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Cryptos faced winter but since then they have moved from survival to scale. Cryptos these days are riding a surge in market momentum. Many users are returning, and volumes are swelling.

There was high volatility in 2023, but since the second half of 2024, the tide turned. The user registration rose 2.5 times and trading volumes jumped 6.5 times. It is expected to be profitable scale soon. The direction is clear. The eco-system is fast evolving.

Bitcoin crossed $1.21 lac mark for the first time on July 14, 2025. The previous peaks were beaten. The political leaders adopted a pro-crypto stance. There was growing institutional participation, e.g. BlackRock, Coin DCX group (Coin DCX India, BitOasis, UAE and Bahrain) and Okto registered annual revenues Rs.1179 crore. Transaction volume, spot trading volume and crypto SIPs increased. There was growing traction in Tier 2 cities.

Crypto sentiment has turned positive. The hyper-bull market is still ahead.

Regulations have firmed up in the UAE. In Europe, at the end of 2024, there was Crypto Assets (MICA) Regulation. In the US the Genius Act was signed in July 2025. It created the first federal framework for regulating payments in stablecoins. In India, we have moved from regulating crypto to the procedure to regulate cryptos.

The talk of banning cryptos has vanished. Today, there are well-defined guidelines.

On Thursday August 7, 2025, OpenAI unveiled GPT-5, a major upgrade over GPT 4o and a significant step towards AGA (Artificial General Intelligence). GPT-5 can write good, instantaneous software. GPT-5’s distinguishing feature would be software on demand. It is like having a team of PhD level experts ready to assist you whatever your objectives are .

GPT-5 will be released for all users. GPT-5 free users will see only GPT-5 platform, whereas paid users could see all previous versions. It is going to be the smartest, fastest and most useful model. It would have much better accuracy and a lower hallucination rate.

To many, it would be the first introduction to reasoning. With thinking and reasoning capabilities, GPT-5 is less likely to hallucinate.

India could become the largest market for GPT-5. GPT-5 is better in cultural contexts and languages.

GPT-5 will have broad global accessibility at very reasonable cost.

This is the era of social media, especially the post-2010 Instagram era. It is also an era of the emergence of girlbosses who are media-savvy and head lifestyle brands. It reached a peak in 2020. The startups leveraged their public images which were fascinating. The products sold were luggage, make-up, gym equipment. It also indicated the public support for feminism and inclusiveness.

George Floyd was a victim of racial tendencies in the US. Many founders have created toxic work environments. They never lived up to the objectives they had espoused. The expectation was a friendly business environment while they were climbing up the ladder. They were hit by the hypocrisy of their own. They left the business due to embarrassment they faced.

Some five years down the line, a new team of girlbosses re-emerged. It is heartening they are back. They cannot be acquitted of their sins. But they could be given a second chance. Some male bosses have survived even the worse misdeeds. Of course, all executives must be subjected to a higher bar. A new set of standards could be created for the fair sex.

The modus operandi of the girlbosses has changed. They have shaken off their connections to progressive politics. They bade good-bye to ‘changing the world’ mentality. There are no social and political missions. Once onboard, you have to get ahead. These founders now exhibit marketing prudence. They have to maintain control. They are not willing to dilute their equity, though their equity stake is less than half of the stake of their male counterparts.

Instead of being female founders, they would like to be treated as businesspersons. It is a stratedic move.

There is increasing adoption of AI across enterprises. There are AI and SaaS startups who would like to deliver results in a new way (avoiding cost and complexity of traditional AI) — modular AI.

Modular AI systems are pre-built, function-specific components that can be plugged into existing systems. These components can be used individually or assembled together to automate/optimize business workflows. These modules are designed for tasks such as fraud detection, NLP and sales forecasting. These could be plugged into existing systems, one at a time. Thus they are easily deployed, managed and upgraded. These could be added/swapped. There is no need to rebuild the entire systems. Companies can pick and use only when they need.

Modular AI is speedy, flexible and affordable. It permits businesses to start small and scale gradually. There is no need to extensively overhaul the existing tech infrastructure. The organisations remain nimble.

The shift towards modular AI is led by startups such as Gapshup, Zoho, Gnani AI, CoRover AI and Sima AI.

LLMs evolve quickly. A system is needed that could keep pace with this evolution. Thus plug-and-play was designed. It gives speed, flexibility and affordability.

The startups are at the forefront of this shift. There is a surging demand for modular offerings. There are multi-lingual chatbots, predictive analytics and voice based biometrics modules. Such components are used to solve problems.

Zoho is a SaaS giant. Its branded modules are Zia AI modules. They are embedded in 55 Zoho products. It covers anything from sentiment analysis to time series forecasting.

