Dear Colleague, we have officially put our foot in December’s door and we thought it was our fiduciary duty to update each one of our 58,000 readers on how corporate language should be truly deciphered for the rest of the year.
Alright then, here are some mission critical phrases we heard in meeting rooms through 2023, followed by what they truly mean:
“Let me check with my team” = I forgot
“Possibly” = Impossible
“On my roadmap” = Won’t happen
“This will be done in Q4” = Will try in Q2 next year
“Let’s take this offline/circle back” = We’ll never speak of this again
“35,000 foot view” = I don’t know what I’m saying
“Low hanging fruit” = Easy promotion
“Challenging landscape” = We’re going out of business, rapidly
“Digital transformation” = We’re going out of business, slowly
“All hands on deck” = Can we please try once? and…
“We use AI” = We don’t use AI
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🏆 At IAMAI’s iconic DNB Awards 2023, this monthly email was declared as one of India’s top 3 business newsletters.
Experian, Make My Trip, and INT. Pulse were the three finalists and MMT bagged the winning trophy, leaving us in the dust.
Are we going to try and become the champion next year? “Possibly” 😅
Indian managers listen up, please. It seems your credibility – when it comes to employee performance reviews – is at an all-time low.
We kid you not. Per this report by the HR experts at Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG), 71% of Indian employees would rather have their performances evaluated by AI than their managers.
We reckon this could be due to two reasons:
1️⃣ Rising trust in artificial intelligence (AI), or
2️⃣ Sinking trust in managerial performance evaluations.
But irrespective of the reason, the end result is not looking good for Indian managers.
Since you asked:
💡92% of respondents acknowledge the role AI plays in assisting managers in creating employee schedules, while 89% believe AI should help.
💡95% of employees surveyed also feel AI can improve their quality of life, meaning so far, employees have benefitted much more from the usage of AI than the organisations they work for.
But since this newsletter is not written by a bot, we beg to differ. 😁
Need HR Analytics help? Reach out to Dipak, our resident AI man. We estimate 92% of our readers should get in touch with Dipak in 3…2…1.
Oh boy, imagine this.
In a neighbourhood shopping mall, you approach a metallic, square 8×8 foot box and unlock it with your phone.
Once inside, you find a chair and a large screen, where a robotic voice guides you through a body scan or a blood pressure reading or a finger prick blood draw — all of which you do on your own to receive a hospital grade diagnosis and a prescription.
Is This Checkout Humour?
We assure you it ain’t.
Because according to Adrian Aoun, who cofounded San Francisco-based health tech startup Forward in 2016 and recently announced a fresh USD100 million in funding, the future of healthcare is an AI-powered mall kiosk he’s dubbed the “CarePod.”
Going Forward. . .
Forward is working hard to bring 25 of these pods to malls across the US, and the startup compares its healthcare approach to what Elon Musk is building at Tesla.
The objective, akin to Musk’s vision of self-driving cars, is to put medicine on autopilot.
🎙️“Slowly but surely we’re just migrating every single thing from doctor and nurse to hardware and software.”
“In fact, we don’t even believe a doctor’s office should exist,” the cofounder told Forbes.
Doctors reading this be like – 🥱😆
Every other day, you will see an entrepreneur on LinkedIn – complete with a tagline like, ‘bootstrapped to 100 gazillion’, or ‘solving the world’s greatest pain point through alien technology’ – write a post that starts with ‘the life of an entrepreneur is like selling bad karma at hell’s door’.
While that is true in some ways, the highs entrepreneurs experience once in a while makes up for all the pain, we guess.
Yeah?
Hell, yeah!
Per this MoneyControl report, SoftBank Vision Fund’s finance chief just announced that valuations of portfolio companies like Swiggy, FirstCry, and Ola Electric have been marked up in the September quarter.
We have been following this space for a bit and clearly, this is a move that could be an early sign of private market prices of tech companies bouncing back after a prolonged slide.
Doing Relatively Very Well
SoftBank also stressed that 6 companies from its India portfolio — OYO, Swiggy, Ola Electric, OfBusiness, Lenskart, and FirstCry are among the top 15 of its private holdings worldwide.
📌At least 4 of these 6 Indian companies will IPO next year, per the grapevine.
More power to entrepreneurs, please. ✊
📌Take Off Those Glasses: Point your smartphone through a pair of glasses with a certain power. Then tap the screen until the “AF/AE lock” function appears. Use it to get a focus lock. Now remove the lens and voila! This is how the person who wears those glasses actually sees the world without them. An eye opening tech use case by Sakata Yoshi.
📌India Is A Rising Star: According to Wharton professor’s iconic ‘Best Country in the World’ list, India is inching up slowly, from No. 31 last year to No. 30 this year. Even though it hasn’t cracked the top 10, Prof. Reibstein said he’s keeping an eye on the country. India doesn’t score well on social purpose, but it ranked fifth as a mover. The rankings are here. . .
📌When AI Explains Maby Baking: One tough thing about parenting is explaining to kids how babies are made. It will have the best of us fumble and wince, despite the fact that today’s kids probably know all of it already. But in case you are faced with that question, here’s what Grok, Musk’s rebellious AI tool, has to say about that. Wishing you many special hugs.
This month, we decided to turn our closing blurb idea into a meme.
So that’s what we had to say about that.
💡Comments and feedback are always welcome on the first day of December. Heck, we are accepting year-end invites to parties too.
Simply hit reply to this email and get instantly connected to a team of 850+ technology experts to start any kind of conversation, or to solve burning revenue problems for your business within a realistic timeframe.
And never forget – We use AI.
See you when the year ends. Cheers!
Team INT.
