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Meta maps India’s digital evolution from creators to AI and micro dramas
MUMBAI: At the 25th edition of Ficci Frames, Meta’s top leadership: Sandhya Devanathan, vice president, Meta India, and Meta India managing director and country head Arun Srinivas, laid out a comprehensive view of how India’s digital, entertainment, and creator ecosystems are evolving at breakneck speed.
From the rise of Gen Z as the dominant consumer force to the explosion of short-form video, AI-driven content, and micro-dramas, both leaders stressed on how India is not just adapting to global digital trends, it is carving them.
“India’s growth is unique and inevitable,” Devanathan said, opening her session on New Age Tech Platforms: Redefining Access, Innovation and Scale. “One trillion dollars of our future economy will be driven by digital.”
With over four billion reels shared globally every day, she noted, India stands out as both the largest creator market and a leader in the innovation of content.
That digital drive, she explained, rests on India’s growing online base of over 650 million social media users and 270 million online shoppers. Yet, she noted that to make prosperity more inclusive, more small businesses need to come online. Only about five million of India’s 65 million SMEs are currently digitally enabled.
“The Indian creator economy is among the most vibrant in the world,” Devanathan noted. “Creators here aren’t just entertainers, they are entrepreneurs, cultural catalysts, and small businesses rolled into one.”
Meta, she explained, continues to invest heavily in tools that empower creators to monetise their craft: from performance insights and AI-powered production aids to immersive advertising formats that help brands connect authentically with their digital-native audiences.
Devanathan also highlighted the versatility of “many Indias”: the digitally savvy India, the vernacular-first India, and the emerging India Each requires its own approach to content, access and engagement. “Winning in India,” she said, “means understanding these layers of India and building for all.”
Meta, she noted, sits at the heart of this digital revolution. India is now home to the largest community of Instagram creators and the biggest user base for Meta AI worldwide. The country also boasts one of the world’s largest Whatsapp communities, with over 200,000 small businesses using “Click to Whatsapp” to drive sales every month.
Beyond platforms, Meta is investing in digital infrastructure, from the Project Waterworth subsea cable (a subsea cable network that will span 50,000 kilometres and will reach depths of up to 7000 metres) to supporting data centres that fuel AI innovation. Devanathan also spoke about Meta’s work with the Nudge Institute and Pragati AI for Impact, which harnesses artificial intelligence for social good.
Building on that foundation, Arun Srinivas focused on the behavioural shifts defining media and entertainment consumption in India today, particularly among Gen Z and gen Alpha audiences.
“Gen Z isn’t the future; they’re the present,” he exclaimed. “They are already shaping how content is discovered, processed, and shared.”
According to Srinivas, the average Gen Z consumer processes information three times faster than previous generations and takes less than 1.5 seconds to decide whether to engage with a piece of content. “They need less attention, but more repetition,” he noted, explaining how frequency, rather than single exposure, now drives brand recall and conversions.
He also pointed to India’s massive short-form video boom, with 97 per cent of Indians watching short videos daily, surpassing television viewership. “Linear TV time is declining month on month,” he said, adding that this isn’t limited to urban India, “rural and small-town audiences are consuming just as much, if not more.”
Among the new frontiers Srinivas spotlighted was the rise of micro dramas: serialised short videos running between one and five minutes per episode.
“This is storytelling redesigned for the mobile-first world,” he said. “India’s short-form drama market could touch 10 billion dollars by 2030, driven by vernacular content and tier-II and tier-III audiences.”
Startups and creators are already experimenting with dubbed Korean and Chinese mini-series adapted for Indian viewers, marking a new phase in the fusion of entertainment and digital innovation.
Both Devanathan and Srinivas emphasised the transformative role of artificial intelligence across Meta’s platforms, from content creation and personalisation to ad optimisation and discovery.
“AI isn’t replacing creativity; it’s amplifying it,” Devanathan said. “It’s enabling creators to produce higher-quality work faster, and helping brands find the right audiences with precision.”
Srinivas added that more than four million advertisers globally used AI-generated creatives last quarter, producing over 15 million ad assets and achieving double-digit ROI improvements compared to campaigns created by humans.
Outlining Meta’s larger ambition, he noted that the company aims to make Meta AI the world’s most widely used personal assistant. “With more than 100 billion dollars invested in AI in just four years, we’re building systems that make digital creativity more accessible and intelligent for everyone,” he said.
Bringing that vision to life, Devanathan closed her session with an AI-generated video: a vivid cascade of colours that unfolded into the words, “Change is the canvas from which opportunity paints its masterpiece.”
