Narratives that share our personal experiences, reflections, and journeys.
Let us start with the data, because the data frames the problem in a way that the usual MSME AI conversation does not. India has 63 million MSMEs. They employ more than 110 million people. They represent approximately 30% of India's GDP and 45% of total exports. They are, by almost every measure, the backbone of the Indian economy. And fewer than 3% of them have a structured HR function.
I was twenty-one years old. I had recently joined Talent Synergy through the FresherRank programme after stints at LatentView Analytics and Teceze, where I had spent a meaningful amount of time inside HRIS systems - building integrations between DarwinBox and BI tools, automating workflows, creating dashboards that converted raw HR data into something decision-makers could actually use.
There is a particular kind of institutional optimism that takes hold in a conference room when a new framework is introduced. The slides are clean. The model is elegant. The logic is internally consistent and the research citations are impeccable.
When most organisations in India engage gig professionals - a technology consultant for a six-month transformation project, a fractional finance lead for a pre-IPO phase, an HR specialist to manage a restructuring - they evaluate those professionals against a set of criteria that has one central, unacknowledged assumption baked into it.
There is a question that three years of research, more than a thousand conversations, and one published book have taught me to take seriously — and that the entire gig economy conversation has consistently failed to ask
There is a scenario that plays out in organisations across India with a regularity that should be more alarming than it typically is. A high-performing employee - someone who has been a reliable, effective, occasionally exceptional contributor for two or three years - walks into their manager's office and resigns.
Let us be precise about what is happening. Seventy-seven percent of CEOs are currently pursuing cost-efficiency measures at the same time as they are articulating ambitious growth targets.
There is a conversation that happens in almost every leadership team when a critical role opens. The job description is written. The salary band is approved.The hiring panel is assembled.
When I joined LatentView Analytics as an HR Generalist, one of the first things I noticed was the gap between what our HRIS was capable of and what we were actually using it for.