Customers tap AI everywhere in their workflow without paying for compute they do not need. The privacy is maintained since no customer data is ever fed into model training. Zoho processes 16 billion API calls monthly though its modular services. These modules are trained narrowly and outperform larger LLMs (both in cost and speed).

Gnani AI is conversational AI startup. There is no rip-and-replace IT. Gnani expands its modular libraries into industry-specific workflows with deep integration across CRM, loan management, customer engagement. It has strong traction with BFSI sector, telecom and BPO.

India values multi-lingual support of modular AI. West Asia values its accuracy and conversational quality. Latin America likes its quickness to experiment and scale.

CO-Rover provides NLP modules, speech translation and integration services.

This is the Golden Age of big business. Depending on your perspective, it spells out the Dark Age for small business.

Wealth is being concentrated — it has risen from main street to Wall Street. After Nvidia, Microsoft has emerged the second company to reach a market capitalization of $ 4 trillion. Nine out of 10 biggest corporations in the world are US-based. All of them are worth at least $ 1 trillion.

In fact, legislation enacted favors big business. These generate a large share of employment. Over the last 30 years, the businesses are becoming bigger. It is difficult for smaller companies to go public. Smaller companies going public offer stake at a discount. Pre-pandemic, the US has 7000 listed companies (1996). Those have shrunk to 4000.

Mom-and-pop stores though still around, are not favoured by consumers. Even rented houses are being owned by a private equity firm or a local landlord. Big business is more efficient in absorbing costs. Smaller businesses pass on costs to consumers.

Smaller businesses create jobs and are innovation hubs. Still big business scores over smaller units. These scale quite easily and are more efficient in logistics. They are bought by big business.

Big companies are not favourable for innovation. If Big Tech companies collapse, it will be disastrous for the market. It will affect savings and retirement plans. It will raise cost of capital for all. At the same time, small businesses do not remain profitable — they have to pay liberal wages and provide benefits. Policies favor big business. Tariffs are better absorbed by the larger firms.

AI as has the potential to democratize services and tasks that were mostly handled by large staff. Anti-trust policies favour breakup of the big business. However, that is not so helpful to smaller businesses, which bear higher costs on account of policies.

The Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) is setting up an international campus in Dubai. In fact, it has set up an office in 2018-19 to provide short courses, and realised that there is high demand for management education in this region. The Dubai campus will be a full-fledged international branch. It is recognized by the Commission for Academic Accreditation (CAA), the regulatory agency in the UAE. The campus will run MBA and MBA-like programmes.

It will commence operations by offering one-year executive MBA, and the founding batch will receive their degree in August 2026. The eligibility criteria are experienced professionals clearing GMAT/GRE. The students selected will be from the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC), from Africa, from erstwhile USSR region. The idea is to attract students from global south.

To begin with, the institute will have fly-in fly-out faculty from the parent IIMA. In about a decade, they intend to have a 900-student campus. It will have then regular local and international faculty.

The institute will use local case studies for which they will launch two research centers, one for developing local case studies, and another to incubate startups.

Both the government of India and Dubai government are providing capital expenditure support. The Dubai government will foot the capex. The institute has to focus only on operating expenses.

In a few months, the institute will be allocated land, and the civil facilities will be ready in 3-4 years.

The global business schools charge $ 1 lac plus fees for an MBA in Dubai. Smaller institutes charge $ 40000. IIMA has kept its fees at about $80000 per year. The fees are somewhere in the middle.

Already, Dubai has several Indian educational institutes — Manipal Dubai (2000), BITS Pilani (2000), SP Jain School of Global Management (2004), Amity Dubai (2011), IITM (2023), Symbiosis (2024), IITD Abu Dhabi (2024).

The major OTT channels in India are Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and JiOHotstar. There is these days a quiet revolution in India’s watching habits — regional OTT platforms. Once these were considered niche players. However, these days they are gaining ground. They are not restricted to the volume of content, but extend themselves to loyalty, cultural resonance and reach. The audience of language OTT channels has expanded to other languages — Malayalam thrillers are watched in North India, Bengali Social dramas are watched in Karnataka, and Tamil shows are watched in Gujarat. The whole country is becoming the market, not just one particular state.

Some regional OTT channels are Hoichoi in Bengali and Hindi. It is mainly watched in India and Bangladesh. It has 15 million subscribers. Aha is Tamil, Telugu channel watched in India but also reaches the US and Canada. It has 15 million subscribers. Chaupal is for Punjabi, Haryanvi and Bhojpuri audience. Though primarily watched in India, in a tie-up with Zee5 Global, it is watched in the US. SunNXT is watched by the Southern states, but its viewership extends to Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and English knowing audience. It also reaches Sri Lanka, S.E. Asia, Western Asia and the US. Planet Marathi has reach in India, US, UK and UAE. ManoramaMax in Malayalam is mainly watched in India and GCC countries.

