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Nikhil Kolar reposted thisNikhil Kolar reposted thisYour traffic is not telling you the full story. ❌AI assistants are already deciding what your customers see, trust, and choose before they ever visit your website. 🤖 That means your content can influence decisions without a single click. Wondering if you're measuring the right KPIs for an AI-Mediated web? 💡 Here are 5 KPIs that actually matter in today's AI-driven web: https://lnkd.in/gQWN-aVG
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Nikhil Kolar shared thisCan’t wait to see what new heights Shourya Agarwal and team will take #flam to next…Nikhil Kolar shared thisLovely speaking at SXSW with the legend Paul Woolmington, conversation was so deeply engaging I genuinely didn’t realise where did an hour go! And most exciting part was ofcourse unveiling Flam generation models - Fable, Falcon & Fantom. To be released soon for enterprises, stay tuned 🚀
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Nikhil Kolar shared thisAppreciated the opportunity to talk about Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace at the Microsoft Executive Media Summit in Munich recently.Nikhil Kolar shared this🚀 From insight to impact – setting the stage for the AI Tour The Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study for Microsoft AI in Media & Entertainment shows measurable AI gains in productivity, engagement, and business value - setting the tone for our Microsoft Executive Media Summit in Munich ahead of the Microsoft AI Tour. 🎤 Keynote & vision In his keynote, Marco Casalaina, VP Products, Core AI at Microsoft, shared how Copilot and the Microsoft Enterprise Agentic AI platform help media organizations create, monetize, and engage - at scale. 🤝 Real conversations. Real use cases. Thomas Nowicki (Handelsblatt Media Group): AI for business models & journalism Alexander Woge (knk Group): agentic ad sales at RTL Deutschland Daniel Geyer (Appsfactory): AI engagement & publishing Adrian Kuckian & Dr. Morten Wetjen (PwC): playbook for the Agentic Media Frontier Thomas Schultz-Homberg (Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger Medien): scaling agentic AI at KStA Florian Tatzer (ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4): AI agents everyone can build Ezequiel Jadib & Gerardo Meola (SOUTHWORKS): AI powered video creation Maximilian Kaczynski (Parloa): AI Customer Experience transformation in Media Rebekka Weiß, (Microsoft): sovereign AI&Cloud for Europe - trust, control, performance Nikhil Kolar (Microsoft): Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace - protecting journalism with creator control & attribution; Copilot uses credible, licensed content at scale 👏 Thanks to our partners & co‑sponsors knk, PwC, Appsfactory, SOUTHWORKS, Parloa 💙 One team, one outcome Special thanks to Verlinda Ibraimi and Dennis Tschorn - your leadership and passion made this event truly special. Thanks to the extended team and leadership across Microsoft Germany/EMEA, Media&Telco, Microsoft AI (MAI) & Marketing. Wolfgang Lippert Alexander Heidler Björn Klaverkamp Viktor Luca Wilkens Karsten Goymann Silvia Candiani Federico Suria Simon Crownshaw Anton Lengle Denisa Köhler Julia Wachendörfer 🎬 Watch the highlights I’m sharing a short highlight video with executive interviews capturing the spirit of the day: candid perspectives, concrete use cases, and a shared commitment to shaping the future of media with AI – responsibly, securely, and at scale. The AI Tour on the day after concluded with Satya Nadella’s keynote: innovation and digital sovereignty go hand in hand for Germany and Europe - enabled by secure, sovereign cloud and AI. Agnes Heftberger captured today’s AI momentum and the questions leaders are turning into responsible action. The CEO Connection with Edith Wittmann highlighted the shift from experimentation to leadership‑driven strategy. The media industry is stepping up to lead the AI era in all three dimensions. #MicrosoftExecutiveMediaSummit #AITourMunich #AgenticAI #MicrosoftInMedia #AIatScale #MicrosoftAI
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Nikhil Kolar shared thisExtremely pumped to see the work of many months getting talked about. Started as a crazy idea last year after many conversations with publishers. Loads to do, but been a great journey so far!Nikhil Kolar shared thisIt's validating to see continued excitement around Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace. Today's The Wall Street Journal article is another sign that publishers are looking for scalable solutions, and I'm proud of my team's ability to lead in this space as a key partner. https://lnkd.in/gniFRFmHMarketplaces Are the Next Frontier in Publisher Deals With AI CompaniesMarketplaces Are the Next Frontier in Publisher Deals With AI Companies
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Nikhil Kolar shared thisWould love to hear your thoughts on this!Nikhil Kolar shared thisIf you’re still measuring performance the same way you did two years ago, you’re missing part of the funnel. AI assistants are reshaping discovery and influencing decisions before users ever land on your site. Traditional KPIs aren't designed to capture that impact. From AI referral traffic and AI citations to the metric that ultimately matters, AI referral conversions, we break down five forward-thinking KPIs to help you measure AI’s role in growth. 📊🤖 🔗 Explore 5️⃣ KPIs for an AI-mediated web: https://lnkd.in/gQWN-aVG
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Nikhil Kolar shared thisGreat team.Nikhil Kolar shared thisWe’re Hiring: Principal Product Manager – AI (Microsoft AI) AI is transforming how individuals discover, understand, and act on information. At Microsoft AI the Content & Knowledge team is developing the next generation of intelligent, trusted content experiences that power Copilot, Windows, Bing, and Microsoft canvases across M365. These experiences have the potential to impact billions of users globally as AI becomes an integral part of Microsoft surfaces. We are seeking a Principal Product Manager to help shape and deliver AI-powered systems that integrate structured data, licensed content, and advanced language models into grounded, context-aware experiences at scale. In this role you will be responsible for: - Crafting a bold product vision in a rapidly evolving AI landscape - Designing trustworthy, high-quality AI systems - Owning metrics, outcomes, and real-world impact - Collaborating closely across research, engineering, and design If you are passionate about building AI that informs, empowers, and earns trust at a global scale, AND have the relevant experience I would like to hear from you. Please DM me for an informational or apply directly https://lnkd.in/gg2vYW38 #MicrosoftAI #Hiring #ProductManagement #AI #Copilot #LLM #ResponsibleAI Aparna Lakshmiratan Julia Beizer Sridhar Iyer Kit Thambiratnam
