Here is the full transcript of educator Ishan Sharma’s talk titled “AI Tools That Can Support Entrepreneurship” at TEDxIITDelhi (May 22, 2025).
Listen to the audio version here:
The Greatest Opportunity of 2025
ISHAN SHARMA: How many of you have used ChatGPT in the last one week? Amazing. Almost everyone. Right. Now how many of you have built an AI agent of your own? Okay, we see two hands. See three hands. All right. Now, this is honestly the greatest opportunity of 2025. And I’ll explain you why in the coming few slides.
There was a stat which I read this morning which said that ChatGPT has 500 million monthly, weekly active users. That’s an insane stat. But very few people like we just saw are actually building agents with it. So I’ll talk more about that. But today I want to start with the story.
Real-World AI Automation Success Stories
So this is my marketing company. We just got an office in Bangalore and we’ve been running it for the last four or five years now. And I did something really interesting. So I built this amazing make.com automation. In which I will input my pin code of where I’m living and it will tell me the best businesses who I can sell my services to who have an example of bad copywriting or poor copywriting on their landing page. Now I built this in about one hour.
This is a voice agent that my co-founder built in which we call all of our leads before our meeting starts and it asked them, “Are you ready for the call?” So this is what the script looks like. So it asks you, “Hey, I’m Roberto from Market Up. Just wanted to check if you’re ready for the meeting.” And that’s a voice agent that my co-founder built.
But the most insane part about this is that none of us are really coders. That’s the workflow that he built, but they’re not coders. Like we’re not typical developers who would write code all day long. Yes, we’ve built stuff in the past, but we’ve not touched code for months at this point. And yet we were able to build a voice agent automation workflow for lead generation in just about one or two hours. And this is honestly insane.
Lessons from Silicon Valley: The Product-First Approach
I’ll give you one more example. So I was in San Francisco about six seven months ago and I met this person. Does anyone know who this person is? He has built an amazing app that I’m sure every one of you would have used the name starts with N of the app. Notion exactly. So you built this app called Notion and I just met him there at the Notion office. I interviewed his co-founder, but I asked him this question: How do you hire? Because that’s a big problem that I face every day when I’m hiring people at my company.
And he said that “we only hire people who are having a product first approach.” What that means is we hire developers who can also design interfaces. We hire designers who also have an understanding of business and how their UI impacts the revenue that they make, the retention that they have on the product. And that was really insightful.
What that means now is the typical roles that we have of a designer, a developer, a marketer are all going away and everyone is supposed to be a builder. Now I met this another person in San Francisco. He built this app called Replit which enables anyone to build any app in minutes by just describing what it is that you want to build. Right? So you just enter what do you want? I asked it to make a project management dashboard that looks like Tinder and it built it for me in about 10 minutes. Just an example of what all you can build now.
Communication Is the New Superpower
He tweeted something very recently and it is “I think people no longer need to learn to code.” That was his tweet and it went viral on Twitter because everyone was bashing him for saying no one should learn to code, yet he was hiring engineers with five years of experience at his company. But the bottom line is he replied back to all the people who were hitting on him by saying that “I think it’s really important for people to focus on communicating clearly what they want.” That according to him is the greatest skill that you can learn today in 2025.
So it’s less about being the best developer out there, but it’s more about can you describe what you want to create in as much depth as possible and it could be for designing an app. It could be for creating a marketing campaign. Knowing how to communicate with clarity is the new superpower and it might sound obvious that what’s the big deal about it, but I’ll show you more examples of why that matters.
So I want to take you to this meme which I saw which basically says engineers who can’t code, marketers who can’t market, they come together and they build a thing called Vibe Startup. The idea is we don’t exactly know what we are building or how we are building it, but we have an idea for exactly what we want it to look like and we’re describing it to AI tools and it’s building in real time the thing that we want to launch. And I’ll show you how you can do this.
Five AI Tools to Automate Your Business
So I showed, I told you that everyone can be a builder, but let me prove it to you. So I’ll be sharing in the next five minutes, five AI tools that you can start using today to automate every main part of your business. Every major part of a business that you want to start can now be automated with AI.
Tool #1: Manus – Research at Scale
The first and the biggest one is this thing called Manus.
