The Hills Are Alive With AI-Dropping

Even before Nvidia super-GPU Jensen Huang landed in Planet India last week, every businessman worth their salt has been peppering every sentence with two magic letters: A and I. It’s become so trendy that if you and your corpcon… sorry, corpcom team don’t mention AI, you’ll be deemed uncool. Or, so goes the thinking. During last week’s conversation with ET, when Huang said that all the ingredients are here in India to ‘manufacture AI and lead the AI revolution‘, such dhobi ghat-level AI-washing wasn’t what he had in mind.

AI is the new avocado toast of the corporate world – trendy, omnipresent, and being used left, right and centre even when a business AI-dropping – name-dropping AI – uses AI as much as a fish uses a bicycle. ‘Our cutting-edge AI-driven toothbrush guarantees 50% more plaque removal!’ Or having ‘AI’ in your conversations regardless of the topic – niece’s wedding, or your opinions on the war in Ukraine. But caveat, emptor-bhai.

Does your smart toaster really need to learn your breakfast habits and optimise its toasting algorithm? Truth is, AI-dropping is the latest biz buzz, equivalent to adding ‘organic’ or ‘superfood’ to your product label. So, next time you hear about the latest AI-powered agarbatti or AI-designed chappals, remember, it’s not really about artificial intelligence, but about artificially intelligent marketing.