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Nikhil Kolar shared thisExciting to see all the work being done by Microsoft AI in this space!Nikhil Kolar shared thisVery few companies maintain a live index of the internet alongside the technology to return a relevant slice of it in real-time. That capability is becoming foundational as AI agents replace browsers as the primary way users interact with the web. At Microsoft, we've built a grounding layer for LLMs and agents that anchors responses in authoritative, real-time information and materially reduces hallucinations. Today, this grounding service powers many of the most widely used AI experiences in the world. As the agentic web scales, APIs like this will only become more critical, especially when combined with complementary services like the recently announced Publisher Content Marketplace, which gives AI systems licensed access to high-quality publisher content. Proud of the work Jordi Ribas and our combined teams have done here. If this problem space interests you -- whether as a customer or a contributor -- reach out. https://lnkd.in/gs-rJ9wV Roberto Carli Knut Risvik thank you for your leadership
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Nikhil Kolar shared thisLove the partnership with Business Insider on the content marketplace!Nikhil Kolar shared thisAt Business Insider, we are among the most-cited sources in large language models, making us a global leader in generative engine optimization (GEO). Journalism has value, and AI companies should support the newsrooms that power their answers. Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace is designed to help create a fair AI economy, with clear compensation and attribution so supply can meet demand responsibly. It's now officially open for business; read more about it in a note from our CEO, Barbara Peng: https://lnkd.in/e526AWZ9
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Nikhil Kolar shared thisYesterday we announced it. Today we go a bit deeper! Late yesterday evening, Digiday published an interview with me following our announcement. In the conversation, we went deeper into the thinking behind the AI content marketplace we’re building at Microsoft - what problem we’re actually trying to solve and why this matters for both #publishers & #AI builders, and for products like Microsoft Copilot. Thanks to Jessica Davies for the thoughtful and nuanced discussion. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gnjgMMBE At Microsoft AI, we are always curious to hear reactions and questions. Look forward to the discussions!Q&A: Nikhil Kolar, vp Microsoft AI scales its 'click-to-sign' publisher AI content marketplaceQ&A: Nikhil Kolar, vp Microsoft AI scales its 'click-to-sign' publisher AI content marketplace
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Nikhil Kolar liked thisNikhil Kolar liked thisExa just raised $85M at a $700M valuation. Their product? Selling publisher content to AI companies. Exa (formerly Metaphor) closed a Series B led by Benchmark’s Peter Fenton. Here’s what publishers need to know: 🔍 Exa built a neural search engine designed for AI agents, not humans. It crawls the web, indexes publisher content as embeddings, and serves it back via API to thousands of AI companies 💰 Sacra estimates ~$10M ARR, up 11x YoY. Revenue model: $1 per 1,000 pages retrieved. $5 per 1,000 “answers.” Full-page publisher content delivered to LLMs on demand 🤖 Notion AI uses Exa to process millions of queries monthly, pulling full web content into workspaces. Point72 taps its index for financial news. HubSpot monitors over 1B profiles. Cursor, Databricks, AWS, Vercel. Every query extracts publisher content, repackages it, and delivers it without attribution or compensation to the source 📊 At a 70x revenue multiple, Benchmark is betting Exa becomes the default content pipe for AI agents. Their stated goal: “gather the vast majority of the world’s information.” Whose information, exactly? 🚫 No publisher licensing program. No revenue share. No opt-in. Exa delivers “full page contents for LLM context” and advertises filtering out “paywalled” results. That’s not search. That’s a supply chain built on routing around publisher monetization MSG POV: mExa is the clearest example yet of the content laundering stack. Publishers create it. Exa crawls it. AI companies buy it. Publishers get nothing. And VCs just valued that extraction machine at $700M. This is why infrastructure like Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace matters. The question isn’t whether AI needs publisher content. It’s whether publishers will ever see a dollar from companies whose entire business model depends on it. https://lnkd.in/eGddar53Exa Raises $85M to Build the Search Engine for AIsExa Raises $85M to Build the Search Engine for AIs
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Nikhil Kolar liked thisNikhil Kolar liked thisFirecrawl doesn’t license publisher content. It extracts it, restructures it, and sells access to it. Firecrawl is a Y Combinator-backed tool (S22) that crawls publisher websites, bypasses anti-bot protections, executes JavaScript to capture dynamic content, strips away “noise,” converts everything into LLM-ready Markdown or structured JSON, and then sells API access to that repackaged content. 📊 Used by Snapchat, Coinbase, MongoDB🔧 34K+ GitHub stars, millions of pages/day (per website) 💰 Pricing: $16–$719/month based on pages crawled 🎯 Tagline: “Turn entire websites into LLM-ready data” This isn’t search traffic. This isn’t even scraping in the traditional sense. This is industrial content processing infrastructure built explicitly to feed AI models. Publishers create journalism, research, expertise. Firecrawl packages that work into “clean markdown,” strips attribution context, and monetizes access to third parties building AI agents and RAG systems, often with zero revenue, traffic, or even awareness flowing back to the original creators. MSG POV: The economic model is backwards. Publishers invest in content creation. Middlemen like Firecrawl extract value by repackaging that content into AI-optimized formats and capturing the margin. If this becomes default infrastructure, publishers aren’t just losing traffic distribution, they’re becoming raw material suppliers in someone else’s value chain, with no negotiating power and no participation in the revenue their work generates downstream. https://www.firecraw
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Nikhil Kolar liked thisNikhil Kolar liked thisI am thrilled to share that I am starting a new position as VP Enterprise Strategic Finance at Aon. I am so grateful to everyone who supported me during my transition, and I cannot wait to join this talented team.
