Daybreak

On Wednesday, Meta began firing 8,000 people.This makes up 10% of its global workforce. The cuts started at 4am on 20 May, rolling across time zones. People found out by email. Meta's quarterly revenue that same week: $56 billion. It's capex guidance for 2026: up to $145 billion, almost all of it going into AI. This is the current trend in Big Tech: record profits, mass layoffs, redirect to machines, repeat. Then, closer home: Unacademy is being sold to upGrad for $218 million — over 90% below its 2021 peak of $3.44 billion. The edtech gold rush is over and what's left is the reckoning.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Adani Group has spent the last decade building India's largest private airport empire. But owning nine airports turned out to be only the beginning.From aircraft maintenance to pilot training to ground handling, the group is now reaching into every corner of the aviation business. Airlines operating at Adani airports are already feeling the squeeze — on pricing, on vendor choice, on the terms of doing business.India has never had a single player control this much of the aviation stack. Are the regulators keeping up?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Virat Kohli's new Meta Oakley ad has 40 million views in two weeks — more than every other athlete in the global campaign, including the one that aired during Superbowl. The tagline says Athletic Intelligence is here. But the ad shows the glasses answering questions, playing music, and recording a slow-motion shot. The athletic part is mostly just Kohli.India's smart wearables market is set to triple by 2033. Fifty million Indians already make health decisions based on what these devices tell them. Studies show a 30-80% error rate on something as basic as calorie counting. So how intelligent is Athletic Intelligence, really?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Three weeks before the FIFA World Cup kicks off in the US, India still does not have a broadcaster for the tournament. JioStar offered $20 million. FIFA said no. Sony did not bid at all. A petition has reached the Delhi High Court asking that matches at least air on Doordarshan.The easy explanation is that FIFA got greedy. But that does not explain how the world's biggest sporting event ends up with no takers in a country with more than 300 million football fans.In today's episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at what FIFA fundamentally misunderstood about India as a football market. And how one merger  gave Reliance enough power that left FIFA with nowhere else to go.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

The Indian government just moved two million email accounts off NIC's servers onto Zoho's cloud. The reason the government decided to leave behind a system it had built and run for 40 years? A list of issues; including ransomware attacks, power outages, and even a blackout on a New Year's Eve that knocked out Parliament's website.The fix was a seven-year, 200 crore rupee contract with a private Indian company. Zoho actually scored lower than Google and Microsoft in the government's own assessment. Bur it won the assessment anyway.Thing is, India spent years building open-source infrastructure to stay independent. The question is whether it just traded one dependency for another.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Jio Studios is now the largest production house in India by revenue, catalogue, and box-office share. It got there fast. Stree 2, Laapataa Ladies, Dhurandhar, all Jio. The Dhurandhar franchise alone is closing in on Rs 3,000 crore worldwide. Meanwhile, Dharma, Excel, Maddock, and Bhansali have all sold significant stakes just to stay in the game. Jio simply does not need to. It has Reliance's telecom network, streaming platform, and marketing muscle all working together. The studio model that Bollywood once abandoned is back. But can Jio can build an identity to go with it?Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Gen Z was supposed to be AI's most enthusiastic adopters. For a while, they were. Then the hiring froze, the jobs disappeared, and the tools got good enough to make the question uncomfortably personal.Excitement about AI among Gen Z is down 15% since last year. Anger is up 9%. But the more interesting story isn't the sentiment shift — it's what's happening underneath it. Writing skills degrading without anyone noticing. Complacency creeping in. A generation becoming, in one colleague's words, more boring.The curiosity is there and so is the dread. And, often in the same person.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Air India's board met in Mumbai last week to discuss cost cuts, CEO succession, and whether to start charging business class passengers separately for meals and lounge access. The airline is projecting losses exceeding ₹22,000 crore for the financial year just ended, nearly double the year before. Campbell Wilson is stepping down as CEO. International flights are being cut by over 20%. Jet fuel costs are up 63% since the war on Iran began. But the crisis arrived at an airline already deep in trouble. In today's episode, we look at what was happening inside the Tata turnaround long before the war on Iran began.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

