The summer I turned ten in Madras, the BBC was already a presence in our house. Chennai is what the city is called now, but in my memory it is always Madras, and Madras in summer is heat and humidity and the particular sound of a valve radio warming up in a room where the ceiling fan turns slowly overhead. My parents listened to the BBC World Service the way other families might have kept a clock running. It was always on. It marked time. It told us there was a wider world out there, even when that world felt very far away.
I never imagined I would be in it.
This past week, Krupa Padhy of BBC Weekend introduced me to her audience as Principal Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group and asked me to respond to something Jack Clark, one of Anthropic's co-founders, had told the BBC the day before. Clark had spoken about research showing that eighty percent of Anthropic's own coding is now done by AI, and about why that capability should not be allowed to run without humans in the loop. My answer was straightforward: the message is not that AI should stop, but that a human being needs to review and approve the work before it goes further. That sounds obvious. It is apparently still worth saying out loud.
What I was not prepared for was the particular strangeness of hearing myself come through the same channel that once brought the world into a house in Madras. My old Siemens valve radio is long gone. I listen to the BBC now as a podcast or through their app on my phone. But something about that moment felt continuous with the ten-year-old who sat in a hot room and learned that voices could travel across oceans.
The first international call I ever made in my life was to BBC Bush House in London. It was the only international phone number I had.
My friend Ajoy Joshi heard the interview from Australia. He sent me a message because he could not quite believe his ears. That is one of the great gifts of a moment like this: it becomes real when someone who knew you before any of this hears you and recognizes you anyway.
This week held other things worth pausing on. Mike Isaac quoted me in the New York Times in his piece on Anthropic's IPO filing. And Jonathan Vanian sought my perspective for his CNBC column on whether Meta can build a business around AI the way it built one around advertising. What I told him was what I genuinely believe: Meta has a long way to go to build an enterprise business from the ground up, because the company has been so focused on consumers. Their Workplace offering always felt half-hearted, because the real attention was on the social side where the ad revenue lives. To compete seriously in enterprise, especially in cloud, you have to build up the processes, the platforms, the technology, and most importantly the people required to actually serve customers over time. Cutting staff while trying to expand in that direction is not a formula that tends to work.
Both conversations were made possible by work I do every day at Info-Tech Research Group, staying close enough to what is actually happening that I can be useful to the 40,000 members who trust us to help them think clearly, either confirming that they are moving in the right direction or giving them something new to push against. I am grateful for that work. It is also what earns the phone calls.
And as if the week needed one more layer, I was at Cisco Live, hearing directly from the leaders of a company that has spent forty years building the infrastructure underlying how the world communicates. There is something grounding about being in a room full of people who understand that none of this happens without a network underneath it. Including, in all likelihood, the signal that carried my voice from a BBC studio to Ajoy's phone in Australia.
Some weeks remind you that the connections you make are not accidental. The valve radio and the podcast app. The one international phone number I memorized as a child and the BBC interview I never planned for. The forty-year-old networking company and the researcher who is still, after all this time, just trying to keep learning.
I have been very lucky. I know that. I want to say it plainly rather than dress it up.
Shashi Bellamkonda is Principal Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group, with affiliations at Georgetown and Stony Brook. He writes at readythoughts.com and shashi.co.
