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AI Is Creating Value—and Destroying It
The Weekend Playlist
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On this week’s weekend playlist:
AI is beginning to do two very different things at the same time. Inside companies like Maruti, it’s becoming a force multiplier—helping factories run smarter, decisions move faster, and legacy businesses behave more like startups. But outside, on the open internet, the same technology is quietly breaking the system that powers digital publishing—consuming content without sending traffic or revenue back to those who create it.
Two conversations this week capture this divergence: one where AI is unlocking value, and another where it’s redistributing it. The common thread? The rules of who creates value—and who captures it—are being rewritten in real time.
SPECIAL EDITION
Inside Maruti’s Quiet Startup Machine
For decades, big companies built everything in-house. That model is breaking.
Maruti’s startup push reveals something deeper about where corporate innovation is headed. For years, large companies treated startups as peripheral—nice-to-have partnerships, innovation theatre, or PR-friendly accelerators. What’s different here is intent. This is not about “engaging with startups”; it’s about outsourcing speed while retaining control of the problem. By anchoring innovation in real business challenges, Maruti is effectively turning the startup ecosystem into an extended R&D layer—one that is faster, cheaper, and closer to emerging technologies.
But there’s a second, less comfortable truth. Most startups don’t fail because of weak technology—they fail because they’re solving the wrong problems. Maruti’s model quietly exposes that gap. Access to real-world problems, not capital, may be the scarcest resource in the ecosystem.
If this approach scales, it could redefine the relationship between incumbents and startups—not as disruptor versus disrupted, but as co-dependent systems. And in that world, the competitive advantage won’t come from who builds the best tech, but from who understands the problem best.
THE CORE QUIZ
What immediate policy step did the government take to manage the LPG shortage? |
MEDIA ROOM
When AI Reads, Who Gets Paid?
The internet was built on a simple trade: publishers create content, platforms send traffic. AI may have just broken that deal.
In this episode of The Media Room on The Core, Vanita Kohli-Khandekar speaks with Toshit Panigrahi, Co-Founder and CEO of Tollbit, about how large language models are quietly reshaping the economics of digital publishing—often consuming content without sending users, clicks, or revenue back to its creators.
The shift is subtle but profound. Instead of directing audiences to original sources, AI platforms can summarise, repackage, and deliver content directly, weakening the link between creation and compensation. For publishers, that raises an uncomfortable question: if traffic disappears, what replaces it?
Tollbit is betting on a new layer of infrastructure—one that allows publishers to track, price, and license their content in an AI-first internet. The goal is to move beyond the old dependency on clicks and toward direct monetisation frameworks built on usage and attribution.
Because the real battle isn’t just about technology—it’s about who captures value.
As AI rewrites how content is consumed, the future of publishing may depend on whether the industry can rebuild its economics from the ground up—and ensure that when machines read, creators still get paid.
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