Nikhil Pahwa – Page 2 – On Tech, Business and Society

Digital Payments mess: On the impact of recurring payments and tokenisation

I spoke with Suprita Anupam of Inc42 for a story he did on the impact of the Reserve Bank of India’s recurring payments and tokenisation on consumers and businesses. It’s a thoroughly researched article, and I highly recommend reading it.

My comments on the issue:

Recurring transactions, both Indian and global, fail often: “Both as a consumer and as a business user of global digital services, I’ve found that recurring transactions fail often. We’ve also had situations where some global services no longer accept Indian credit cards, post the RBI guidelines related to recurring payments, as well as the tokenisation guidelines. As a consumer, I have had to re-enter my credit card details and enable payments for a few Indian services as well, and that’s an inconvenience I wish I didn’t have to deal with.
Lack of a proper consultation process creates such issues: “The problem I have with the Reserve Bank of India is that they don’t appear to take into consideration the impact of their regressive regulations on merchants and consumers, and the increasing inconvenience this leads to. There was no impact assessment, no public consultation: just a diktat with a deadline, which eventually got pushed repeatedly because of lack of feasibility.
Why only credit cards? We also have to take into account that the RBI has enforced these guidelines on credit cards, which have better customer service, fraud detection and accountability, and yet they’ve failed to do anything to enforce accountability in case of UPI, especially in terms of fraud detection and prevention. There’s a saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In case of the RBI, they broke something that was working — credit card payments– and have failed to fix something that is crying out loud for regulatory intervention — UPI.”

TV Show: The impact of low cost handsets on India’s Internet

On CNBC-TV18, we discussed yesterday the launch of a low cost Reliance Jio handset and its impact on India. My key topic points:

My notes for the show:

Handsets are important: Low cost handsets are important for Internet access because they bring access to the internet for users. You cant give 1GB a day for a few hundred rupees a month, and then expect a user to pay Rs 10,000 for a handset. Users also transition eventually from low cost devices to higher cost devices as their understanding of the utility of the Internet increases.
India’s internet user base has mostly been stagnating over the last few quarters. So another price war might actually help shake things up a bit.
Jio 5G: 6,024 Cities/Towns, but 51 in J&K, 74 in Uttarakhand, 11 towns in Mizoram, 19 in Nagaland, 18 in Manipur
Address shared access in low income households: Lower cost handsets also drive personal Internet access, rather than shared Internet access. RIght now many handsets are essentially household internet access, and this makes it difficult for women in these households to get to use the Internet. Lower cost devices address this gap.
Downward pricing pressure for other operators: the pricing of the bundle brings Internet pricing down to Rs 123 (around $1.5) per month. Other incumbent mobile operators have increased Internet access pricing recently, and this will probably bring costs down for all users, and other operators feel downward pricing pressure.
Great for Startups targeting Bharat: Augurs well for startups targeting Digital Bharat, including agritech startups
Jio has been critical for Internet growth in India: if you check the charts, the launch of Jio in 2016 led to a decline in 2G connections and a massive increase in mobile broadband (3G+4G connections). Most people leapfrogged 2G and 3G and went straight to 4G.
Ubiquitous infra rollout still needed: We still don’t have adequate 4G infra in all spaces. There are areas in the hills and in between towns and cities where it’s not adequate. At times, in some areas, one mobile operator has better infrastructure than the other, including in case of Jio. I think eventually the availability of network will be more important than pricing of Internet of access in some regions, and that’s where Jio still needs work.
Bundling services into the same price and replacing other forms of entertainment also makes a lot of sense. It’s not as if it has not been tried before, like Airtel had Wynk and its own movie services as well… all of this competition is fantastic for consumers.

TV Show: Regulating financial influencers

The influencer ecosystem has been gaining importance in India: they’re better than most media and experts at understanding consumer needs and packaging their content. Many of them are experts at what they do. They monetize their work through advertisements, product placements, and subscription based premium content or advisory models.

