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Avadhoot Kulkarni
Guest
Introduction: From Eye Rolls to Eureka
The current AI wave is not the first one. We saw it a few times earlier too. In the 1960s, then in the 1980s and again in the 1990s, with each “new” AI technique that was supposed to have the grand dream of AI finally realized. During the tail end of the 1990s wave, I was doing my master’s in Intelligent Systems. Back then, learning AI meant learning various AI decision algorithms, knowledge systems, Logic trees, LISP programming language, defining neural network structures, image processing in tools like MATLAB, learning human brain and cognitive science and all that fun stuff. But, even in their wildest dreams, nobody said things like “prompt engineering.”
So, when ChatGPT exploded onto the scene, my first reaction was… skepticism.
It was more like: “Seriously? People call this, AI? What even is this… entertainment with confidence?”
Everywhere I looked, people were posting their “groundbreaking experiments” with it:
“I asked it to write a love letter from a broccoli to a cauliflower.”
“It explained the plot of Game of Thrones in the voice of Darth Vader.”
“It named my pet goldfish using Jungian archetypes.”
“Write a poem like a wet cat in rain, standing on London bridge would.”
At some point, someone proudly showed me how ChatGPT wrote an apology email from their dog to the neighbor’s cat. That was the moment I mentally unplugged my internal GPU and said, “Nope, this is a fad. Let the hype train pass once again.”
It felt like a circus of weird prompts and even weirder outputs. Fun? Sure. World-changing? Pleeeeeeease!
I wasn’t just skeptical. I was confident in my skepticism. I’d been in the trenches of AI for too long to be swayed by what looked like a toy wrapped in sci-fi marketing.
But over time, and to my surprise, that changed.
This blog is my story: how I went from dismissing Generative AI as a party trick to embracing it as a powerful tool. From denial and disbelief to learning, experimenting and eventually becoming one of the voices guiding our company’s AI strategy and social impact.
If you’re skeptical right now, I get it. You should be. But maybe some of what changed in my mind will resonate with you.
Denial: “This Isn’t AI, It’s Just Fancy Parroting”
If I had ₹10 for every time someone told me, “ChatGPT just wrote my wedding vows!” or “It helped me name my startup selling eco-friendly socks,” I could’ve funded my own LLM by now.
In those early days, my response to Generative AI was a mix of amusement, irritation and professional focus on practical use cases of digital products (without AI).
I’ve been elbow-deep in building products that solve real market problems. These products and technologies were helping people, businesses and users to make their lives better. I knew technology can only benefit people if it solves real problems practically and the so-called AI wasn’t even close.
Generative AI tools, on the other hand, felt like an overconfident intern who always had an answer, even when it made no sense.
I dismissed it as “autocomplete on steroids”, built more for novelty than utility. The responses were fluffy, generic and often confidently wrong. Like a janitor in the boy’s dorm room of preschool having great ideas on avoiding the third world war and fixing structural challenges in the world economy overnight.
It didn’t help that people were treating it like some divine oracle:
“ChatGPT gave me a recipe for shampoo-flavored cupcakes!”
“It rewrote 'Bohemian Rhapsody' from the perspective of a confused robot!”
“It planned my vacation, proposed to my girlfriend AND drafted my resignation email!”
I rolled my eyes so many times I’m pretty sure I did a full 360 at one point.
The logic was simple: If people are asking unreal, nonsensical, impractical things to AI and its answering those authoritatively, thoroughly and with the divine flare of confidence, then we’re not talking about enterprise-grade value here, are we?
I wasn’t just unconvinced. I was as confident as Generative AI about it.
But deep down, there was a quiet, nagging voice. The same one that nudged me years ago to explore neural networks when everyone else was obsessed with business rules engines. It said: “Are you sure you’re not missing something?”
Spoiler: I was.
Awareness: Something Was Shifting
Months passed, and I remained comfortably lodged in my denial phase.
The world around me was still hyped. Tech leaders were posting dramatic predictions about how AI would automate everything, decimate jobs and turn the world upside down by next Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the people around me were still:
Sending the same Excel sheets
Writing long-winded documents and emails
Attending meetings that should’ve been emails
Business as usual.
So, I told myself: “See? Nothing’s really changed.”
But then, something did.
One afternoon, a colleague pinged me on Teams with a message that caught my eye. He shared a neat, structured summary of a Gartner research paper completed with trends, key takeaways and even suggested actions for our product strategy.
And then, with a glimmering-face emoji, he added: “Summarized this with ChatGPT in under 30 seconds! What do you think?”
I wanted to poke holes in it. And I did. But still, it was… pretty good.
It was better than what I would have expected. It was better than what I’d seen from any junior analysts. And faster than anything I could’ve ever pulled off.
A few days later, another colleague with a bit of, how should I say, “tentative” English shared a beautifully written marriage invitation email draft. It was warm, engaging, funny, romantic and everything a wedding invitation needs to be. It even included subtle personal touches about the bride’s and groom’s unique characters.
When I asked how he did it, he smiled and said, “Oh, I asked ChatGPT to help me create that. It made it so much easier.”
And that’s when it hit me.
This wasn’t just about fun prompts or silly outputs anymore. This was about real people solving real problems. It was about improving clarity, saving time and even boosting confidence.
For someone like me, who is fluent in ideas but always aware that English isn’t my first language, this struck a personal chord. The thought that I could use a tool to:
Refine my message
Improve tone without second-guessing
Structure complex thoughts more naturally
That wasn’t all hype. There are practical uses to it. The mere toy was now drastically improved to become a useful tool that can be used to shape the new world. That was practical, personal and powerful.
The shift had begun. Not with a bang but with a well-written email and a neatly summarized research doc and many such small nudges, I started observing which were real, practical and impactful.
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