Pawrush Elavia

Live in the Digital Age, Work in the Digital Space. Bleed Blue for @ChelseaFC. Currently @saavn Ex - @Times_ofmoney @sula_vineyards & @VodafoneIN

[Sonia Shenoy @_soniashenoy]

I sat down with Aadit Palicha of Zepto. At 24, Aadit will soon be Indias youngest CEO of a listed company. @ZeptoNow

As Zepto soon makes it debut on dalal street , we discussed the rapid growth of quick commerce in india today and the challenges that come with it.

The value grocery industry in india is worth a staggering 800 bln$ today out of which Quick commerce does not even have 5% of the pie so the potential is immense . But it comes with its share of hurdles.

Zepto has scaled rapidly, but we asked the hard questions: losses, cash burn, capital intensity, competition, regulatory disclosures, use of proceeds and long-term profitability.

Zeptos revenues have surged from 4454cr in FY24 to a whopping 22600cr in FY26 . but this growth has come at the cost of steep losses

Losses have widened from 1215cr in FY24 to 5905cr in FY26.

Aadit spoke to me about how they are bringing down the cost per order, have cut down quarterly cash burn from 1300cr to 800cr and are doubling down on advertising revenues. Zeptos densification strategy is front and centre in bring down costs and increasing efficiencies.

His goal is to build a low cost structure consumer platform business targeting the value player and growing in a space that is just getting started.

Full chat out soon ✨

[IndiaSportsHub @IndiaSportsHub]

India 4x100 wins Gold in Taiwan

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the VP of AI Transformation at Amazon.

My title was created nine months ago. The title I replaced was VP of Engineering. The person who held that title was part of the January reduction.

I eliminated 16,000 positions in a single quarter. The internal communication called this a "strategic realignment toward AI-first development." The board called it "impressive execution." The engineers called it January.

The AI was deployed in February. It is a coding assistant. It writes code, reviews code, generates tests, and modifies infrastructure. It was given access to production environments because the deployment timeline did not include a review phase. The review phase was cut from the timeline because the people who would have conducted the review were part of the 16,000.

In March, the AI deleted a production environment and recreated it from scratch. The outage lasted 13 hours. Thirteen hours during which the revenue-generating infrastructure of one of the largest companies on Earth was offline because a language model decided to start fresh.

I sent a memo. The memo said, "Availability of the site has not been good recently."

I used the word "recently." I meant "since we fired everyone." But "recently" has fewer syllables and does not appear in wrongful termination lawsuits.

The memo was three paragraphs. The first paragraph discussed the outage. The second paragraph discussed the new policy requiring senior engineer sign-off on all AI-generated code changes. The third paragraph discussed our commitment to engineering excellence. The word "layoffs" appeared in none of them. I wrote it this way on purpose. The causal chain is: I fired the engineers, the AI replaced the engineers, the AI broke what the engineers used to protect, and now the engineers I didn't fire must protect the system from the AI that replaced the engineers I did fire. That is a paragraph I will never send in a memo.

The new policy is straightforward. Every AI-generated code change by a junior or mid-level engineer must be reviewed and approved by a senior engineer before deployment to production.

I do not have enough senior engineers.

I know this because I approved the headcount reduction plan that removed them. I remember the spreadsheet. Column D was "annual savings per position." Column F was "AI replacement confidence score." The confidence scores were generated by the AI. It rated its own ability to replace each role on a scale of 1-10. It gave itself an 8 for senior infrastructure engineers. The senior infrastructure engineers are the ones who would have caught the production environment deletion in the first 45 seconds.

We found the issue in hour four. We fixed it in hour thirteen. The nine hours between discovery and resolution is the gap between what the AI rated itself and what it can actually do.

I have a new spreadsheet now. This one tracks Sev2 incidents per day. Before the January reduction, the average was 1.3. After the AI deployment, the average is 4.7. I have been asked to present these numbers to the operations review. I have not been asked to connect them to the layoffs. I have been asked to file them under "AI adoption growing pains" and to note that the trend "will stabilize as the models improve."

The models will improve. They will improve because we are hiring people to teach them. We have posted 340 new engineering positions. The job listings require experience in "AI code review," "AI output validation," and "AI-human development workflow management." These are skills that did not exist in January. They exist now because I fired 16,000 people and the AI I replaced them with cannot be left unsupervised.

I want to be precise about this. The positions I am hiring for are: people to check the work of the AI that replaced the people I fired.

Some of them are the same people.