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Nikhil Kolar liked thisNikhil Kolar liked thisWhere are we in the AI adoption curve? There's a pair of photos of New York City’s Flatiron District in the early 1900s. In the 1905 photo on the top, Broadway and Fifth Ave are full of horses and trolleys. Twenty years later, the same intersection is filled with cars – no horse in sight. The daily announcements about AI adoption and industry changes make it feel like we’re in that 1925 photo but we aren't there yet. Most systems today run on top of the human web with interfaces built for people and designed to resist robots. The inversion is coming, though; the companies and leaders that move first will have learning advantages that compound before others even begin to experiment. Every major efficiency gain in history follows the same pattern known as Jevons' paradox: when the cost of achieving an outcome drops, demand accelerates. The question isn't whether the environment will flip or when. It's whether you’ve prepared your business and are future-compatible to take advantage of it. #AIEconomy
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Nikhil Kolar liked thisNikhil Kolar liked this6 publisher AI insights we collected from Digiday Vail: 𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐜𝐚𝐧'𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐬𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦 The idea of one monolithic AI model serving an entire editorial operation is proving hard to make work in practice. A gossip column and a breaking news story require fundamentally different training. Niche models per vertical is where it's heading. 𝐇𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐩𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐛𝐞𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐚 𝐩𝐚𝐲𝐰𝐚𝐥𝐥 Loyal visitors get the most value from a personalized homepage. This makes it a lever to convert them into subscribers and boost retention. Free readers get editorial curation. Subscribers get a homepage that learns them over time. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐀𝐈 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 An AI product got built, tested, and scrapped. The reasoning: summarizing journalism isn't journalism. Every reader seeing the same article enables shared conversation and editorial voice. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐟𝐢𝐱 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐬 A big internal AI culture shift came from one person vibe-coding a fix for one annoying manual workflow. A small tool that saved a team real time every day did more for internal AI buy-in than top-down initiative. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐡 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐚 𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐠𝐨 "There’s a boom in companies who claim they will sell your content for money, and not yet a boom in the money from those deals" - Jonathan Roberts. For mid-tier publishers, AI licensing income has been modest at best, nowhere near replacing what was lost in traffic and advertising. 𝐁𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐠𝐨𝐭 𝐚 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞 Brands are discovering a gap between what they say about themselves and what AI platforms actually say about them. Trusted publishers who can audit that gap and produce content to close it can help brands achieve business outcomes. “A lot of branded content is done in a one-off. This is intended to be a little bit more strategic, to follow a longer-term strategy of consecutive releases" - Mark Howard Thanks Jason Matthew March for helping capture the notes on this! Quotes via Digiday.com
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Nikhil Kolar liked thisNikhil Kolar liked thisThe scraper economy just got bigger. 15 companies. Still zero publisher compensation. 1. Firecrawl — Turns entire websites into LLM-ready markdown or structured data via a single API, covering 96% of the web including JS-heavy pages. 2. Exa — A custom search engine built for AIs, with its own independent index and proprietary embeddings-based retrieval models trained specifically for semantic relevance — not a Google wrapper. 3. Tavily — The real-time search engine for AI agents and RAG workflows, delivering live web data structured and chunked so models can reason over facts without hallucinating. 4. Bright Data — 150M+ residential IPs across 195 countries, $300M ARR, serving AI labs and model developers who collectively scrape enough data every 15 minutes to train a large language model from scratch. 5. Perplexity Sonar — Advanced AI models for real-time web search, conversational answers with citations, and structured retrieval from billions of webpages — sold directly to third-party developers via API. 6. You.com — Claims 57% of Fortune 500 companies as customers, processing 1B+ API calls per month, delivering real-time web and news data from hundreds of top publishers directly into AI pipelines. 7. Brave Search — Independent search index, privacy-focused, no tracking, offering programmatic web access to AI developers at $5 per 1,000 queries. 8. Parallel AI — Collapses the full scraping pipeline — searching, crawling, parsing, cleaning, and verifying — into a single API call optimized for LLM consumption. 9. Jina AI — Reader API that converts any URL into clean, LLM-ready text and automatically captions every image on the page, enabling downstream models to reason over both text and visuals. 10. SerpApi — Multi-engine SERP data platform covering Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Amazon, and dozens more via a single standardized JSON interface. 11. Serper.dev — Lightweight Google Search API delivering results in 1–2 seconds at $0.30 per 1,000 queries, positioned as the fast, affordable backbone for high-volume AI search workflows. 12. Diffbot — Autonomously builds the world's largest knowledge graph from the entire public web — over 10 billion entities, 1 trillion facts, no human curation required. 13. Apify — Full-stack scraping platform with a marketplace of pre-built actors that crawl websites and extract text content to feed AI models, LLM applications, vector databases, and RAG pipelines. 14. Oxylabs — Enterprise proxy and scraping infrastructure with dedicated scrapers for Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google AI Mode, achieving 94%+ success rates across major AI platforms. 15. Zyte — Home of Scrapy, the most widely used open-source scraping framework; provides managed extraction of accurate articles and news data from global publishers and the largest news websites in the world. MSG POV: Fifteen companies. A billion-dollar market. Newsrooms producing the content that powers all of it. Zero licensing conversations.
