Tailored AI turns one
Seated on the bus in Hyderabad, enroute to Bangalore, I pause to absorb the day and the year. I was in Hyderabad to present our solution infront of the CEO of a healthcare client. The presentation had gone great, and we had shared a candid laugh afterwards on cap tables. I couldn’t have imagined this day a year ago.
Tailored AI is one year old now. Time has gone past swiftly, and I haven’t had the time to look back at the point we started. We were too busy putting the next foot in front of the other that we didn’t notice the distance we convered.
We have made leaps that are evident now, looking back
- From working on our first project at night after returning from my previous job to happily working 12-hour days — and still wanting to do another hour.
- From working alone in the living room to conducting hundreds of interviews and having a 10+ member team with an office in HSR (which we’ll outgrow sooner than expected).
- From struggling to finish a project that felt overwhelming—so much so that we considered returning the money (though we eventually delivered it)—to tackling far more complex problems and delivering them on time.
- From following up with a client through 81 emails and waiting four months for a ₹20,000 payment to landing ₹50 lakh+ clients.
- From writing buggy, embarrassing code that got us an earful from the client to building multiple production-ready products, already launched or soon to be.
- From lending personal money to the company to cover salaries to writing off a ₹15 lakh client due to their financial situation.
- From being crippled by impostor syndrome when meeting successful people to feeling confident that I add value to the conversation.
The journey has taken us from freelance developers to AI partners, co-creating AI roadmaps for companies.
On a personal note, I’ve grown tremendously, both from a technical skill point of view and as a person. I’ve talked to numerous founders, CEOs, partners at private equity and consultancy. I’ve spoked at a startup event and at a college where we went for placements. The feeling is visceral, to the like of driving a car, of moving something bigger than yourself, of being more than an individual contributor. For the first time in my professional career do I feel like I am doing something substantial. And that I bring value to the table. Tailored AI is a big part of feeling confident / alive for me.
I remember an interview of Viswanathan Anand I had watched, where he described a moment when life felt non-linear to him.
At his chess club, students played a tournament where the winner stayed on the board while the loser was replaced by the next person in line. No matter how hard Anand worked on his game, he struggled to secure a win and, frustratingly, had to return to the end of the queue each time. Then, he took a break from chess to focus on his board exams. When he returned, something had shifted—he began winning every match.
The lesson? Change is often invisible in the moment. Progress isn’t always linear, but when you pause and look back, you realize you've leveled up by an order of magnitude. Growth happens when enough pieces of the puzzle fall into place, revealing the bigger picture.