Speaking at the Bharat Inclusion Summit 2025, CRED founder and CEO Kunal Shah remarked that 50 to 60% of ChatGPT users engage with the platform for non-productive purposes such as companionship, entertainment, and astrology. He urged individuals to align their time with their per-hour income and focus on efficiency to maximise productivity.

“People should calculate their per-hour income to understand the value of their time,” Shah quipped. His remarks align with his earlier warnings about AI’s transformative impact. In 2023, Shah predicted that 90% of jobs could be disrupted by AI within a decade, stressing the need for upskilling to stay relevant.

Interestingly, Shah’s point is reinforced by new data from Harvard Business Review, which reveals that people are increasingly using AI chatbots for personal and human reasons rather than for work. In 2025, the top use case of generative AI was for ‘therapy and companionship’, followed by ‘organising life’ and ‘finding purpose’. This is a shift from the top use cases in 2024 being all about generating ideas, editing text, and web search.

Shah also highlighted the rapid pace of technological evolution, noting that advancements in AI, from browsers to everyday tools, are accelerating. “It feels like changes are happening every month, and soon, they’ll occur daily,” he said. 

He encouraged the audience to adopt a mindset focused on practical applications of AI to solve real-world problems. Moreover, he also stressed the importance of financial literacy in the country and believes that kids aged 8–20 are the real tech drivers at home. According to him, they will soon also be knowledge and procurement leaders with the help of AI. 

“There is a chief technology officer in all of your houses between the ages of 8 to 20. They’ll soon become the chief procurement and knowledge officers of your homes, especially with AI helping them.”

This isn’t the first time Shah has shared such concerns. In a fireside chat with Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur at FTX’25, he voiced frustration over India’s tech narrative.

“We didn’t question why India didn’t invent WhatsApp or LED bulbs. We just adopted them and became the best at using them. That should be our approach with AI,” he argued.

Shah pointed to UPI as a model worth emulating, a made-in-India solution now being copied globally. “We built UPI, we are the beneficiaries of that. The world should be copying that,” he said.

He believes India’s focus shouldn’t be on competing with the US or China in building foundational LLMs, but rather on becoming the largest and smartest users of such tools.

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