Just the other day, venturing into Terminal 3 of New Delhi’s airport, I chanced upon the digital hoarding of a pharma company known, among other things, for its condom ads starring a female film personality. But the person on this hoarding was not her.
Further research using my trusted new assistant, which comes free with the mobile phone service, revealed it was not a person, but a brand ambassador generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Thus began a fair few minutes of pleasurable prompting in the AI app while sitting at the boarding gate to find out more about AI-generated brand ambassadors. It seems this particular figure in the condom ad on the T3 hoarding made her first appearance this year itself and has a very human name: Myra Kapoor. And she is not the only one of her ilk.
More and more companies are generating brand ambassadors using AI. Several others run campaigns with popular virtual influencers created by specialised studios and with names such as Kyra, Naina, Aditi, Radhika, and so on. Curiously, the AI app on my phone did not throw up a single masculine name, though it went on to say that the return on investment on virtual brand ambassadors is higher because they cost considerably less than human ones.
We don’t know how human brand ambassadors will cope with this latest challenge to their lucrative hegemony. But that such things exist and that one can find out so much about them within minutes is a testament to what modern technology can do. Indeed, we live in an era of magic, when the sci-fi stuff of as recent as 40 years ago has become mundane and everyday. Maybe one day the annual air quality menace of north India will be solved using technology—now that all other ways seem to founder with regularity. As it turns out, about 40 representatives of startups and fund houses attended a meeting in New Delhi on December 13 to discuss the NCR’s air quality problem.
We will see where this goes, but startups are perhaps the best bet to solve the problem, because that is what the best startups have always done: Solve intractable problems. And they go where few have ventured before.
Look at the way space tech startups are soaring in the country. The sector was a near monopoly of the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) till 2020. But in the few years since then, as the government opened up the sector to private participation, as many as 200 startups have mushroomed. And they cover the gamut: From rockets to satellites and equipment manufacturing. As Samreen Wani and Naini Thaker report, there is no limit to their ambition.
Estimates say India could garner eight to 10 percent of the global space business pie, with a value of $44 billion, by 2033. The small satellites market, in particular, beckons them. And people are betting that the time-honoured Indian strengths of frugality and practicality will have their say in space as well. But Indian startups are not shying away from daunting tasks; they are getting into complex areas such as propulsion and working on a future increasingly reliant on reusable launch vehicles.
Who would have thought we would get here so soon. It seems only yesterday that our people working in information technology and business process outsourcing companies were being described as—pejorative and unfair as it was—white-collar coolies. And here we are, poised to send the country’s first privately built multi-stage orbital vehicle into space, perhaps as soon as early next year.
Maybe one day some startups will come down a little bit to address the air in our atmosphere.
First Published: Dec 22, 2025, 14:14
Subscribe Now(This story appears in the Dec 26, 2025 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, Click here.)