what if’ scenarios of your startup. It could be the real-time consultant that you need.
A cautious approach is what we need
AI is making inroads as a silent partner or an active founder, contributing significantly. However, it is imperative to take a few cautions while adopting AI. Currently, AI is only a guide, an advisor. Take its advice but use your own judgement as AI works on training modules, and at times these can give grossly wrong answers, that too confidently.
Keep a regular check on biases. Use AI tools for solving the basic and small problems first, get trained and gain hands-on experience yourself, and for your team by working on the basics. Be cautious about protecting your data because, if not used judiciously, you may end up exposing your sensitive data to the entire world.
While using AI, don’t let you and your people lose on their core strengths like critical thinking, creativity, and human emotions. Lastly, AI can be a cost guzzler if not used judiciously. Thus, keep a close watch on where to use AI tools and scale only if you see early success.
Using it, ‘just not’ seeing it
The majority of organizations have deployed AI in smaller processes at multiple intervention points already, but the current trends are quite encouraging, and we will see AI deployment move past the basics to move to the next levels progressively. The next set of unicorns may not have massive teams, but they will have AI-first operating models, helping entrepreneurs to bring speed, scale, cost efficiency, and innovation in their businesses as true co-founders.