Now Manus is this Chinese company. It’s a general purpose AI agent and what it does essentially is that it allows you to research at scale. So normally let’s say you have a business idea, you would normally search it on Google, you will go through various different websites, stats, you will compile all of that together, you’ll make some mistakes here and there and just take a lot of time and in most cases you lose the motivation to actually do it.
Now the best part about Manus is that it does all the research on your behalf. So anything from doing market research to understanding if there are any companies that you can reach out to, so it does lead generation for you and it also does some financial research that you wanted to do. It’s an exceptional tool that you can start using and it is free to get started with to start researching about anything that you want.
How many of you have used Manus in the audience? Very few people. Do you like using it? You think it’s good? It’s useful? I think it’s honestly the best tool that I’ve come across because it does these thorough research. It takes about 10 minutes but gives me the most in-depth information about anything that I want to know. So you can literally ask it, “This is my idea, give me a SWOT analysis of my idea and do a deep research on it” and it will go through hundreds of websites, will save you countless hours and give you the most important information. The first tool that you should be checking out has to be Manus.
Tool #2: Replit – Build Apps Without Coding
Now let’s say you got the idea. I want to build this app for this audience. Perfect. The next step is for you to now build the website and going back to the person that I just talked about, Replit enables you to do that. You can build apps super fast. You just describe what you wanted to build, wait for 10 to 15 minutes and watch it create beautiful interfaces, watch it build the logic in real time, watch it build the server, the databases, connect it together and present to you a full-scale application that you can now put a Stripe link to and you can start charging people money to use.
There are incredible apps which have been built using Replit. The most incredible example is this thing called Magic School, which was built by a school principal. He was like a 50-year-old who knows nothing about coding. He went on Replit and he described what he wants to build and he wanted to build a tool which would help teachers prepare for classes and he understood that teachers have used ChatGPT, obviously that’s the obvious tool, but it’s not useful to them as much. They have to prompt it a lot to get the right responses.
So he built Magic School and hundreds of school teachers around the US use it every single day today and they’ve almost built a unicorn company out of it. In 10 minutes, you can build stuff which normally takes design and developer teams weeks to build. It’s a great way to launch your company, prototype, see how it works, get the progress and growth and then later on think about hiring a developer and then making a full-fledged professional website which has no bugs or errors and can scale indefinitely.
But this is a website that I was able to build for my marketing company in just a few, I think, minutes by using this tool called Replit. So that’s how it works. This is what the interface looks like. On one side, you describe what you wanted to build and on the other side, it builds it for you. In this example, I asked it to build a learning app which looks like Netflix and it built this responsive website for me.
Automating Sales Processes
Now, you can also automate sales which is what we’ve been doing at my marketing company. The tool called Apollo. Apollo is a brilliant tool which lets you take your ICP, put it into the filters and it creates the lead list for you. So let’s say for example, I want to sell to FinTech companies in Gurgaon who have 2 to 10 million dollars of funding and have let’s say 10 to 50 employees. For example, you press enter and it will build out the entire lead list for you and I can tell that I want to reach out to marketing people in the company. I want to reach out to founders in this company and it will give you all of the information of these people. You can click get email and it gets you the email of anyone that you want to reach out to. That is the part where you create the lead list.
The next part is automating the cold outreach funnel and for that use this thing called Instantly. Instantly enables you to take this lead list, this CSV file, put it into Instantly and start sending out cold emails and this is the workflow that my marketing agency is running today to get leads and convert them into clients in US and UK every single month. So while I’m sitting here, my office is in Bangalore, we are sending emails to people around the world, closing deals all because of this workflow and automate all of our sales. This is truly one of the best thing that we’ve done in our company.
Automating Content Creation
Alright, now you can also start automating content, right? You no longer need to sit in front of the camera and talk and keep talking. I know so many founders which face this problem of not being able to record enough content and then they have to pay creators and they have to rent distribution, right? You’re basically paying someone to put out some post to get some growth which will later die down and you have to keep paying to get that growth and traction.
Now using this tool called HeyGen and ElevenLabs, you can basically create content using AI. So HeyGen is exceptionally good at creating avatars and ElevenLabs does a great job at taking the audio and creating AI generated audio from it. So I can train it on my audio, give it three hours of my audio. I can put a five minute video of me speaking to HeyGen and it generates an amazing video which is AI generated. I did not sit and record that video. It was made automatically using HeyGen.