On a Wednesday morning in April, The Ken's Mrunmayee Kulkarni went to Rushikonda beach in Visakhapatnam looking for a manhole. She found it — a concrete chamber with a reinforced lid, no armed guard, no exclusion zone, no legal protection. In a few years, it will be one of the landing points for the world's longest undersea cable.95% of India's internet — every payment, every message, a $341 billion services economy — runs through cables like this. The nearest repair ship is in Singapore. There is no protection law. And 60% of that traffic runs through a war zone.What happens if something goes wrong?Tune in.Read Mrunmayee's story here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India's carmakers are staring down a deadline. In less than a year, new emission norms will require them to dramatically cut their carbon output — or pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. Electric vehicles were supposed to be the answer. But the batteries aren't ready, the infrastructure isn't there, and adoption has been slower than anyone predicted.So the industry has quietly pivoted to an unlikely stopgap: CNG. Tata, Maruti, and Hyundai are all betting on it. In fact, two in every five Maruti cars sold last year ran on the fuel. But a stopgap is still just a stopgap.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India's best AI models are confidently wrong. Not occasionally — structurally. If you put two unrelated ideas into a prompt, the model will usually invent a connection rather than admit that none exists.In this piece, The Ken's Debanjali Biswas traces what a five-month study of leading AI models — from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — actually found about how they reason. The results landed almost every model in what researchers are calling the "danger zone", which shows high confidence and low accuracy.This is a read aloud of Debanjali's original story, by Rachel Varghese, on Daybreak.

A two-year-old think tank backed by Adani just got 14 of its suggestions, some of them word for word, written into a law passed by Parliament. That law opened India's nuclear sector to private players for the first time in history. Months later, Adani floated a new subsidiary to enter the same field.The think tank is called Chintan Research Foundation. It started in a South Delhi cafe. It calls itself independent. And it's now one of the more visible and contested players in Delhi's policy world.So what exactly does Rs 100 crore buy you in India's policy ecosystem?Also listen to: Friday Roundup: Adani goes nuclear and AI's talent exit

The Parle-G packet has cost five rupees since the 1990s. Once, when the company tried raising it by 50 paise, consumers switched to Britannia's Tiger within weeks. The price was rolled back. That's how sensitive this market is.But something else has been changing — quietly, and without announcement. The packet that was once 100 grams is now 45. And Parle-G isn't alone. Dabur, Britannia, Nestlé, Godrej — all cutting weight, all in the same quarter, all for the same reason.A war in West Asia has sent packaging costs up by 40 to 75%. The buffer won't last. What comes next?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

West Bengal and Tamil Nadu declared their results yesterday. BJP swept Bengal after fifteen years of TMC rule. In Tamil Nadu, Vijay's TVK won, upending the DMK return almost everyone had predicted, including the platforms that had money on it.Prediction markets are now a $150 billion industry. And they were taking live bets on India's assembly elections, on a platform India officially banned last year. In a recent edition of The Ken's Make In India Competitive Again, Seema Singh wrote about an interesting research paper. While most assume the trading volumes were not high enough for concern, this peer-reviewed paper in Science says otherwise. In fact, this it says, it matters even when the volumes are thin, or maybe especially then. So what is India's ban actually achieving?Tune in.Also listen to: India banned online betting. Polymarket is wagering on our elections anyway. 

Market shocks hit retirees harder than anyone else. For those just retired or on the verge of it, a sharp early drop in portfolio value can cause damage that compounds quietly over decades, long after markets recover.The American war in Iran is the latest trigger. And it may not be the last.The good news: careful planning can offset the risk. A concept called the safe withdrawal rate, used correctly, can be the difference between a corpus that lasts 30 years and one that runs out in 20.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In November 2024, one of India's biggest FMCG companies, Hindustan Unilever, started getting a barrage of complaints from its consumers, who said they were seeing the same Dove and Surf Excel ads repeatedly on OTT platforms during a single watch session. Some of them were shown the same ads as many as 150 times within a week.With IPL around the corner, HUL — which spends nearly Rs 4,000 crore on ads annually — couldn't afford to ignore these complaints. So what followed was a series of investigations. And what they discovered has opened a real can of worms for not just JioHotstar, the platform streaming the IPL, but OTT platforms in general. The big issue is a serious mismatch between what was promised and what's actually being delivered for ad campaigns, according to seven insiders from HUL, Disney, and other industry rivals who spoke to The Ken.So what happens when a big spender starts feeling like it's not getting what it signed up for during the biggest streaming event of the year? The Ken reporter Rounak Kumar Gunjan speaks to Daybreak hosts Snigdha and Rahel.This episode was first published in February 2025. We're re-airing it now because IPL 2026 is live, and the underlying issue the episode raises has not been publicly confirmed as resolved.Here's what has changed after we first published: ahead of IPL 2025, JioHotstar partnered with Nielsen to introduce third-party verified ad measurement for the first time in Indian OTT. It was a direct response to the advertiser pressure this episode describes. But the Nielsen study that followed measured cross-screen duplication: whether the same viewer was being counted differently across TV, mobile, and connected TV. It didn't address the specific complaint HUL raised, which was about a single user being shown the same ad repeatedly within one platform. JioStar has not publicly confirmed that the problem has been fixed.What has changed though, for IPL 2026: connected TV ad rates are up 25%, with the base cost of a 10-second ad rising from ₹480 to ₹600 CPM. The money is bigger. And the question of whether advertisers are getting what they pay for remains the same.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Investors are calling India's home-services market quick commerce's next big moment. Instahelp, Snabbit, and Pronto are betting big on it. They're sending trained workers to your door in under 10 minutes, at prices cheaper than a coffee. Orders, naturally, are in the millions.But the difference is that quick commerce eventually figured out how to make money. Here, on the other hand, 82% of consumers have already said they won't pay more than Rs 200 an hour. And on every order placed today, the market leader is losing twice what it earns.So who exactly is this boom working for?Tune in.