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Nikhil Kolar liked thisIf you are an editor or newsroom leader, we invite you to share your perspective: https://lnkd.in/gvkee2guNikhil Kolar liked thisArc XP is proud to support the Future Newsrooms Study, a new global survey led by FT Strategies in partnership with WAN-IFRA, the World Association of News Publishers. This study aims to establish a global benchmark for how newsrooms are evolving, an area where the industry still lacks consistent research. We are gathering insights from newsroom leaders worldwide to understand: ➡️ How strategy is defined and executed ➡️ How AI and automation are integrated into workflows ➡️ How organizational structures are evolving ➡️ Where editorial investment is shifting ➡️ Which skills will define successful newsrooms If you are an editor or newsroom leader, we invite you to share your perspective: https://lnkd.in/gvkee2gu Your responses are anonymous and fully confidential, and the survey is open until Friday, April 10th. The findings will inform a flagship report launching at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in June, helping shape the future of newsroom transformation.
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Nikhil Kolar liked thisNikhil Kolar liked thisI wasn’t exactly sure what would happen when we asked commercial teams to open a code editor. I came away thinking this may change a lot more than just productivity. It fundamentally changes every way that we work and collaborate! 🚀💻✨ Over the past weeks, I ran vibe coding workshops with our Microsoft Monetize teams — first in New York, then in Paris 🗽🇫🇷 — introducing #VisualStudioCode, #AIagents, and: some exciting new agentic capabilities in Monetize - #MCP. The mindset was simple: just explore and try building something. 💡🤖 I wasn’t totally sure how it would land. Asking account managers and sales leads to open a code editor is definitely not a typical commercial training format. But I had a feeling it could unlock something genuinely valuable — not just in terms of productivity, but in giving teams a new sense of ownership and what they can do themselves. 🌱 And that’s pretty much what happened. 🙌 The hesitation didn’t last long. Then curiosity took over. Then collaboration. 🔄 People started sharing screens, helping each other, and experimenting with ways to automate work that usually takes a lot of time and energy. By the end, colleagues who had never written code were building newsletter automations, simple dashboards, web apps, and custom workflows. ⚙️📊🛠️ And I selfishly had such a blast! :) What stayed with me most, though, wasn’t the output. It was the shift in mindset. That moment when someone realizes: “Maybe I can actually do this.” 🔥 That kind of confidence can go a long way. 🌍 On a personal level, I’ve gone pretty deep down the AI rabbit hole lately. 🦞🤖🦞 And what I’m seeing feels bigger than just productivity gains. It is changing how different roles overlap and work together. Product and engineering. Commercial and Solutions Consulting etc. The more people can build, automate, and analyze directly, the more some traditional boundaries start to blur. 🔀 That feels exciting — and it also raises a lot of questions. 🤔 I’ve been thinking a lot about what an AI-first organization could actually look like. Not just AI-assisted, but more fundamentally shaped around these capabilities: different roles, different team setups, different ways of collaborating and making decisions. 🧠 I definitely don’t have the answers. But I do think it’s a conversation worth having now. ⏳ Curious how others are thinking about this: What does an AI-first org model look like to you? 👇 Big shoutout to our teams aka. #thebestteamever Xavier Toulemonde Jill Casey Lauren Wiseman Katie Blair erik zamkoff Tom Dover Adrian Mason Christopher Walmsley Justin Kushik Vincent Soucaret Jason McKay Jonathan Mars (can't tag everyone ;) ) And thank you Microsoft & Microsoft AI / Microsoft Advertising for all the Tokens!!! Kya Sainsbury-Carter #VibeCoding #AI #MicrosoftMonetize #Transformation #FutureOfWork #MAI
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Mike Williams
Everything Marketplaces • 26K followers
This was an awesome chat with Deepak Chhugani where we did a deep dive into how Nuvocargo is leveraging AI. We also discussed lots of topics like how B2B marketplaces often start off looking more like brokerages, how operationally complex marketplaces can leverage AI, taking the "full-stack AI" vs. vertical agent approach, early GTM strategies for B2B marketplaces, and more. This is a must-watch (or listen) for B2B marketplace founders and get ready to take some notes!