What that means is now I can scale my brand, my content on social media to as much as I want. There are incredible examples of people on social who’ve already done this. There’s a friend of mine who creates a lot of AI videos which are AI generated and he just hit a million subscribers on Instagram, followers on Instagram. But this is super powerful. This is what the interface looks like. So you enter your character, you enter the script, you press generate and it creates this amazing video with the ElevenLabs generated audio. So that’s how you generate and automate content.
Marketing Automation Through AI
But you can now also start automating marketing. And this is the latest update from photo image generator. I know all of you would have made Ghibli images from it. But another amazing use case of photo image generator is to create these marketing ads. So instead of hiring a professional designer, figuring out all the copy yourself by hiring a copywriter, you can now simply describe the type of ad you wanted to create. So you click a picture of your product, you upload it there and you ask it to make an ad in this style, this format and press enter and watch it create amazing visuals using your product in different scenarios.
That’s one example of Saratoga. There’s another example of a beauty cream which you can create ads of instantly using photo image generator. So now we are able to create content, we’re able to do marketing, able to do sales, we’re able to create websites. We’re also able to get market research all with the help of AI tools.
Now, the last thing that I want to talk about is automating learning because of course, you have to know about these things to start using them. And Google AI Studio makes it really easy for you to turn any software which looks confusing to you. You just basically share your screen and it will come online. It will look at your screen and it will teach you how to use that software. So you could be on Excel, share your screen, Google AI Studio, Gemini enters on your screen and you can ask any question that you want from it. And that is the best part of automating learning. So now you can learn anything that you want on your own by having this on your laptop AI assistant which can help you with it.
The Rise of One-Person Businesses
Now, all of this means that it’s easier than ever before for you to start building one person businesses. And I’ll give you an example of this. This person is Zach on Twitter. And he’s a 17 year old kid who’s just built this app called Cal.AI. It’s a simple calorie tracking app which is number one on Play Store and App Store. And he makes $30 million per year with it.
Building in Public
I want to now talk about the last part of this talk which is building in public. I’ll again go back to the time when I went to SF. I went to builder houses and I saw that everyone in those rooms were coming together and launching tools in real time. So it’s a group of people, let’s say 100-200 people who are building tools and every weekend they’re launching it. They’re sharing their journey of launching the tool on Twitter and they’re asking for feedback.
And the best part about when you do this is that you get free advice from the most skilled people, from the most experienced people in this field on Twitter. You get free users because you’re launching it, you’re showing demos of it and you also get free visibility in front of venture capitalists. So you get funding, advice, users, revenue, none of which is bad. And you can do that for free by just building in public, by just sharing your wins, your losses, your learnings on Twitter. You can do the same on LinkedIn or Instagram as well. But Twitter seems to be the easiest platform to get started with.
You’re just one post away from the dream job that you want to be at, from that brand collab that you want to do, from that event that you want to get invited at. It’s all about being visible in front of the right people. I am a living proof of that. I’ve been making content for five years now and just because I was visible, I got invited by world’s biggest companies. Last year, I was at Apple event. They were launching their MacBook M4 in Los Angeles. Four days ago, I was in the Microsoft Seattle office on their 50th year anniversary, being arm’s length with Bill Gates and Satya Nadella. It was unreal. And last month, I was at NVIDIA GTC event which happened in San Jose. I met Jensen Huang.
All of this would not have been possible if I had doubted myself, if I worried about what people would say, if I had doubts about my skills, if I listened to the two negative comments I get on social. I made myself visible on Twitter and on social and companies reached out and got me all of these opportunities. And I want to leave you with this one quote. Now, I’ve showed you what I’ve built, but I’m just a journalist. I’m not the best designer. I’m not the best developer, but I’m great at writing.
Imagine what the top 1% designer can build. As a top 1% designer, you know what you want to build and you can write the prompts for it and you can create amazing ads. You can create amazing websites for the developer using these AI tools. So AI is not here to take your job. AI for the top skilled people will only accelerate your learning and ability to build stuff fast. That’s all from me today. Thank you so much.
