BENGALURU: India’s manufacturers, traders and family-run firms are being handed an unlikely shot at a cash prize: build something useful with AI, or watch a rival pocket Rs 1 crore for doing it first. Emergent, the AI software-building platform, has teamed up with entrepreneur and podcaster Raj Shamani to launch a nationwide challenge daring Indian business owners to solve a real operational headache using artificial intelligence, with the most impressive transformations splitting a Rs 1 crore prize pool.
The pitch is blunt. India’s next leg of business growth, the organisers argue, will not come solely from glossy new startups but from the unglamorous backbone of the economy, manufacturers, traders, logistics operators, D2C brands and family-run enterprises, finally ditching spreadsheets and patchwork systems for software built around how they actually work. The catch that has held them back until now: custom software has traditionally been expensive, slow and locked behind a wall of technical expertise.
That is the wall Emergent wants knocked down. The platform lets business owners describe what they need in plain language and have it built, no developers, no agencies, no months-long build cycles. Think inventory trackers, lead-tracking tools, workflow automation and order management systems, conjured in days rather than quarters.
Mukund Jha, Emergent’s co-founder and chief executive, put it sharply: most businesses, he said, do not need more software so much as software that actually reflects how they work, something that has always demanded time, money and technical resources most firms simply do not have. AI, he argues, just removed that excuse.
Shamani has put his own business where his mouth is, building and documenting a tool for his own operations using Emergent before throwing the challenge open to the country. His logic: every business has bottlenecks that once meant hiring developers or agencies to fix. Now, if you can describe the problem clearly enough, you can build the fix yourself, no permission required.
Beyond the headline prize money, the ambition here is bigger than one competition. The top three entries will split the pot, but the real target is mindset, nudging an entire tier of Indian business owners who have never written a line of code toward treating AI-built software as a normal, unremarkable part of running a business. Whether Rs 1 crore is enough to make spreadsheet diehards finally let go remains, for now, the only question still unanswered.