Diet Coke disappeared from Bangalore's shelves, and a teenager's frustrated Reddit post accidentally explained why: the Strait of Hormuz.When the US-Israel war on Iran began in February, fuel shipments slowed. Aluminium furnaces went cold. PET resin prices jumped 75%. At least 25 plants shut completely. In one Odisha industrial belt alone, 700 of 1,500 workers lost their jobs.But the war only made an existing problem worse — India had already tightened import rules on aluminium cans, leaving beverage companies dangerously dependent on West Asian buffer stock.The shortage was always coming. The war just decided that it was now.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Last week, Rihanna was all over our social media feeds as she flew to Mumbai for the official India launch of Fenty Beauty. Now it is exclusively available through Reliance Retail's beauty company, Tira. This was the popstar's second visit to India in two years; the first being a private performance at Anant Ambani's pre-wedding celebrations in 2024, her first paid show in eight years. For a woman who built her entire brand on never showing up on anyone else's terms, there's something worth examining here. Fenty is valued at nearly $3 billion and India's premium beauty market is heading towards $4 billion by 2035. But the real story starts in November 2023, when Reliance spent ₹99 crore acquiring Sephora India.In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma examines if any of this was really Rihanna's choice.Tune inDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

At Kochi's Infopark, two models of the IT industry sit 500 metres apart. Infosys and Wipro: sprawling campuses, thousands of engineers, margins built on scale. IBM: a smaller hub, senior-heavy teams, focused on enterprise AI. Same city, completely different bets on the future.India's IT giants are expanding into tier-2 cities because they're cheaper. But AI is quietly making the old logic — hire more, deliver at scale — look like the wrong answer. Infosys and Wipro's stocks have nearly halved since 2021. IBM's has doubled.So what does Kochi reveal about where Indian IT is actually headed?Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Lightrock arrived in India with nearly a billion dollars and royal backing — the Liechtenstein dynasty's centuries-old fortune funding bets on around 40 growth-stage startups. The firm moved fast, doubled down on existing investments more aggressively than most peers, and scaled hard during the zero-interest-rate boom. Then the cycle turned. Its portfolio — Waycool, Pharmeasy, Dunzo — ran into trouble. New cheques dried up. Lightrock shifted from investor to caretaker, managing what it had rather than building what came next. A royal wager on Indian tech, still waiting for a payoff.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

You pick up an unknown number. A bubbly voice starts selling you a credit card. You hang up in seconds. Except now, that voice may not be human.AI voice agents are already live across banks, e-commerce and healthcare platforms in India, with startups in the space raising over Rs 280 crore. But behind that perfectly polite pitch is a more complex rollout — from pilots and script tuning to adapting across languages and dialects.So, what's driving this sudden funding spree, and how are companies actually deploying these AI callers in India?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