Regional OTT channels are rewriting the rules. What matters is how they are different in terms of intimacy, language, character and place. The storytelling resonates with the audience.

A work of art could be local in theme but could be international in appeal.

Silicon Valley is synonymous with wealth generation and innovation. At the same time, the elite of Silicon Valley are endowed with futuristic vision.

These are the days of AI breakthroughs and trillion-dollar market capitalization. Still there is an unexpected trend — the tech elite quietly are taking steps to protect themselves from uncertainties in the environment. They are creating safe undeground dwelling places for themselves which can sustain and survive them. Call them bunkers or hide-outs, what matters is survival planning.

It is an answer to real-world threats — global conflicts, economic stability, civil unrest, climatic catastrophes, cyber-attacks, infrastructure failures. As we know, there are geopolitical tensions, and the elite must be prepared to face the worst-case scenario.

These premises for their survival have civic amenities like air filtration systems, hydroponic farms and renewable energy systems.

All these tech leaders are shaping the future of the world, but at the same time are conscious of the need for their own survival.

It means that the fear of war and social unrest is common to the average citizens and the elite. They are as much vulnerable as we all are in this volatile geopolitical climate.

The war-like situation un-stabilizes the system — disruption of supply chains, communication and even civic amenities. There could be sudden disruptions. Bunkers are safe refuge at such times. It is a part of contingency planning. Besides military conflicts, there is a global warming and rising sea-levels, hurricanes and droughts. These disturb infrastructure and basic resources such as food and water. These are not abstract possibilities. Thus the shelters must be made self-sufficient.

A cyber-attack can cripple economics in this interconnected world and could trigger chaos. Cyber-attack could affect individuals as well as professionals. The shelters are the fallback arrangements.

There are pandemics leading to shortages and over-strained healthcare systems. In future, such orises could be more severe. Bankers provides isolated quarantine-like environments.

There is a moral dilemma here. Is it necessary to outlive society or is it better to invest in its resilience? Sophistication in bunkers represents not only the fears but lack of foresight. The most disturbing issue is who gets to survive and who are left behind.

As we have already observed, in July 2025, China held AI summit at Shanghai. In this event, China held the march of robots at the exhibition venue. The whole spectacle looked like science-fiction. The robots played drums, served eatables such as popcorn, played in boxing ring or hanged in the hallway awaiting their turn. They had a beautiful uncanny face, full of cosmetic effects — eyeliner and rogue. There were dog-like bots who could stand on their hind legs.

It is easier to dismiss the whole thing which will fade out once the novelty wears off China is promoting the robotics sector. Humanoid robots involve high costs and technology barriers. They are not able to do much on their own. All these demos are curated. It requires human intervention. As it was vacation time, kids accompanied the parents to enjoy the humanoid show.

Though in nascent stage now, these have the potential to evolve for prime time. The entry barries have been removed by economical open-source software access. More data will be needed to train them for the real world. And like a chatbot, they should understand the natural language.

China has invested in automation and embodied AI. They are strong in EV manufacture and tech manufacturing. This has created a supply chain for robotics. The firms also collaborate with each other in developing an eco-system conducive to novelty.

The US should not lag behind China. In the exhibition, a humanoid with a price tag of $ 5900 was unveiled. The older generation cost $ 16000. So, this was quite a come down.

All the prototypes on display may not be commercialized. The workplaces and residences may not be robotized soon. Whether robots would be tools or our partners is to be seen. Those firms will survive which create robots that could work on shop floors, retail outlets and fast-food joints.

The robots that make most contribution may not look like humans. There is no need to make them look cosmetic. The focus should be on efficiency.

Big Tech keeps spending more on AI and the returns are rising too. Investors are happy about these investments in AI.

AI drives internet search, digital advertising and cloud computing. It generates more revenues for Microsoft, Facebook and Google. There are capacity shortages, and Microsoft and Google have decided to spend more to meet the AI demand. AI is emerging as a primary growth engine. Of course, monetization of AI is still in its early days.

Amazon is the largest cloud provider. There are uncertainties on account of tariffs, but the technology demand is shielding it from such uncertainties. Google and Facebook too are doing capital investments and will do so in foreseeable future.

Microsoft shares show an upward trend. The market capitalization may cross $ 4 trillion. This milestone has been reached by only Nvidia — the chip making company. Facebook shares have risen too, reaching a market value of $ 1.75 trillion. Azure cloud computing business shows growing returns on its massive AI bets. Google also beats revenue expectations. Microsoft has Copilot user base of 100 million. Around 800 million customers use AI tools prepared by Microsoft. Microsoft more than justifies its spending on AI.

Gemini has AI assistant app has more than 450 million monthly active users. ChatGPT has weekly 500 million active users.

The race for AI is intensifying in Silicon Valley.