The looming AI disruption is not Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s first time staring down the barrel of technological upheaval. Now, he is urging today’s builders to apply the hard-won lesson that saved his empire: adapt immediately, or be erased.By the time Vijay Shekhar Sharma was preparing to take his mobile-services company public in 2010, he already knew his business was dying.One97 Communications, the parent company of what would later become Paytm, was then one of India’s most successful purveyors of mobile value-added services — ringtones, ringback tones, cricket scores, astrology readings, jokes delivered by SMS, exam results pinged to feature phones across the country. It was a thriving business. It was also, Sharma had concluded, a business with a clock ticking above it.”I was going for an IPO in 2010, and the challenge was, what will happen to the future?” Sharma told the audience at the India AI Impact Summit 2025. “I had seen the smartphone in the US, and I was uncomfortable that we should do an IPO at that point in time because I was like, the business model is going to change.”The world had not yet seen it coming. He had. “The ringtone will no longer be a… Read MoreYourStory RSS Feed