A study gave 16 experienced developers the best AI coding tools available.They predicted they'd be 24% faster. They felt 20% faster. They were actually 19% slower — and still didn't believe it when told.That gap between belief and reality is now being deployed at enterprise scale.TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and Cognizant have committed to over 50,000 AI coding licences each. Bugs per developer are up 50%. Code is reaching production without any human review.And the senior engineers who could catch the mistakes are buried too deep in the flood to look up.Is India's IT sector selling a productivity story it hasn't actually earned yet?Tune in. *With inputs from Mrunmayee Kulkarni. Read her piece here: Engineers gag as Amazon, TCS, and Cognizant ram ‘mandatory AI' into everyday workRead the NYT article: The Big Bang: A.I. Has Created a Code OverloadRead Luciano Nooijen's blog post: Why I stopped using AI code editorsDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Seventeen years ago, Reliance Industries made a promise that was supposed to change India's energy future. It didn't. Today, with a war raging in the Middle East, the Strait of Hormuz mostly closed, and Qatar — India's single largest gas supplier — unable to guarantee supplies, that broken promise has become a full-blown crisis. India finds itself caught between Trump, Tehran, and its own structural failures. The IEA calls it the worst energy crisis in history. For India, it may be the moment that finally forces a reckoning.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

When your SIP bounces, your bank charges you Rs 500. The mutual fund that missed the investment? Charges you nothing. That gap is not an accident.In this piece, The Ken's Mutasim Khan traces how India's banks have quietly turned missed SIP debits into a revenue line — one that costs them roughly Rs 25 to process, and nets them hundreds of crores a month. The people paying most are first-time investors in smaller cities, often unaware the charge even happened.This is a read aloud of Mutasim's original story, by Snigdha Sharma, on Daybreak.

India's life expectancy has doubled since 1950. But 65% of deaths are still from diseases caught too late. Cent, the new startup from Practo's founder, thinks it has an answer: full-body AI scans that find risks before they become diagnoses. At Rs 20,000–30,000 a scan, it's already found critical findings in hundreds of patients — with zero false positives, it claims.But Cent doesn't diagnose. It doesn't refer. And it has no proprietary technology. So what exactly are you paying for — and what happens after it finds something?Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Anthropic has spent years building a reputation as the AI company that actually cares about safety. Then, in the span of two weeks, it leaked an unannounced model, exposed its own source code, and accidentally handed hackers a blueprint of its most widely-used product. The fix came in 24 hours. The blueprint can't be unlearned. And the companies that trusted Claude Code with their deepest systems are still running on publicly documented defences. If the most careful AI company couldn't prevent this, what does that mean for everyone else?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

The Indian government approved a ₹41,534 crore fertiliser subsidy for the upcoming kharif season last week, a 12% increase from last year. The move comes as the Gulf War has severely disrupted India's fertiliser supply chains, with urea prices jumping 65% in just 40 days. India is the world's second largest fertiliser importer, and the Strait of Hormuz carries a significant share of both the finished fertilisers and the gas needed to make them domestically. The kharif season, which produces roughly 100 million tonnes of rice, begins in June. In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at India's fertiliser subsidy policy and what its really doing for farmers during this crisis. Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India is building data centres at unprecedented speed to support cloud services, AI, and digital growth. At the same time, cities across the country are struggling with water shortages and repeated contamination of drinking-water supplies.A United Nations report describes this condition as water bankruptcy. It is the stage where water systems continue to function, but only by drawing down reserves that cannot recover fast enough.In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at how India's data centre push fits into that reality, drawing lessons from cities abroad where similar tensions have already surfaced.So as India builds for a digital future, the question is simple: who decides how much water that future can afford?**This episode was originally published on 22 Jan, 2026Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India's new undergraduate framework was supposed to fix a broken system — where only 8% of graduates land jobs that match their degrees. The fix? Give students hundreds of courses to choose from, blend formal education with vocational training, and make them more employable. But when every course carries the same two credits, students do the math quickly and the easier course wins.Now universities are scrambling, edtechs are stepping in to teach core curriculum, no one's quite sure who's in charge and it's not really clear if this reform is fixing employability yet.Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

At a fintech conference in February, Razorpay showed a demo. A user ordered food on Zomato by voice and paid — without opening a checkout page or a UPI app. No friction and no redirects. Just a job done end-from-end.The same week, OpenAI quietly rolled back its own in-chat shopping agent.Razorpay is calling this the biggest disruption to payments since UPI. But agentic commerce raises questions that a demo can't answer — around trust, fraud, consent, and who's liable when an AI spends your money.Is India ready for that? Is anyone?Hosts Snigdha Sharma and Rachel Varghese, speak to The Ken reporter Mutasim Khan. Tune in.Buy your tickets for the Zero Shot event here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

