VIPM × AITD Virtual Industry Connect, 3 September 2026

The seven-month curve

Why the people, not the tools, decide India's ports.

Ahmayank Awasthi, Founder, Coretexial

11 PM

A small town in central India. A stuck consignment.

He types the problem in his own language.

Ninety seconds later, it's resolved.

No call. No ticket. No human.

We built that. It's called DIVA.

conversations with franchise partners

0 in 10

never reach a human being

I'm not here to talk about DIVA.

The woman who used to answer that call.

She knew every franchisee by voice.

One quarter, her job stopped existing in the shape she knew it.

Nobody retrained her. Not because nobody cared.

Because nobody believed it would move that fast.

She wasn't alone in that building.

The onboarding desk

Zero-touch, digital KYC. Activations +40%, manual effort −60%.

The retail counter

Digital payments, COD reconciliation, NFC bookings. The screen changed twice in a year.

Across the industry

Delhivery wrote its own maps because Google couldn't read Indian addresses.

Every desk moved. Nobody joined the dots.

We are brilliant at building tools.

We are terrible at building the people who sit behind them.

Ahmayank Awasthi

Founder, Coretexial. I build and sell next-generation software for public infrastructure.

A decade in logistics. Most recently DTDC, channel sales across 16,000 partners.

How long can an AI work on its own before it fails?

2 s

2019. Enough to finish a sentence.

12 h

2026. A full working day, unsupervised.

×2

every seven months for six years. Last year, every four.

You cannot run a five-year curriculum against a seven-month curve.

Rotterdam. The most automated port in Europe.

−40%

dockworkers at one automated terminal

180

automation technicians it can barely find

11 mo

one senior automation vacancy, still open

78%

capacity. Two million containers below their own 2021 peak

Not for lack of machines. For lack of people who can run them.

February 2026

Tuticorin. India's first major port with a digital twin.

Wave one, done

RFID gates
E-documentation
Machines recording

Wave two, now

Berth allocation
Crane sequencing
Maintenance calls
The AI deciding

47 lakh more logistics workers by 2030.

Of every hundred already in freight logistics today:

44 with no vocational training52 informal4 formally trained

Train them for the port of 2021, and we build Rotterdam's problem at ten times the scale.

Five levers. TIPPS.

Technologywas the expensive one

Infrastructure

Processes

Peopledecides whether the other four function

Sustainability

Today, technology is the cheapest of the five.

I say that as the last person who should. My job is to build and sell next-generation software.

StreetPulse

Delivery riders' phones become a live map of every broken road in a city.

The model finds the potholes.

The bottleneck is an engineer in the municipal office who can trust the map enough to send a crew.

Marut AI

Routes freight around pollution as clean-air rules start closing metro roads.

The model predicts the air.

The bottleneck is a transport officer who can question a reroute before it closes a road.

Sakshi

Reads satellite imagery to catch illegal dumping. The same eyes work on a port perimeter.

The model sees the dump.

The bottleneck is an inspector who will put their name to what the satellite saw.

Not one was limited by the model. Every one, by whether someone inside could put their name to the output.

Take it from the seller.

Technology is the cheapest thing I sell.

Judgement is the scarcest thing you buy.

Stop teaching AI tools.

They will change twice before your batch graduates. Teach three things instead.

One

Split a job into the tasks a machine finishes reliably, and the tasks it doesn't.

Two

Stitch in a human checkpoint wherever being wrong is expensive.

Three

Know which decisions never leave a human. Ever.

Then run it in seven-month sprints, not five-year roadmaps.

There is a crane operator in Tuticorin right now who doesn't know his job changes in eighteen months.

Somebody on this call is responsible for telling him.

And the woman who answered that call at eleven at night needed eighteen months she never got.

Nobody here can give her those eighteen months back.

Every person you enrol from tomorrow morning, we still can.

That's the whole opportunity.

Thank you.

Ahmayank Awasthi

Founder, Coretexial Private Limited, New Delhi

Sources: METR time-horizon benchmark (2026); Port of Rotterdam Authority, H1 2026; KiTalent, Apr 2026; Ministry of Ports, Shipping & Waterways, Mar 2026; Logistics Sector Skill Council at LogiMAT India, Feb 2026.

Image credits

India at night during Diwali, 2012. NASA Earth Observatory, Suomi NPP VIIRS. Public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

APM Terminals Maasvlakte II container cranes, Rotterdam. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Dakshin Bharat Gateway Terminal, V.O. Chidambaranar Port Authority. Wikimedia Commons; check licence on the file page before re-publishing.

Delhi air pollution, 2019. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Swiggy delivery rider, Marine Drive, Mumbai. Zoshua Colah on Unsplash, Unsplash licence.

Icons. Lucide, ISC licence, github.com/lucide-icons/lucide.

Coretexial

1 / 20

Arrow keys or click to advance. N for notes. ? for help.

→space next step

← previous step

N speaker notes and elapsed clock

F fullscreen

R reset the clock

19 jump to a slide

? close this