Both leaders saw eye to eye on one message, that India’s digital future will be built at the intersection of creators, commerce, and connection.
Srinivas highlighted how Meta’s latest tools, such as the Edits app for easy video production and new AI-powered creative platforms, are enabling India’s vast creator base to thrive. Meanwhile, Devanathan emphasised Meta’s partnerships with brands, small businesses, and policymakers to foster a sustainable, inclusive digital ecosystem.
“Our goal,” she said, “is to ensure that India’s creative economy doesn’t just grow in size, it grows in diversity, opportunity, and global influence.”
Concluding the session, Srinivas offered a peek into Meta’s newest innovation, the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, designed to merge content, communication, and AI assistance in one device.
“These glasses are a glimpse of a future where connection becomes truly immersive,” he said.
As both Devanathan and Srinivas made clear, India’s digital landscape is entering a new chapter, one driven by speed, creativity, and intelligence. With the next generation of consumers redefining how content is created and consumed, Meta’s vision is not just to keep pace, but to help build the infrastructure of tomorrow’s digital culture.
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AI could replace half of entry-level white-collar work: Anthropic study
Hiring in AI-exposed occupations fell 14 per cent post-ChatGPT
SAN FRANCISCO: From lamplighters to elevator operators, waves of technology have repeatedly erased once-common jobs. Now artificial intelligence may be poised to do the same for large swathes of professional work.
A new study by Anthropic suggests that while AI tools are technically capable of performing many knowledge-economy tasks, real-world adoption lags far behind that potential, at least for now.
The report, Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence, by Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory, introduces a new metric called “observed exposure,” which compares what AI systems could theoretically perform with what they are actually doing in workplaces.
Using professional interaction data from Anthropic’s Claude model, the researchers found that AI could theoretically cover a wide share of tasks in business, finance, management, computing, mathematics, legal services and office administration. Yet current adoption represents only a small fraction of those capabilities.
That gap between potential and reality reflects a mix of legal barriers, technical limitations and the continued need for human oversight, the study said. But the authors suggest those constraints may prove temporary as the technology matures.
Warnings about AI’s impact on white-collar employment have been growing. CEO Dario Amodei has previously argued that AI could disrupt as much as half of entry-level professional work, while Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman has suggested that most professional tasks could eventually be automated within 12 to 18 months.
Highly educated workers most exposed
Contrary to common assumptions, the study finds that workers most exposed to AI are not those in manual labour but highly educated professionals. The most exposed group is 16 percentage points more likely to be female, earns on average 47 per cent more than the least exposed group and is nearly four times as likely to hold a graduate degree.
Occupations including computer programmers, customer service representatives and data entry clerks are among the most vulnerable to automation.
Yet even in highly exposed fields, AI is not yet replacing jobs at scale. The researchers cite routine medical tasks, such as authorising prescription refills, as examples that AI could technically perform but is not widely observed doing in practice.
In the report’s visual framework, actual AI usage (the “red area”) remains far smaller than the theoretical “blue area” of possible tasks. Over time, the researchers expect the red area to expand as adoption deepens.
At the other end of the labour market, roughly 30 per cent of occupations show virtually no AI exposure. Roles such as cooks, mechanics, bartenders and dishwashers still depend heavily on physical presence and manual work that large language models cannot replicate.
Hiring slowdown rather than layoffs
So far the clearest labour-market signal is not mass layoffs but a slowdown in hiring within AI-exposed occupations.
According to the study, job-finding rates in those sectors have fallen about 14 per cent since the arrival of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT compared with 2022 levels. A separate study cited by the authors found a 16 per cent drop in employment among workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed roles.
Recent labour data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics also point to softer hiring conditions, with employers shedding 92,000 jobs in February and unemployment rising to 4.4 per cent.
Some companies have already linked layoffs to automation. Jack Dorsey said his payments firm Block recently cut nearly half its workforce in part because AI tools allow smaller teams to operate more efficiently.
Not everyone is convinced the technology is solely responsible. Critics such as Marc Benioff have accused some firms of “AI washing”, using automation as a convenient explanation for cost-cutting measures.
Still, the researchers warn that the longer-term risk is a potential “white-collar recession”. If unemployment in the most AI-exposed occupations were to double, from about 3 per cent to 6 per cent, it would mirror the scale of labour-market disruption seen during the Global Financial Crisis.
For now, the shift may simply mean fewer entry-level openings. Some young workers are staying longer in existing roles, switching sectors or returning to education rather than entering AI-exposed fields.
