Time is Now: A Journey Into Demystifying AI

Every human heart beat is a universe of possibilities.

—GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS, SHANTARAM

Life is a series of Now, and each passing moment has echoes of the past and will have reverberations into the future. Our memories are made of the information we take in throughout our lives and give us our identity. The current context gives us impetus. How we choose to act in the Now is what makes us, us.

This book is about my journey of the discovery of Now and how the three pillars of Now—Information, Context, and Choice—helped me shape a billion-dollar company specializing in transacting, analyzing, and contextualizing data in real time to amplify human intelligence and capabilities.

While this book is centered on my story, life has taught me that our stories never belong to us alone. They are part of a greater story begun long before we came into the world—a tapestry of moments woven together from the decisions and choices of our ancestors.

In the rush of life, it’s easy to forget the impact a single moment can make. It’s easy to neglect the power of Now. Until Now comes rushing toward you to change everything.

On a gorgeous February day in 2010, such a Now met me head on. It had been a mild winter in the Bay Area, and I was into CrossFit at the time. While recovering from my workout, I was feeling pleased with myself and thinking about the day ahead, which I assumed would be filled with chasing around my little ones.

I was still in my workout clothes when my phone rang—and I saw it was my mother calling me from India. Knowing how uncharacteristic it was for her to call at such an hour, my heart skipped a beat. Whatever she had to say, it was unlikely to be good news.

My fears were confirmed right away. My grandmother had passed away. The grandmother who had helped, in a substantive way, to shape me into the person I am today.

My mind rushed back to the last time I had seen her—my cousin’s wedding years before in Delhi. After the wedding, my life had been filled with a series of moves from country to country.

Sorrow washed over me mixed with regret. Year after year, I’d told myself, Next year, I will make the time to go visit. But now? I would never see her again. An extreme river of grief flowed through me, and I so regretted the carelessly discarded yesterdays that I will never get back.

This Now I was experiencing was a combination of three pillars—my memories of my grandmother (Information), my emotional analysis of her loss (Context), and my own decision to delay visiting her despite knowing the limited time I had left with her (Choice).

As the Buddhist thinking goes, Life is a series of Now.

This is the true power of Real Time. In a single moment, your world can be altered. Knowing how to act in that moment requires great discernment. It necessitates knowing where you have been, knowing where you want to be, and deciding how you want to get there.

The implications here are not only personal—they are interpersonal. They are global, even. Our actions ripple to impact others for generations. Our stories are shaped by events that preceded us. To repeat the opening quote, they open a universe of possibilities.

To understand the power of Now, we must become students of how it forms through Information, Context, and Choice. By doing so, we can become the leaders the world needs by becoming better humans.

Information

In technical terms, our memory is the collection of the data that shapes our identities. The longer we live, the more information we take in. Yet it also includes the events that happened outside of our control, before our lives began.

It wasn’t until after my grandmother died that I learned she had been adopted. In life, she had been a strong, self-possessed woman. I adored her for all she was—she filled rooms with her infectious laughter and walked with the grace and dignity of a highly educated person despite the fact that she had no formal education herself.

The circumstances of how she ended up alone at less than a month old, whether she was abandoned or whether her biological parents had died, were never clear to us. The best we can piece together is that she was likely orphaned from a Brahman family in India. When my paternal great-grandfather heard about her circumstances, he made a split-second decision to bring her up as his own daughter.

Part of his motivation in this was likely the circumstances that faced orphaned children in India. It was a very unsafe world for such children, who often ended up begging on the street or being forced into sex slavery.

Meanwhile, my paternal great-grandfather was a merchant of some means. Even though he was newly married at the time, when he caught wind of an orphaned newborn, it stirred his compassion. Within this context, he and his new bride—my great-grandmother—made the choice to adopt my grandmother, their hearts overflowing with a generosity and kindness they passed on to her.

This single decision, now frozen in time, not only changed her fate but created mine. In 1936, at the age of thirteen, she married my grandfather. He was working as a government servant, a clerical worker in the British Empire, trained to be subservient to the Raj, something that seems so far‑fetched in the world I inhabited decades later. He put his head down, rode his bicycle to work, and on his way dropped off his kids to a government school in what is now known as Old Delhi.

They lived together in a one-bedroom, government-sanctioned house. As my father told me many times, it was a happy home. We grew up not knowing want, he said—a sentiment that could not be shared by everyone.

My dad then went on to become an officer in the Indian Army. By the time I was born in 1970, he was doing well for himself and our little family.

As one might expect in a military family, we moved a lot, and at one point he was assigned to a field position in Ladakh on India’s border with Tibet and China. Families could not go there, so my mother and I moved to Delhi to be with my grandmother, aunts, and uncles. When I was age three to six, we lived in the same house all together, and I was fortunate to spend so much time with my grandmother.