They thus replicate many of the functions of media publications.

I was on News9 to discuss a few controversies around the financial influencer space, now referred to as “finfluencers”, and frankly, as long as they don’t play in a regulated space such as stock advisory services, without the required regulatory certification/registration/license met, I think they’re providing an important service of financial education.

I also spoke about the upcoming Digital India Bill in the first part of the show.

TV Shows: Addressing job loss fears around AI

Are AI tools a boon or a bane. On TV shows and on conference panels, I’ve spoken about how AI tools actually make our work easier, and more efficient. Whether an organisation wants to do more with the greater efficiency or make people redundant is their decision, and no fault of the AI tools. It’s important for people to learn these tools, and add these skill sets.

Two TV shows:

On NDTV, here’s a clip of how we at MediaNama are using ChatGPT and other AI tools. We have, since June 2023, done a lot more, in terms of working on prompt engineering, and have even bought some tools to help us work.
On TimesNow, here’s a show from January 2023, on concerns of job losses with AI, where I talk about how it impacts creators, and address threats regarding job losses.

My show notes from the Jan 2023 discussion:

Here’s where AI is being used:

Drafting legal contracts
Designing rooms according to a theme and size
Generating written content, such as articles, blog posts, and scripts
Creating dialogue for characters in video games, movies, and TV shows
Generating song lyrics and poetry
Assisting with brainstorming and idea generation for advertising and marketing campaigns
Creating chatbot responses for customer service and virtual assistants
Finding the right image for a mood
Writing emails
Creating proposals
Writing marketing content
Improving emails you’ve written to be more respectful

ChatGPT AI has a clear bias: the dataset that it references. The final output should always be reviewed and edited by a human to ensure it is of high quality and appropriate for the intended use.
AI is going to get better with time. It uses a feedback loop to understand what humans want and what they dont.
AI can improve efficiency and productivity of individuals but an also lead to job losses for some. The market will change.
Impact industries like data entry, customer service, and other tasks that rely on language. ChatGPT can be used to quickly and accurately understand and respond to customer queries, allowing companies to improve their customer service and support. This can lead to improved efficiency and cost savings for businesses.
The development and deployment of ChatGPT and other language models can also create new job opportunities in fields such as data science, machine learning, and software engineering. People will need skilling.

TV Show: The cost of Internet Shutdowns

The function of a state is to protect our fundamental rights. When a government imposes an Internet Shutdown, it’s an acknowledgement that it’s unable to protect our fundamental right to free speech. Internet Shutdowns are a failure of governance. It’s also disproportionate. In order to shut down illegal speech, and sometimes they shut the Internet down when there are exams, they’re censoring all legitimate speech as well.

Digital India fails when there is no Internet. Digital Payments don’t work. Students can’t apply for exams or colleges.

India has the highest Internet Shutdowns in the world. It’s a shame.

On AI and its impact on News Media

I spoke at the Media Foundation Dialogues, organised by the Foundation for Media Professionals, held at the India International centre.

I really don’t think that journalists have anything to fear: AI tools can help them in their work, and will never entirely replace reporting. At MediaNama, we’re already using AI tools for transcription, and have started experimenting with prompts to clean copy, correct grammar, generate tweets from article, suggest article ideas, headlines, questions for interviews, speakers for conferences. We’re also creating tweets, threads, generating text to video, scripts for video. There’s so much more. The list will expand, as we become better at prompt engineering. AI will make things easier for journalists, not more difficult.

Creating and optimising videos for different platforms will be easier and faster. Processing videos will become so much more efficient.

The part that excites me most is how much translation and voice to text and text to voice will become over the next few years. That gives us the opportunity to cater to language audiences in India.

The business model challenges are of course going to increase, especially with increased advertising inventory, and fewer people required to do the same job. At the same time, this helps smaller publications punch far above their weight. How they navigate AI over the next few years is going to be critical.

A repeated some of the points I had made during the discussion, in a separate video for MediaNama: