AI will automate work. India’s next startup wave will sell experiences

Last year, I watched a traveller spend forty minutes talking to a street food vendor in Mumbai. Not because the food was extraordinary, but because the man behind the cart had a story she had never heard before. No app recommended that conversation. No algorithm made it happen. It just did, because two humans were present at the same moment.

That memory stayed with me. And it keeps coming back every time someone asks: will AI replace us?

The honest answer is that it will replace a lot of what we do. Code written in seconds. Reports summarised instantly. Marketing campaigns drafted from a single prompt. For engineers and knowledge workers, the pace of this change is both exciting and deeply unsettling. AI is reshaping how work gets done, faster than most of us anticipated.

But here is what the conversation keeps missing. Automating tasks is not the same as replacing human experience.

Experiences are not outputs. They are moments shaped by presence, spontaneity, and the kind of chemistry that happens when people actually show up for each other. Think of a small group shaping their first pottery bowl, someone trying aerial yoga and laughing halfway through, or strangers bonding over a coffee brewing workshop they signed up for out of curiosity.

It could be a weekend trail ride outside the city, a jewellery-making session where creativity takes over the room, or a spontaneous go-karting challenge that turns into friendly rivalry. What makes these moments stay with people is not just the activity itself. It is the human energy around it. The unexpected conversation, the shared learning, the laughter that was never planned. These are the stories people carry home.

No model is going to replicate that.

For founders, this distinction is critical. While AI compresses the cost and time required to build digital products, it also raises the bar for what is worth paying for. If anything can be generated instantly, then value shifts toward what cannot be replicated on demand, experiences that are social, contextual, and inherently human. This is where a new kind of defensibility is emerging.

We are already seeing this play out in how people spend. Over the past decade, consumers have steadily shifted from buying things to buying moments. Travel is a clear example. People have moved from simply seeing landmarks to participating in experiences. Instead of ticking places off a list, they want to cook with a local family, learn a traditional craft, or explore a neighbourhood through the eyes of someone who actually lives there. Entertainment has evolved in a similar way. Audiences do not just want to watch anymore. They want to participate.

The underlying desire is simple. People want things that feel real. And the more time we spend with machines, the more urgent that desire becomes.

There is an irony worth sitting with here. Social media promised deeper connections. What it actually created, over time, was a counter-movement. People began actively seeking offline communities, in-person meetups, and experiences that felt unscripted. AI may accelerate exactly the same dynamic. The more routine tasks get automated, the more human effort migrates toward things that require empathy, cultural intuition, and genuine presence.

Vivek Kumar is a founder focused on building the experience economy.

This is where the next real frontier for entrepreneurship lies.

In India, this shift is already translating into early business momentum. A new set of startups is emerging at the intersection of experiences, community, and commerce, ranging from curated workshop platforms and hobby-based communities to hyperlocal discovery products. Unlike traditional marketplaces, these businesses are not just solving for access, but for quality of interaction. What they are building is not inventory, but participation.

But building in this category requires a different playbook from traditional tech startups. Scale does not come purely from adding supply. It comes from ensuring consistency in experience, which is far harder to standardise. Trust, curation, and community become core product features, not afterthoughts. In many ways, these businesses behave less like marketplaces and more like ecosystems.

Technology will still matter in this world. Platforms will help people discover experiences, build communities, and coordinate at scale. But the value will not live on the platform. It will live in what happens when people actually meet.

AI will reshape industries and redefine work. That part is certain. But it will not touch our need to gather, to celebrate, to be surprised by each other.

If anything, by making so much of life feel automated, it may make that need feel more urgent than ever. And in that future, the most interesting opportunities will not come from replacing humans. They will come from creating the conditions where being human feels worth showing up for.

Vivek Kumar, Founder & CEO of Alive, a full-stack experience platform.