Most service businesses are adding people to grow. One Hyderabad founder did the opposite and cut his team from 1,000 to 600 with zero drop in revenue, a live case study in AI and the future of work.

Sridhar Muppidi, co-founder of [x]cube LABS and ello.ai, breaks down exactly how, and what it means for anyone building in the AI era.

Few people have built through as many tech cycles as Sridhar Muppidi, who started in the dot-com boom, co-founded the cloud telecom firm PanTerra Networks, and shipped India's first game on the Apple App Store before scaling [x]cube LABS into a bootstrapped agency that has created over $5 billion in value for clients like Amazon, Sony, and Dr Lal PathLabs. His newest bet, ello.ai, builds enterprise voice agents that let customers talk to software in Hindi, Telugu, and a dozen Indian languages instead of clicking through menus.

In this conversation with host Akshay Datt, he argues that AI came for high-paid coders before blue-collar work, that today's cheap AI tokens are a subsidy with a reckoning coming, and that the engineer over 40 is now the most valuable hire. With Indian IT shedding entry-level roles and the AI and the future of work debate intensifying, his ground-level view is timely and contrarian.

👉How [x]cube LABS cut headcount from 1,000 to 600 people with no drop in revenue using AI coding agents

👉Why AI displaced high-paying programmer jobs before blue-collar work, reversing the 2012 consensus

👉Why Sridhar calls AI model companies drug dealers and predicts a token pricing reckoning 👉What separates writing code with AI from orchestrating coding agents, and how to brief them like a real team

👉Why almost every piece of software built in the last 40 years must be rebuilt for AI agents and voice

👉Why a profitable quick commerce idea his team built in 2015 slipped away, and the lesson he took from it

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Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel