Every few years, a piece of technology arrives and everyone panics about what it will take away from us. Calculators. The internet. Smartphones. Now it is AI, and the panic is louder than ever. But in a recent conversation with Jasravee Kaur Chandra, author and brand strategist Santosh Desai offered something rarer than panic: a clear-eyed argument about what AI can do, what it cannot, and what that means for marketers, students, writers and an entire generation growing up inside algorithms.
Desai has spent decades reading Indian society like a text, first through his book Mother Pious Lady, and more recently through Memes for Mummy Ji. In this conversation, he turns that same decoding instinct on AI itself. The result is less a technology talk and more a meditation on what remains distinctly human when machines can generate almost anything.
The Three Things AI Cannot Steal From You
Desai’s central argument is refreshingly simple. As each age automates a human capability, agriculture automated foraging, industry automated muscle, information automated memory, the AI age is automating “routine, creativity, functional intelligence, copy, segmentation.” So what is left for humans?
He names three things:
- Subjective experience. AI can simulate and describe experience, but it does not have one. It cannot feel the CJP protests the way a person on the ground feels them.
- Judgment. As Desai puts it, “if you ask it to recommend one, it’ll recommend one. But if you change your prompt a little bit, it’ll recommend something else.” Ask for twenty options and you get twenty options. There is no “the answer”, only more answers.
- Accountability. This is the one that lands hardest. “You can’t hold an AI accountable,” he says. “You can’t fire an LLM.” Someone, always a human someone, has to carry the consequences of a decision.
He sums it up with a line that marketing folk will want to pin above their desks: “We always will need someone to blame, which is the reason why human beings will never go out of fashion.”
Comparison: What AI Brings vs What Humans Bring
| Capability | What AI offers | What humans offer |
| Ideas | Infinite variations, on demand | A stance, a point of view |
| Analysis | Retrospective, pattern-based | A sense of “this time it’s different” |
| Decisions | Options, ranked or unranked | Judgement under risk, and the will to choose |
| Outcomes | No stake in the result | Accountability when it goes wrong |
| Insight | Reads descriptions of feeling | Actually feels the thing |
The takeaway is not that AI is useless. It is that AI is retrospective by nature, brilliant at telling you what has happened, weak at telling you what should happen next. Marketing, Desai argues, is fundamentally about “a sense of what is to come rather than what is.”
Stop Asking AI For Answers. Start Arguing With It.
Here is where the conversation gets genuinely useful for anyone actually using these tools day to day. Desai’s approach is not to ban AI from classrooms or workplaces. It is the opposite.
“I would say broadly the way to do this is to actively encourage the use of AI,” he says, “but you say that use AI to come with your own point of view, argue with AI, disagree, everything the AI says, disagree with it.”
His method, in his own words, boils down to a loop:
- Throw a half formed idea at AI.
- Let it respond.
- Disagree with it, challenge it, push back.
- Repeat until something emerges that feels genuinely yours.
He calls this treating AI “not as a substitute for cognitive effort, but as a partner in cognitive effort.” And he has a brilliantly blunt idea for educators: stop grading the essay, start grading the transcript. “I would always ask for transcripts of use of AI. That is your answer paper. I don’t want the outcomes. I want transcripts.”
“These Are Not My Words”: A Writer’s Confession
Desai’s most candid moment comes when he talks about trying to get AI to write in his own voice. He fed it enough of his old columns that it began to nail his style convincingly. For a while, he admits, it felt “amazing.”
Then the feeling curdled.
“If I don’t recognise the words,” he says, “it just feels like it’s an out-of-body experience of some kind. It’s not mine. It feels like, yeah, this is what I want to say, and it’s kind of broadly in my style, but it’s not my words.”
So he changed his method entirely. He now keeps AI away from the actual writing but leans on it hard for ideation, throwing kernels of thought at it and letting it argue back, sometimes across dozens of exchanges in one sitting, until the thread runs so long the system asks him to start a new one.
His verdict on using AI to solve problems directly, rather than sharpen his own thinking, is unambiguous: “I have almost never used the solution suggested by AI.” Even for something as specific as naming a new brand, he finds AI ruthless at critiquing his ideas, but weak at generating its own. “It comes up with such junk,” he laughs.
Gen Z Didn’t Inherit The Rules. They Had To Write Them.
The conversation takes a sharp turn into generational analysis, and this is where Desai is at his most quotable. His argument is that every generation before Gen Z grew up with rules already in place, rules they could choose to break. Gen Z is different.
“Gen Z is the first generation that has to make the rules before breaking them, because the rules don’t exist,” he says. That is why, in his telling, young people at work ask blunt, first-principles questions such as why 100% effort should ever mean more than 100% effort for 100% pay.
He extends this into the recent wave of youth protest, arguing it looks calm and almost playful because it comes from people with no baggage of old political theatre. “They don’t want to use the Azadi or they don’t want to use songs that were in the fifties… They want to use reels.”
And Gen Alpha, the generation coming up behind them? Desai is candid that nobody fully knows yet. But he flags a genuine discontinuity:
- Growing comfort with being fed content rather than choosing it.
- More coded, tribal, visually driven communication, closer to anime and manga than to text.
- The first generation for whom online is the default reality, not offline.
“Gen Z still had their feet in both worlds,” he says. “Gen Alpha is the first generation whose dominant reality is online, and not offline.”
Why Foundry Matters: Building Entrepreneurs, Not Just Ideas
Desai also spoke about Foundry, his venture that ran six hundred interviews down to eighty candidates, then a boot camp down to thirty founders, over ninety days, culminating in a pitch day that drew interest for roughly five hundred and seventy crore rupees against a target of a couple hundred.
What struck him was not entitlement, which he expected to find, but its absence. “One didn’t see an absence of commitment,” he says. “All of these people were fiercely, fiercely committed.” What they lacked instead was groundedness beyond their own bubble, and a slightly inflated founder mythology borrowed from VC culture rather than built from the ground up.
The Real Lesson
Strip away the podcast chat format and Desai’s argument is essentially this: AI is an extraordinary sparring partner and a poor oracle. It should sharpen your thinking, not replace it. It should be interrogated, not obeyed. And in a world where anyone can generate infinite options, the humans who matter will be the ones willing to pick one, stand behind it, and answer for what happens next.
As he puts it, almost as a closing thesis for marketers and makers alike: the goal is never to arrive at what AI wants to say. It is to use AI “to distil what you wanted to say” all along.
Jagged with Jasravee, the Marketing Show 
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