Every morning at six thirty, I’d wake up eagerly, much to the surprise of most adults in the family and specifically my mother. I loved to accompany my grandmother to the Hindu temple. She would take a brass container, and I would help her collect fresh flowers to submit as an offering. In those walks, I observed her piety and her kindness, and I learned the nature of karma. The serenity of the temple, the sounds, and the basic act of sitting still was very appealing to me. Very peaceful. I surprise myself today as I recollect how I felt at that rather young age.

She taught me, If you do good, good will come back to you. The universe is not good or bad but reactive.

I found extreme solace and serenity in those experiences with her, and my mind goes back to her lessons often. Even after my dad was reassigned to Kanpur and we joined him there, I would visit her every summer and continue our ritual together. When she came to visit us, she would follow the same routine at the local temple.

As she cultivated my soul, my mind was cultivated at home. Our house was a typical Indian home in that education was always the highest priority. Growing up under British rule, the philosophy of my grandparents was simple: Your country can be invaded and taken over, drought can take away your crops, but nothing can take away your education.

As a result, almost the entire side of my father’s extended family has a master’s degree. Since I was an only child, our nuclear family’s agenda was centered on my schooling. It was important that I was at school on time, wearing the right uniform, with all the resources I needed to be successful. After school was sports, and my dad’s army life afforded me an opportunity to play tennis, squash, and billiards, and during the blistering heat of the summer, a nice cool dip finished off the evening.

In school, there was a huge emphasis on what we would today call STEM, especially the math and science portions. Fortunately, I was good at math, but what really caught my attention were these new things called computers entering the school. We were taught the basics of coding, such as the Fibonacci sequence … which may sound trivial now but was magic in those days. While I was never set on becoming a developer, I credit those lessons with teaching me the power of structured thought—something I treasure to date.

Having such a template in my mind is the greatest aspect to which I attribute my modest success. The value of structured thought is one I’ve paid forward to my own children, ensuring they have a basic foundation for programming because of the mental advantages it provides. This is the ethos that has carried forward from my family’s value of education—to educate yourself as much as you can because it’s never a waste.

From an uneducated, orphaned child, married at an early age to a kind man, who then went on to raise a family, my grandmother is the genesis of my journey. A journey that led her great-granddaughters to be strong, independent women attending some of the most sought-after educational institutes in the world. I think you can tell, I am proud of my daughters. And equally proud of my older son, who too embraced a similar path. With my youngest child, little Chance, who is at the ripe old age of six as I write, I can’t be objective, as I truly believe his only role is to be my reason to be deliriously happy! He has in his possession the best golf swing I have seen.

All these events have helped shape me into who I am today. Without the choice my great-grandfather made to adopt my grandmother, my father would have never been born. Nor would I.

You can say the same for yourself. From a genetic standpoint, your Now was decided by a billion other Nows that came before. Those Nows opened doors that would never have opened without them and led to helping you make choices you never thought would present themselves. We often seem to refer to that as luck, but it just may be the reflective nature of the good choices made way before we had a choice. Similarly, the future is being decided with each Now. What you choose matters. Way more than you think. In life and in business.

And much more when you have a never-before-available tool like AI.

Context

When you think of Real Time, what comes into your mind? Maybe it’s a phrase like right now, in a flash, instantaneous, or in the blink of an eye. For me, I think about the world of navigation.

For thousands of years, humans have relied on the stars to gain our bearing in the universe and to help us chart direction across the sea. By knowing the position of the stars and planets at any moment, one could deduce one’s position on the earth. But how real is this type of Real Time? Think about that—sailors were making real-time decisions on direction based on light that was millions of years old!

As technology changes how we can accomplish our goals, it changes the definition of Real Time. If a ship captain today insisted on using the stars to guide their way when they are equipped with a state-of-the-art navigation system, you’d insist on having a new captain.

Growing up in India, I constantly had to ask people for directions. I was dependent on the knowledge of others to figure out where to go and how to get there. Even if you were traveling by train, you had no say in the path itself. You just consulted the train schedule based on when you needed to arrive at your destination. This was Real Time.

Then websites like MapQuest came along, allowing us to see multiple options to navigate our way. We felt more in control of the journey and could print out the directions immediately rather than having to wait for an updated map to become available. This was also Real Time.

Today’s Real Time is the AI-enhanced GPS you rely on to navigate your commute. You can think of Real Time as the blue dot that indicates where you are in the moment. You can see where you just left—and you have some predictive data on what lies ahead. It may tell you where to turn for the fastest route, but you are the one who must turn the wheel.

As the speed of Real Time has increased, so has the level of control we have. We have more power to decide what to do at any moment. These decisions carry great weight, not only for ourselves but for the world around us. With this power, we have a responsibility to ask ourselves how we will use it.

Before we can act, then, we must first learn.

It is no different with AI. The heart of AI is data—that is, the information it learns. If we see AI not as artificial intelligence but as amplified intelligence, it means we must recognize that these tools have the potential to both help and harm. The difference is in who has the control—us.

We control the data. We steer the ship.

Consider how the printing press revolutionized communication. A machine was able to print a Bible in