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Snehal Kulkarni
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The GCC Shift No One Is Talking About: “Decision Altitude Design” After returning to Hyderabad and meeting leaders across the GCC ecosystem, I’ve noticed something that rarely gets discussed, yet quietly determines whether a GCC becomes a strategic engine or stays a delivery shop. It’s not AI maturity. Not talent density. Not cost structure. It’s something bigger: The altitude at which decisions get made inside the GCC. Every GCC operates at one of three decision altitudes: Level 1-> Task Altitude Teams execute. They wait for clarity. They follow instructions. Great for output. Terrible for influence. Level 2 --> Ownership Altitude Teams manage outcomes. They shape how something is built. They add velocity and solve problems locally. Good for innovation. But still dependent on HQ for direction. Level 3 --> Enterprise Altitude (The Rare One) Teams think like the mothership. They understand the customer, the business model, the risk, the trade-offs. They influence what gets built, not just how. This is where a GCC becomes a global strategy center. Very few centers operate here , but the ones that do are redefining what “India-led leadership” means. Here’s the truth: You can hire hundreds of brilliant engineers. You can run 24×7 pods. You can automate everything in sight. But if your decision altitude stays low, your impact will stay low. The next wave of GCC transformation will come from redesigning - how context flows - how decisions are distributed - how India teams influence upstream thinking This is the real unlock. Now that I’m back in Hyderabad, this is the work that excites me the most: Building GCCs that operate at enterprise altitude, not just delivery altitude. If you're building a center here or scaling one, happy to connect, meet in person, and exchange notes. Hyderabad is ready for its next era of global leadership. And leaders who think at enterprise altitude will shape it. #GCC #Leadership #Hyderabad #IndiaGCC #DecisionDesign #DigitalTransformation #AI #FutureOfWork #ReturningLeader EY EY Technology Solutions Viswanathan K S GCC Pulse™ Susheel Kumar Achyut Menon "AK" Vishnu BG Amrish Kumar Shankaran (Shanks) Srinivasan Accenture in India Reshab Shaw LinkedIn News India T-Hub Vishwanadh Raju Supriya Sethi (She/Her/Hers) KPMG India Naveen Gullapalli Amgen India Lilly India McDonald's Global Office in India Vanguard India Covasant Pavan Kumar Bandaru Korn Ferry Kamal Karanth Xpheno Talentiser Michael Page PageGroup ANSR Subu Boyinapalli Lalit Ahuja Southwest Airlines StarRez, Inc. Happening Hyderabad Zinnov
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Priyank Kapadia
Accolite Digital • 4K followers
Launching: Chat with Priyank (beta) today on https://priyank.tech A few weeks ago, I launched priyank.tech as a single home for my work, projects, and notes. Today I’m adding a faster way to get to the signal: Skip the scrolling, ask. “Chat with Priyank” answers questions about my projects, views, and skills by pulling the most relevant context and giving you a concise, useful response. What’s under the hood (and why): - Human‑verified access - Conversations start only after the system knows it’s interacting with a person, not a bot. - Scope & guardrails - It only answers questions about me. When a query is out of scope or uncertain, it responds with a polite “I don’t know.” - Context engineering first (no RAG, yet!) - An analysis by industry veterans suggested that GPT-5 class models can correctly use ~85% of the provided context. I want to see how far careful, prompt, and context design can go before adding retrieval. I’ll evaluate this over the next few days and decide before graduating from beta. - Prompt caching enabled - To keep costs under control (and responses snappy), repeat prompts and shared context are cached. - Early memory layer - A lightweight short-term memory layer powers more personal, consistent answers across sessions. Try it on: https://priyank.tech If it’s your first visit, do subscribe to my newsletter—I’ll share build notes, decisions, and lessons learned there. Starter prompts: “Tell me about your AI and Generative AI expertise “How can you help me become an AI first organization?” Feedback is welcome, especially edge cases and failure modes. #AI #product #buildinpublic #LLM
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Avnish Sharma
360 Realtors LLP • 978 followers
If you're venturing into the world of D2C brands in India and seeking guidance on product development, marketing strategies, and navigating online marketplaces, this podcast featuring Sushank Arora is a valuable resource for your journey. Sushank shares insightful tips on harnessing consumer behavior to boost sales, offering a roadmap to establish a robust D2C brand. Tune in to gain actionable insights for your brand's success. #D2C #BrandBuilding #ConsumerBehavior #SalesBoost
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Nitin Kashyap
3K followers
What is AIGuru? An experiment with AI to test the Hypothesis if AI can help make Indic Wisdom more accessible? So to get started 1) I searched up "The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda" 2) Downloaded the same - courtesy Ramakrishna Mission Pittsburgh 3) Uploaded it to Google NotebookLM 4) And within minutes generated a) A 7 minute Video + Audio podcast of the essence of Vedanta teachings of Swami ji - "The Lion Within" - https://lnkd.in/gVDdxMgK b) a mind map, a briefing doc, an FAQ doc, a study guide, and multiple vernacular audio podcasts in Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Telugu etc. (Refer to the notebook linked in comments to explore all of the above) Some reflections and takeaways (Other than the essence of Vedanta of course) that this exercise reinforced for me 1) With AI the barrier to synthesize, remix and recreate content and experience - no matter how mainstream or how arcane - is now essentially Zero. 2) The limiting factor has always been and will always remain - human attention, human agency & human discretion. 3) So from a consumer point of view - While on the one end there is virtually no limit to what you can access - what you still need to have is the desire (the agency) and discretion (what to access, how to access) to benefit from all this abundance. And the difference in the degree of this desire & discretion will be the thing that will separate those who disproportionately benefit from AI compared to those who get left behind! 4) And from a Content producer's point of view: Well your Job was never harder that this - For your content to have ANY chance at all of standing out in this cornucopia - it would not only need to find your intended audience, entice them enough to engage with it, and hold them long enough to completely experience it, but also give them enough value to come back for more of it! In some sense it reinforces what customers have always really paid for in content - Aligned interests, Unique perspectives & Authentic Voices! Unless of course as a content creator you believe in - as Swami Ji summarises what Vedanta says about Unchained Action as the path to freedom from Maya - Work incessantly but give up all attachment to work - and want to create content - well not in return for some explicit reward or gratification, but because you chose to do so :) So would love to hear your thoughts on all three things - in any order a) the 4 takeaways and reflections above, and b) the quality of the synthesis generated by AI & the AI Guru experiment itself - Do follow the account if you would like to participate in this experiment c) the timeless wisdom of Vedanta, unchained action and "The Lion within" all of us! #AIGuru #IndicWisdombyAI #Vedanta #Philosophy #SelfRealisation #InnerStrength #Motivation #Spirituality #Leadership #PersonalGrowth #Fearlessness #Vivekananda #UnleashYourPotential #DivineWithin #TheLionWithin
