Devendra Meel

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

Today, we announced the launch of Zepto Atom - an advanced data insights subscription for Consumer Brands in India. The Zepto Atom subscription is a top-up to the already existing Zepto Brand Portal (which gives brands listed on the Zepto platform basic day-to-day data on their performance on Zepto and is available for free). The value of the Zepto Atom subscription is the next level of insights brands can derive from this tool, most of which are not available on any e-commerce platform in India today. For example: 1) PIN-code-by-PIN-code market share data and brand performance: Through Zepto Atom, brands can examine a live map of every neighbourhood and PIN code they have presence on Zepto and derive hyperlocal insights on their performance. For example, a brand can see on Zepto Atom Maps that their sales are under-indexed in the western neighbourhoods of Hyderabad and double down on pricing, marketing, or distribution efforts in those geographies to unlock growth. 2) Live metrics visibility refreshed every minute: On Zepto Atom, brands can see minute-by-minute sales, customer impressions, and conversion data and optimise advertising campaigns, pricing, and their product range according to different consumption trends for their products throughout the day and week. 3) Zepto GPT: Zepto Atom has an in-house Natural Language Processing (NLP) assistant that is trained on the Zepto Data set to give brands insights that can improve their performance. For example, brands can ask Zepto GPT "How can I grow my market share in Bengaluru for the protein bar category?" or "What are the key consumer preferences driving energy drink sales among Gen Z in Mumbai?". Zepto GPT then analyses the vast datasets within Zepto Atom to provide actionable answers, strategic recommendations, and even generates data reports on behalf of the brand. 4) Advanced Behavioural Data: Zepto Atom goes beyond basic sales and conversion data. We are now providing brands data on customer repeatability and retention, share of voice in search and home page, full-funnel visibility on customer purchase behaviour with their product etc. We will be doing a detailed webinar for all our partner brands this Friday at 3 PM to formally kick off onboarding to Zepto Atom. Looking forward to seeing you there!

damn, i have an international overnight flight and forgot frido travel neck pillow at home. on my way to mumbai airport. 🥺🥺

“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” -- James Carville.

Zepto Café has hit 100K orders/day. That's closing in on a $100M Ann. GMV with a ~50% steady-state GM. It hasn't been easy to get Café the ground and many challenges are still work-in-progress, but I believe this is the beginning of a revolution in India's QSR industry.