Our first episode, with Prashant Girbane, argued that India wins at AI through diffusion, by how fast it reaches the shop floor. Sudhir Sarnobat sees it from inside the firms. His report is that AI has got as far as the owner's office, and the shop floor is still waiting.
Sudhir is a mechanical engineer from VJTI. He built Medimanage and ran it for about twenty years, then sat on the boards of small manufacturers in Nashik, and now sits on the governing council of the ASCENT Foundation. With his partner Rajendra Bagwe, who has run the Teaching Learning Community for 21 years, he turned that mentoring into a hundred business frameworks at HowFrameworks and put an AI in front of them.
For Sherpa, their AI-assisted advisory service, a three-hour discovery call goes through ElevenLabs and his own AI skills and comes out as a year's operating plan. He charges ₹3–4 lakh for it; he says BCG or McKinsey would want ₹50–60 lakh, and would never go to Kolhapur or Satara. Owners who spend their days on the road get 20-minute podcasts in Marathi that he makes with NotebookLM. And in 75 hours of interviews, not one of them brought up data privacy.
Highlights
The LLM asks the questions, the framework gives the answer — ChatGPT gives him three different answers to the same question in one day. His product uses the model for conversation and context and takes every answer from a framework.
Judgment is what AI can’t do yet — Two Kolhapur foundries at the same revenue can need different fixes: a dashboard for one and daily leadership reviews for the other. He expects AI to get there eventually and says it hasn't.
Five stages of a business — founder-run, team-capable, systems-run, strategy-led, self-sustaining. The stage caps the growth target he will sign off on. An owner at ₹15 crore who wants ₹25 crore next year gets a target of ₹18 crore.
Questionnaires lie, calls are necessary — SME owners answering questionnaires leave a lot to be desired. "Yes, we have SOPs" usually means habits nobody has written down, and "yes, we have a website" can mean a listing on a B2B portal. So, 3–4 hour calls are needed, and then an AI transcription followed by making sense of everything.
The founder's story goes in the context — an ITI-trained owner running a ₹40 crore company still embarrassed about his English needs different advice from a second-generation US returnee, so the narrative history is recorded along with the numbers.
The office, mostly — his one shop-floor example is a Nashik plant that points cameras at old machine counters because the machines have no API.
A 30-tonne casting for Sweden — a Kolhapur foundry made the hub of a windmill, and still pitches abroad with weak presentations. Second-generation owners are fixing that with Apollo, LinkedIn automation and AI-drafted email.
Marathi podcasts from an English document — a break-even explainer went into NotebookLM and came out in Marathi, Hindi and Konkani. He checks every number and listens to every episode first. In a survey last month, owners named these podcasts as where their insights came from.
25 clients instead of five — each monthly review is recorded, and minutes with action items go out within the hour, in Marathi where needed. Weekly reminders follow on email and WhatsApp.
Father against son — first-generation owners have FOMO and barely use AI. Their children use it for the wrong jobs, like building the company website themselves, and read the dashboards as a case for firing a worker the father has trusted for fifteen years.
Owner, graduate, AI assistant — he would rather an SME hire a young graduate with an AI subscription than make the owner learn it. The owner brings the context and the graduate does the finishing.
Pay for it, and skip the courses — he has no time for free tools or for ₹1–5 lakh courses. He moved to Claude on 1 January after one conversation, learnt from Claude's own courses, and did last year's company accounts in it from his card and bank statements.
Notable quotes
I ask ChatGPT same question three times a day and get three different answers every day.
Basically, I would say one sentence: judgment. That judgment is something that cannot come to AI soon.
There is a lot of talk about AI taking away jobs and all. I have been working with these companies for last 18 to 24 months very closely. Nobody is bothered about it. Rather they are saying, I have so many jobs to do, can I get more people?
Anybody who can articulate well can delegate well.
Today I do work with 25 people. 5x is only because of that, that I have a layer where I can get things done very fast.
Not a single time anybody talked about data privacy. Yes, they are worried about employee taking my customer details.
You have to write and don't use AI as a crutch, use it as a research tool. (Amit Varma's advice to him, as he tells it.)
Links & resources
HowFrameworks: Sudhir and Rajendra Bagwe's hundred frameworks, with the AI mentor in front of them.
ASCENT Foundation: the peer-learning network for entrepreneurs where Sudhir sits on the governing council.
The Seen and the Unseen with Sudhir Sarnobat: Amit Varma's long interview with him, for his life story. Amit is also the friend who told him to write his own LinkedIn posts.
The tools he names: Claude, ElevenLabs for transcription, NotebookLM, since renamed Gemini Notebook, for the Marathi podcasts, and Apollo for export leads.
KnOT (Knowledge on Tap): the Pune talk series Sudhir says he wants to come to. The link is its WhatsApp community.
Connect with Sudhir Sarnobat
LinkedIn, where he says he is most active and posts two or three times a week about MSMEs
Website howframeworks.com; he says enquiries sent through the site get a reply within 24 hours