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Niyaz Laiq
Lumikai Fund • 7K followers
We're thrilled to announce we're partnering with Prince, Dr. Utkarsh and Dr. Gourav and leading the seed round for NPrep - an interactive learning platform which brings together personalized, level-based learning through AI, and over 1,400 hours of in-house video content - to teach close to a million nurses in India who undertake competitive exams every year for highly coveted roles here and around the world. India's is the world's largest supplier of healthcare workers, yet the shortage of trained nurses has kept growing as offline coaching centres, rote-learning and a lack of equipment isn't giving nurses the skills they need on the job. NPrep has already changed this for over 100,000 nurses who use the platform for gamified learning, detailed AI-led feedback for their doubts and a video curriculum designed by top AIIMS doctors and nurses. For anyone who has visited a loved one in hospital, you will know that nurses are the real lifeline - by the patient's bedside 24 hours a day. The level of their skill directly drives the outcome as much as the doctor. There is a structural shortage which needs to be filled to meet the world's healthcare needs, and who better than a team of three AIIMS trained doctors who have lived this problem together, to fix it. There has been a rush to solve global healthcare placements from India - the building blocks of that supply have to be built from the ground up through 1:1 learning which builds permanent skills, and a relationship which begins with students far before placement. The NPrep scale-up begins today. More on this here: https://lnkd.in/g9_46grT Lumikai Fund Salone Sehgal Abhay Malla Aditya Deshpande Aanchal Pant Anant Seth Tiasha Guha Neogy CA Rishabh Sethia Asher Siddiqui
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Jesse Landry
Vention • 13K followers
Ozlo has the energy of a team that never forgot what it felt like to build something people actually needed. The founders walked out of Bose carrying 23 yrs of engineering muscle memory, but also the sting of watching the original #Sleepbuds vanish before their prime. Co-Founder & CEO N.B. Patil knew the idea still had teeth, so he pulled in Co-Founder & CPO Charles Taylor and operator-turned-advisor Brian Mulcahey to rebuild the product from the inside out. Same comfort profile, new architecture. Same purpose, sharper execution. By 2024, Ozlo was shipping to 40+ countries, Time Inc. called the Sleepbuds one of the #BestInventions of 2025. The partnership with Calm is the moment where all that momentum stops being background noise. At 12:01 AM EST on Nov 13, the companies released the Ozlo x Calm Sleepbuds, a co-branded drop in a Calm Blue finish with a charging case etched with Take a Deep Breath. It is the hardware equivalent of a deep cut remix: Ozlo brings noise-masking audio, #biometric detection, #allnight comfort, and a sensor-rich case. Calm brings a library of 300+ hrs of sleep stories, #meditations, and #soundscapes, wrapped into a 1-yr subscription to Calm Sleep on iOS or Calm Premium on Android. The price holds at $349, but the value steps up when the subscription cuts the real cost by roughly 20%. The product stops living as a gadget and starts behaving like a nightly system. Calm gets reach into the physical world without touching a factory line. Led by CEO David Ko and guided creatively by Chief Content Officer Greg Justice, the company finds a path beyond app-only engagement, locking in a place on the nightstand instead of competing for home-screen real estate. Ozlo gets access to an audience that has crossed 150M downloads and gains a partner known for shaping behavior, not just delivering content. Eight days before the announcement, Ozlo expanded its Medical Advisory Board with Dr. Rebecca Robbins, PhD MS and Dr. Michael Gervais, a move that frames the Calm partnership as part of a wider push toward clinical credibility and future FDA applications, including tinnitus therapy already in motion. The sleep tech market is moving fast, growing at ~15–18% CAGR, and the companies able to unite purpose-built hardware with ecosystems that travel across #health, wellness, and #behavior are the ones setting the tempo. Ozlo and Calm aren't chasing hype; they're stitching together a category that's shifting from lifestyle to necessity. #Startups #StartupNews #Partnership #Sleep #SleepTech #Wellness #WellbeingTech #Healthcare #HealthTech #Technology #Innovation #TechEcosystem #StartupEcosystem #TechNews
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Alex Marin Gasga
Strategic Advisory, APAC and… • 4K followers
From Hadapsar to the world, powered by grit, not gimmicks A few days ago, I met Dr Vikram Rajguru. Not at a tech conference or a leadership offsite, but during a PRP treatment for my knee. But the real takeaway came from our conversation. Dr Vikram runs a small, independent clinic. Yet his mindset is anything but small. Like many small business owners, he wears multiple hats. But what sets him apart is how quietly he’s blending AI into the rhythm of his practice: → CRM tools to re-engage patients. → Chatbots that answer questions before anxiety sets in. → AI-generated education material that simplifies medical jargon. His clinic is now attracting patients not just from across India, but from the US, Europe, and Asia. The reviews? Glowing. Not because of flashy ads, but because of how deeply they care about patient wellbeing. What stood out wasn’t a dashboard, or VC funding, or an ad campaign; it was grit. The willingness to test, tweak, and keep going. In a healthcare space obsessed with scale and revenue, he’s focused on relevance, trust, and care. All of it built on a lean budget, in a market where attention is scarce, and switching costs are low. He’s not chasing “transformation”. He’s building it; patiently, and with the kind of resilience that doesn’t make headlines… but creates impact. It reminded me that innovation isn’t about having all the tools. It’s about using what you have, well. If a clinic in Pune can scale through purpose and persistence, so can any of us willing to do the work. 👟 Who’s the most quietly innovative business owner you know? #AIforSMBs #Resilience #HealthcareLeadership #IndiaInnovation #LeadershipInAction #GrowthWithCare
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Roopa Kudva
The Global Impact Investing… • 34K followers
