KBC Season 18 to premiere 10 August on Sony, backed by Amitabh Bachchan’s ‘Sochna Padega’ theme

MUMBAI: Eighteen seasons in, a quiz show has to work harder than most formats to stay relevant, and Sony Pictures Networks India knows it. Kaun Banega Crorepati Season 18 will premiere on Monday, 10 August, at 9pm, exclusively on Sony Entertainment Television and Sony LIV, followed by a weekday telecast running Monday to Friday, and it arrives with a new theme, Sochna Padega, built on the not-entirely-original but genuinely useful observation that when facts are a search query away, knowing things matters less than knowing what to do with them.

The pitch, delivered through brand films anchored by Amitabh Bachchan, is that rote recall has been rendered obsolete by ubiquitous information, and that the show’s real test from this season is applied thinking rather than memorised trivia. A Sony Pictures Networks India spokesperson framed it plainly: “KBC has become a cultural phenomenon that has firmly established itself as a knowledge-led conversation starter. This season, with ‘Sochna Padega’, the conversation evolves to celebrate the power of applied knowledge and decision making. This season, KBC is championing a mindset that is increasingly relevant in today’s world.” It is a sensible pivot dressed up as a cultural insight. KBC has always been, at its core, a memory-and-luck format: contestants who happened to know an answer won money, and the drama lived in the tension of the lifelines rather than in any demonstration of reasoning. Rebranding that format around “application” rather than “recall” is less a format overhaul than a repositioning exercise, but it is a shrewd one, because it answers a question the show could otherwise not dodge forever: what does a knowledge quiz mean in a world where every viewer has an answer engine in their pocket.

That question, as it turns out, has a rather literal answer this season. Sony has partnered with Google India to weave Google Gemini directly into the KBC ecosystem, the first time a mainstream generative AI assistant has been built natively into an Indian reality format rather than bolted on as a sponsor logo. The integration runs across three stages: contestant registration, where aspirants can query the Gemini app for real-time guidance on shortlisting rules and SMS timelines that have historically confused first-time applicants; preparation, where Google is rolling out gamified general-knowledge challenges designed to help households train for the show’s pace; and broadcast itself, where Gemini is pitched as an on-screen “interactive knowledge companion” for the audience watching at home.

The more interesting shift is conceptual rather than technical. For two decades, KBC’s lifelines, Phone a Friend, Expert Advice, ran on human networks: a contestant dialled a mentor and hoped for the best. An AI assistant embedded into the format nudges that idea toward something closer to an objective, always-available knowledge layer sitting behind the game, even if it is not, yet, replacing the human lifelines outright. Fan engagement changes shape too. The old model was parallel play, audiences answering along on an app for points. The new model is closer to dialogue: a viewer stumped by a historical question can ask Gemini why the wrong options were wrong, turning a passive watch into something closer to an interactive classroom. Production benefits as well, with generative tools offering a way to fact-check questions, spot multi-disciplinary angles and vary question tone by contestant background, precisely the sort of behind-the-scenes work that keeps a two-decade-old question bank from feeling stale or leak-prone.

The commercial logic threading through all of this rewards a moment’s scrutiny. For Google, KBC is a rare shortcut into the living rooms of tier-two and tier-three India, using Bachchan’s trusted voice to move Gemini out of tech-savvy metros and into genuinely mass adoption, a distribution problem most AI products would kill to solve. For Sony, an AI layer buys a 20-plus-year-old format a credible claim to modernity, the kind of cutting-edge sheen that keeps a franchise attractive to younger, digitally native viewers who might otherwise associate KBC with their grandparents’ Monday nights. For the viewer, the practical upside is friction removed from an entry process that has long been criticised as opaque, replaced with an assistant that will simply tell you how to apply.

There is a reasonably direct commercial logic underneath the philosophy too, independent of Gemini. Eighteen seasons is an unusually long run for any Indian television format, and longevity brings its own problem: audiences that have seen every version of the show’s core mechanics and need a reason to tune back in rather than switch to a reality format or scroll past on Sony LIV. A new theme, a new hashtag, a fresh set of brand films and now an AI companion give the marketing team something to sell beyond “the same show again”, without touching the format’s actual mechanics, which is precisely why Sochna Padega reads as clever positioning rather than genuine reinvention. The prize money, the lifelines, the hot seat, none of that changes structurally; only the framing, and now the technology wrapped around it, does.

Bachchan’s presence remains the show’s real asset, and probably always will. Eighteen years of association with one host is a rarity in Indian broadcasting, and the brand equity that comes with it lets Sony reposition the format’s meaning almost annually, and now bolt an entire AI partnership onto it, without ever having to justify why the anchor stays the same. Few shows could survive a philosophical rebrand and a generative-AI integration delivered by anyone else and have it land as anything other than marketing copy.

Whether “application over memorisation” actually changes what airs at nine o’clock five nights a week is the open question, and the honest answer is: probably not much, at least not yet. What the Gemini partnership does, more concretely, is give Sony a defensible answer to why a near two-decade-old quiz format still deserves prime-time real estate against an OTT-saturated evening slate, and gives Google a foothold in millions of households that no banner ad could buy. Commercially, that pairing of interests may be the only application of knowledge that matters here.