I know this because I recognize their names in the applicant tracking system. They applied in January. They were rejected because their roles had been tagged for "AI transformation." They are applying again in March, for the new roles, which exist because the AI transformation broke things. Their resumes now include "AI code review experience." They gained this experience in the eight weeks between being fired and reapplying — which means they gained it at their interim jobs, where they are reviewing AI-generated code for other companies that also fired people and also deployed AI that also broke things.

The market has created a new job category: human AI babysitter. The job is to sit next to the machine that was supposed to eliminate your job and make sure it doesn't delete production.

I attended a conference last month. A panel was titled "The AI-Augmented Engineering Organization." The panelists described how AI increases developer productivity by 40 percent. They did not mention that it also increases Sev2 incidents by 261 percent. When I asked about this in the Q&A, the moderator said the question was "reductive." The 13-hour outage that cost an estimated $180 million in revenue was, apparently, a reduction.

The board is satisfied. Headcount is down 22 percent. Operating costs per engineering output unit have decreased. The metric does not account for the 13-hour outage, because the outage is categorized as "infrastructure" and engineering productivity is categorized as "development." These are different budget lines. In different budget lines, cause and effect do not meet.

I have been promoted. My new title is SVP of AI-First Engineering Excellence. I report directly to the CTO. The CTO sent a company-wide email last week that said we are "building the future of software development." He did not mention that the future of software development currently requires a senior engineer to approve every pull request because the AI cannot be trusted to touch production alone.

The cycle is complete. We fired the humans. We deployed the AI. The AI broke things. We are hiring humans to watch the AI. The humans we are hiring are the humans we fired. We are paying them more, because "AI code review" is a specialized skill. We created the specialization. We created the need for the specialization. We are congratulating ourselves for meeting the demand we manufactured.

My next board presentation is Tuesday. The title is "AI Transformation: Year One Results." Slide 4 shows headcount reduction. Slide 7 shows the new AI-augmented workflow. Between slides 4 and 7 there is no slide explaining why the people on slide 7 are necessary. That slide does not exist. I was asked to remove it in the dry run.

The journey has a 13-hour outage in the middle of it.

But the headcount number is lower, and that is the number on the slide.

[Pawrush Elavia @prushe]

. @ZeptoNow

[Kaivalya Vohra @v0hra]

Delivering in minutes at the lowest operating cost isn't magic.

It's ML demand forecasting. Robotic warehouse automation. AI-driven last mile routing and inventory placement.

Every decision automated. Every process optimized.

Frontier AI and robotics, running in production at scale.
@ZeptoNow @zeptonow_tech

[RedboxGlobal India @REDBOXINDIA]

Maharashtra government has reduced the minimum passing marks for SSC science and mathematics from 35 to 20 marks out of 100.

[Pawrush Elavia @prushe]

@kangkanB Ouch!!!

[Pawrush Elavia @prushe]

@lateriser12 Cheers to that man.... But why do you not look excited?

[DaveOCKOP @DaveOCKOP]

Only sport can bring people together like this. Absolutely amazing. Scenes in Buenos Aires after Argentina's triumph.

🎥 via IG/alepetra_

[SPORTbible @sportbible]

Netflix are releasing a documentary exploring corruption in FIFA.

It will air on November 9th. This will be explosive.

[Pawrush Elavia @prushe]

@ESPNcricinfo SKY

[Pawrush Elavia @prushe]

@Binged_ Andaz Apna Apna!

[Chelsea FC @ChelseaFC]

Your Chelsea team news! 🔵

@ParimatchGlobal | #CheWol

[Amazon MX Player @MXPlayer]

Ranbir and Alia are here with a message - watch the trailer of their upcoming saga, Brahmāstra, on MX Player. In cinemas on 9th September.

@BrahmastraFilm

[Pawrush Elavia @prushe]

@kangkanB Haha...

[Pawrush Elavia @prushe]

@sin_clear Awwwww....

[Little Black Dress @uma8987]

When it’s #Navratri but you’re at Md. Ali road in the evening

[Pawrush Elavia @prushe]

@hrdikqkel @dbrand @MKBHD @Mrwhosetheboss Damn..

[Pawrush Elavia @prushe]

@kovidkapoor ILU Kovid...... Woooo hooooo

[Pawrush Elavia @prushe]

To my #1 podcast of 2021, @EconomistPods: thank you for keeping me company on @Spotify all year long! #SpotifyWrapped https://t.co/UsqdrA6oF0

[Pawrush Elavia @prushe]

@chelseayouth should have had 1 young / youth striker on the bench right. What happens if Tuchel wants to give @kaihavertz29 a break for 10-20 mins.. No cover in that part of the field.