"If AI can now write performance reviews, analyze engagement data, and even predict attrition - what's left for leaders to actually lead?" The answer isn't in the tools. It's in the judgement calls no algorithm can make. At the CLO Summit in Mumbai recently, I joined Kumaar Bagrodia, Krishnan Narayanan and Lt Col Sanjeev Malik to discuss this question. The conversation reinforced something I've been observing: while organisations rush to adopt AI tools, they're struggling with basic questions about when to use them and when not to. The technology is available. The judgement framework for deploying it isn't. Leaders need three capabilities today: understanding what technology can do, maintaining human-centricity despite pressure for speed and scale, and anchoring decisions in org. purpose rather than just performance metrics. The paradox is real. The same companies automating operations are simultaneously investing in "high-touch" customer experiences. The same leaders celebrating AI efficiency are quietly worried about org. culture. Technology should support human goals, not determine them. That distinction will separate effective organizations from efficient ones. How do you decide when human judgement should override algorithmic efficiency? #leadership #futureofwork #ai #beyondtheplaybook
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Devon O'Rourke
Fluvio • 8K followers
On the latest episode of Embracing Erosion I sat down with Suyog Deshpande, Co-Founder & CEO of Webless (a Fluvio Ventures portfolio company). Before starting Webless, Suyog spent years at Amplitude, Salesforce, and Samsara - shaping products and GTM strategy at scale as a product marketing leader. That perspective is now fueling one of the boldest bets in tech: 🏗️ rebuilding the web for LLMs. Instead of optimizing for clicks and SEO, Webless imagines an agentic web -where sites are designed to interact directly with AI models and agents. We dug into: - What an LLM-native web could actually look like - How companies can prepare to be LLM-ready - What metrics will matter beyond pageviews and clicks - Why safety and trust are core to agent-driven experiences - Lessons Suyog brings from “big tech” into this transformation If you’re curious about how discovery, trust, and value exchange will evolve online, this one’s worth your time. Link to the full episode in the comments 👇
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Nitin Swamy
VAYAVYA LABS PVT. LTD. • 2K followers
Accidents are tragic events, but can one learn from them and design driving systems and software that could safely and robustly avoid such events in the future? This blog attempts to answer this question and also starts to define a methodology to extract information from such accidents for simulation-based V&V of the driving software.
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Sudhir Prasad
Interact AI • 9K followers
Excited to share that Jayashree Rajan is coming on board as our GTM Advisor at Interact AI. This one feels special. Jayashree was one of our earliest customers. The sharp kind. The kind who pulls apart your narrative, questions your category, and asks "where do you actually win?" Her review calls slowly became internal strategy sessions. Positioning debates. ICP sharpening. Enterprise buying psychology. Category framing. We’d walk in to give updates. We’d walk out thinking differently. Jayashree brings deep CMO experience building positioning from scratch, shaping category stories, and translating market shifts into real revenue outcomes. Grateful for the early conviction. Even more excited for what we’re building next.
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Rahul Chaudhary
Angel Investor • 3K followers
🧭 If one of the reasons for the leadership change was “missing AI opportunities,” that would be disappointing. Venture has always been about taking calculated risks, not chasing every trend. Even the best firms will pass on some winners; the real test is whether they stay disciplined enough to find the ones that fit their conviction. Sequoia’s strength has always been long-term focus and pattern recognition through cycles. The danger is not missing a single AI deal, it is losing the ability to think independently amid the noise. https://lnkd.in/eVKiCEtD #VentureCapital #Leadership #AI #Governance #Startups #SequoiaCapital
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Iman Kalyan Pande
Glance • 8K followers
2026 is going to be the defining year for InMobi and Glance! The investments in AI native tech stack that we made over decades is now starting to show brilliant results. The AI led hyper-growth we are seeing in our core product and business across InMobi and Glance is jaw dropping. Mansi Jain Rajat Wanchoo Naveen Tewari Aimee Zmugg Kelli Lin Aashish Benjamin Oommen Abhinav Mohan Rakesh Ranjan
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Ashu Garg
Foundation Capital • 42K followers
Nearly 2 years ago, Ashutosh, Varun, and I crowded around a whiteboard debating if AI could understand the nuances behind human conversations. Why does a VP of Sales answer “How’s the quarter going?” one way to the CEO and another to a board member? The context changes the response. That was the spark behind Viven, which we invested in this year. Most AI can pull up data. But what about the relationships, unspoken cues, and history that shape decisions? So much gets lost when people move on from orgs or when stories never make it into docs. Viven calls their approach “pairwise context" - training AI to recognize who’s speaking + listening, and how their relationship shapes the conversation. Those endless debates evolved into a mission to help orgs preserve their most valuable knowledge... the experience and insight that lives in people’s heads and is rarely written down. It’s an ambitious vision, but one that will transform how orgs learn. Work that once moved at the speed of meetings could eventually move at the speed of thought. I shared more about how we’re making this possible, and why I believe in Viven, here → https://lnkd.in/g8C3PkK5
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Ambarish Kenghe (AK)
Angel One • 19K followers
"𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐢𝐬 𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐜. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐤𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐮𝐩 𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐲 𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐩𝐞𝐫." That’s one of the many takeaways from our first session of 𝐀𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐥 𝐁𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 (𝐀𝐁𝐂)—a new initiative where we bring candid, thought-provoking voices into the room. Kunal Shah kicked off the series with sharp insights and unfiltered honesty. He spoke about trust as a currency, human behavior in uncertain times, and why Indian brands face a unique challenge: building trust in a deeply skeptical environment. His line “𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐬𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲” stuck with many of us. It is an uphill battle Indian brands face every day, gaining consumer trust and keeping up with it. We also explored how rising chaos is shaping investor psychology. As Kunal put it, people are now swinging between extremes, going either ultra-conservative or hyper-risky. This shift is already influencing how money decisions are being made. This was not just a FinTech or business conversation. It was about staying human, relevant, and intentional in a world that’s constantly changing. Thank you, Kunal Shah, for setting the bar high and for making us think beyond the obvious. At Angel One, we grow by staying curious and thinking deeper Angel Bold Conversations (ABC) is just one way we are learning from the best and challenging the way we think. CRED #AngelOne #AngelBoldConversations #LeadershipInsights
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Jasleen A.
