Key takeaways up front
- Cost per million tokens fell faster than capability rose
- Document-heavy roles change first, not creative roles
- Review and judgement work grows as generation gets cheap
Every model release triggers the same headline cycle. The useful question is narrower: which specific tasks in your working week just became cheap enough to automate?
1The real change is price, not intelligence
Capability improvements this year were incremental. Cost reduction was not. When processing a 200-page contract drops below a rupee, workflows that were previously uneconomic become routine.
That means automation arrives first where volume is high and tolerance for a review step exists — not where the work is hardest.
2Role-by-role read
Here is how the shift lands across common Indian job families.
- Operations and back-office: highest exposure, fastest tooling adoption
- HR and recruitment: screening automates, judgement and closing do not
- Finance: reconciliation and variance commentary automate; controls tighten
- Marketing: drafting automates, positioning and distribution do not
- Engineering: boilerplate automates, system design and review grow
3What to learn this quarter
The safest skill is the one that sits above generation: framing the task, choosing constraints, and evaluating output against a rubric. That is learnable in weeks and it compounds across every future model.
What to do next
- Audit your week and mark tasks that are high-volume plus reviewable.
- Learn evaluation before you learn another tool.
- Move up a level: from doing the task to designing and checking it.