A cartoon reposted. An account restricted. A takedown notice with no warning and no appeal.India's new IT rules give platforms three hours to remove flagged content — the shortest window anywhere in the world. But a draft amendment published last month could go even further, potentially treating anyone who posts about current affairs as a publisher. Without the protections that come with it.For millions of creators, anonymous users, and global tech platforms, the stakes just got harder to ignore.The deadline to push back is April 14th.Tune in.Find the IFF email template here.Buy your tickets for the Zero Shot event here. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India's civil aviation ministry issued two directives this March that pulled in opposite directions. First, it mandated full refunds for cancelled flights. Three days later, it removed all caps on airfares. The trigger for the second move: the US-Israeli war against Iran has sent jet fuel prices soaring, up nearly 60% in the US, and India is bracing for the impact. Airlines, already running on thin margins, are warning that fares will rise. For Indian flyers, the net result is this: cancellations just got free but flights just got more expensive.How did we get here?Tune in.Get your tickets for the first Zero Shot live event here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India wants to design its own semiconductor chips. To help, the government launched a scheme with money and tools for startups that do exactly that. But there's a catch — and it's keeping out the very people best placed to build this industry. The engineers who spent decades in Silicon Valley, built the chips inside your devices, and are now coming home. A regulator that's also a competitor. And a factory that was supposed to be for Indian startups — but probably won't be.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Imagine paying insurance premiums for years and then one day you actually need it. You're in a hospital, or someone you love is. And the insurer says: no.In the last financial year, Indian health insurers rejected claims worth ₹30,000 crore. Nearly one in eight claims were denied or left pending.And what's wild is how far back the problem starts. There are agents filling out forms incorrectly to earn a faster commission. Hospitals that know exactly what a surgery costs but keep the number vague on purpose. And insurers operating on margins so thin that scrutinising every claim is more about survival than greed.The Ken reporter Sudeshna Ray dived into this for The Ken's Make India Competitive Again newsletter. Host Snigdha Sharma reads it for you in this episode.Apply for The Ken's Event Manager role hereDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Polymarket and Kalshi are two New York-founded prediction market platforms now valued in the billions. While both let users bet real money on elections and political events in real time, it is Polymarket — the larger, offshore, largely unregulated one — where someone made nearly a million dollars predicting US military strikes on Iran before they happened. Together, the two platforms processed over $44 billion in bets last year.In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma explores how two New York startups turned opinion into a tradeable asset — and what happens when the people placing the biggest bets already know the answer.India banned online money gaming last year. These platforms are taking bets on our elections anyway.Tune in.Apply for The Ken's Event Manager role hereDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

For a decade, digital advertising ran on one idea: get to the top of Google. Buy the keywords and earn the clicks. That was the game.But AI just changed the rules.ChatGPT and Gemini now have over a billion and a half users between them, growing at nearly 200% year on year. People have stopped searching for links. Instead,nthey're asking questions and expecting answers. And those answers mention three brands, maybe four. For the rest who don't make it to these answers, it's like they don't even exist.What will those brands do? Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In 1965, Yoko Ono sat on a stage at Carnegie Hall and handed a pair of scissors to strangers. What they did next was entirely up to them. It was a performance about agency — and about what happens when you give an audience too much of it. Sixty years later, Sam Altman made a promise: OpenAI would treat adults like adults, and roll out an erotic mode for verified users. The market was there. Other players in the intimate AI companion space were raking in dollars. But after multiple delays, the Open AI plan was eventually shelved. So, why is a company known for burning cash, saying no to a revenue making avenue it already considered?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Semaglutide's patent just expired in India. The molecule behind Novo Nordisk's blockbuster obesity drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy, is now fair game for generic manufacturers. An 85 to 90% price drop is expected.Eli Lilly's Mounjaro had already been outselling Wegovy.For most companies, this would be the beginning of an exit. But Novo is doing the opposite. Why?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India's hospitals have been slow to adopt AI. Its government, however, has not. A new programme aims to train 50,000 doctors in artificial intelligence. And not just to use it, but to help build it. The argument is simple: engineers understand disease like an algorithm. Doctors know it's never that clean. So what happens when clinicians become co-builders?Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Bengaluru's water utility loses a third of everything it pumps. It owes Tokyo Rs 10,000 crore. It bleeds Rs 80 crore every month.Its answer to all of this was an app — GPS-tracked tankers, government-backed, 40% cheaper than the market.But nine months later the all the app has to show is 10,000 downloads and a 2.8 rating in a city of 14 million. So why are Bangalore's residents saying no to the state's efforts?Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