Various Startups • 4K followers
Just concluded a mandate to help define and operationalize the AI Product Strategy for CX, for an early stage tech co. Key learnings for an org which is extremely dynamic in nature and operating in a highly-regulated vertical - 1. Build for today but actively anticipate for future scenarios 2. Stress on the human-in-the-loop (HITL), esp due to the regulations involved 3. Combine CX with account management/ upselling, when the HITL kicks-in 4. Redefine how metrics look in an AI-first world Deployments like these have the added benefit of forcing companies to chart their customer journey and bring the focus back to the user.
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Tarun Katial
coto • 40K followers
A moment of quiet pride seeing this feature on Aparna Acharekar and the journey of coto . What began as listening to real conversations — about abandonment, misunderstandings, workplace stress, and relationship struggles — has grown into something much larger: a space where people can seek support in the moments they need it most. At its heart, coto was never meant to be just another platform. It was built on a simple belief: emotional support should be accessible, immediate, and safe. Today, millions of conversations later, the goal remains the same — not to make people dependent, but to help them rediscover their own strength and joy. Grateful to Aparna Acharekar for shaping this vision - alongside our super committed team of hundreds of experts, onboarding specialist, marketers and engineers and to everyone who continues to believe that emotional wellbeing deserves the same urgency as physical health. The journey continues.
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Jitin Nagpal
i3PO • 2K followers
𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗙𝘂𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝗗𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗘𝘅𝗶𝘀𝘁 𝗬𝗲𝘁 SCENE: Two seasoned product leaders, Meera and Rajiv, sit at a quiet corner of a conference hall after a long day of panels. Coffee in hand, jackets slightly undone, they begin an unscripted debate. RAJIV (half-smiling): I heard someone say today - “Creativity in PM leads to gains beyond the incremental.” Sounds nice enough for applause. But in practice? It feels like a poster, not a roadmap. MEERA (raising an eyebrow): You really believe that? That creativity doesn’t move the needle? That PM is just execution, discipline, and distribution? RAJIV (shrugging): Not exactly. Creativity matters. But it’s overrated. In twenty years, I’ve seen more disasters from “creative leaps” than successes. Creativity eats cash and morale far quicker than it produces outcomes. MEERA (leaning forward): And in my twenty years, I’ve seen the opposite. Execution gives you survival. Creativity - when fused with execution - bends markets. Without creativity, PMs are traffic cops. With it, they create leaps. RAJIV (chuckling): Markets don’t bend that easily. For every Slack, there’s a HipChat. For every Tesla, a Fisker. Creativity is high variance. The rare hits look like genius. The common misses look like hubris. MEERA: Variance, yes. But that’s the point. Slack, Notion, Tesla - they weren’t just creative products. They reframed the problem. They created new lenses. That kind of creativity doesn’t give you 1% gains. It gives you 10x. RAJIV (serious now): But most “creative” ideas? They fail because the market isn’t ready. Google Glass was creative. Dead in two years. MEERA: Or maybe Glass failed because the go-to-market wasn’t creative. Creativity isn’t just product. It’s also in how you test, ship, narrate. Execution without reframing will keep you alive. Reframing with discipline creates leaps. RAJIV (pausing): So maybe it’s not creativity versus execution. It’s creativity to expand the option space. Execution to narrow it. Both are necessary. The art lies in knowing when to let each lead. MEERA (pointing her finger, almost playfully): And that’s where I’ll disagree. Because discipline alone creates survivability. Creativity - when wielded with discipline - creates category leadership. The best PMs don’t just optimize funnels. They imagine funnels that don’t exist yet. RAJIV (after a long pause, sighing with a grin): Fine, let’s call it: creativity without discipline is chaos. Discipline without creativity is stagnation. The multiplier is in the fusion. MEERA (raising her cup): Exactly. Incremental gains are survival. Creative leaps - if disciplined - are how you bend markets. RAJIV (clinking his cup to hers, smirking): Fine. You win the philosophy. But in hiring? I’ll still test for execution first. Creativity is only valuable if it rides on rigor. MEERA (grinning): And I’ll still test for imagination first. Execution can be taught. Vision rarely can.
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