From platforms like Cred, Zerodha, and Groww integrating AI assistants, to Sebi-registered advisors now using AI to generate personalised investment recommendations, the shift is already underway. And with nearly 140 million investors and fewer than a thousand registered advisors to serve them, the math alone might make AI advice not just convenient, but necessary.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Seventy years ago, Homi Bhabha designed a three-stage nuclear plan built around one idea: that India's future was thorium, not uranium. The science was proven, the reactors were built, and by 1996, India had already demonstrated a thorium fuel cycle at an experimental reactor in Kalpakkam.What it never did was take it to commercial scale. In 2025, an eight-year-old American startup did exactly that — with a fuel designed specifically for Indian reactors, and a former chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission on its board of advisors. So what happened in between?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India's telecom operators have spent decades controlling how signals reach customers indoors but that arrangement is now under serious pressure.A new breed of infrastructure companies, ones that do not own a spectrum and hold no licence, are taking control of how 5G reaches you inside airports, metro lines, malls, and office towers. The fight over who builds and who pays has drawn in regulators, sovereign wealth funds, and the Supreme Court.And it points to a much larger shift in who really owns the network.Tune in.

India's Northeast has always had money. Wealth managers are only now showing up to court it, and finding the welcome chillier than expected. Post-GST, a wave of newly banked business wealth is looking for a home. Sophisticated products like AIFs, PMS, bonds, are finding takers. But Northeastern millionaires play by different rules. They don't respond to cold calls. They don't trust outsiders easily. And they have little patience for managers who can't answer basic questions.So what does it actually take to win a client here — and why are so many wealth managers still getting it wrong?Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Last Friday, Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur hosted 150 founders at Razorpay's Koramangala headquarters — not to talk payments but to let them showcase what they'd built with OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent taking the world by storm. The same week, thousands were queuing outside Baidu and Tencent offices in China just to get the software installed. The  open source agent AI platform is the same but the two approaches are quite different. China is deploying OpenClaw at a scale and speed no other country is matching. India, meanwhile, is moving carefully, deliberately, problem-first. So here's the question: is India behind China on OpenClaw? And is speed is the only thing that matters in the AI race?Read Inc42's report here: The New Garage: OpenClaw And India's DIY AI Agent BoomDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

The next time you pick up a strip of tablets at your neighbourhood pharmacy, consider this: the drug you just bought for Rs 170 may have left the factory for Rs 14. That's a markup of over a 1000%. And, it's completely legal.In this piece, The Ken's Mutasim Khan traces how India's drug pricing system works, and why the pharmacist, the doctor, and the manufacturer are all optimising for something, while the patient simply pays.This is a read aloud of Mutasim's original story, by Snigdha Sharma, on Daybreak.

In 1955, a man from a small village in Kerala paid 500 rupees for passage on a crowded boat to Abu Dhabi. He told no one he was leaving. He wasn't the first, and he certainly wasn't the last. Over the decades, millions followed  — and the money they sent back quietly rebuilt everything: houses, schools, entire towns. Today, remittances make up over a fifth of the state's economy. Which means when war broke out across the Middle East last month, Kerala isn't just watching from a distance. The hurt is closer home.Tune in. Want to work with The Ken? Apply here!Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India is drinking more — and spending more when it does. Between 2020 and 2025, alcohol consumption nearly doubled. Post-Covid, drinkers didn't just drink more; they upgraded. Four bottles where there used to be one. Home bars where there used to be none. Global brands that once ignored India are now flooding distributors with enquiry emails. But the opportunity comes wrapped in one of the most complicated regulatory systems in the world — 69 permits for a single brand in some states, margins so thin most retailers stock only five or six labels. India is still a teenager. The hangover hasn't hit yet.Tune in.Want to work with The Ken? Apply here!

Within days of the war in Iran, panic spread across India's cooking-gas system. Millions rushed to book LPG refills. Restaurants shut kitchens. A temple in Delhi halted its community meals. The government invoked emergency powers and warned hoarders they could face seven years in jail. But the panic revealed a deeper question.India now has 33 crore households cooking on LPG — one of the largest cooking-gas networks in the world. Yet the country's strategic underground reserves amount to less than two days of national demand.And interestingly, in last year's budget documents, the government told Parliament it had no plans to build any new LPG storage caverns. Almost no one noticed that line until now.How did the world's most ambitious clean-cooking programme end up with a buffer this thin?Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Uber is one of the most recognised brands in the world. But in India, it's losing ground — to a government-backed taxi app, a newer competitor, and its own shrinking margins. So it's making a surprising bet: instead of fighting harder for your weekend ride, it wants to drive you to work. The B2B transport market it's entering has been run by specialists for decades. And those specialists aren't sure whether to be worried or not.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.