As the Founder of Equal AI, Keshav Reddy is building AI for everyday conversations. After scaling Equal Identity into one of India’s largest digital identity and data-sharing platforms, Reddy took another bold leap by launching a voice-first AI assistant designed to tackle one of the country’s most persistent problems: spam calls and digital noise. In this edition of Tech Titans, Reddy talks about the habits that keep him grounded, the family conversations that shaped his entrepreneurial mindset, and why he believes voice, not text, will unlock AI for the next billion users. He also shares why execution always trumps overthinking, how Gen Z is redefining the workplace, and the legacy he hopes to leave behind: making AI feel less intimidating and more useful for millions of Indians.
What’s a personal habit or ritual that quietly shapes how you make big decisions?
It’s my calendar. Honestly, people underestimate this; my entire life lives on my calendar. Personal, professional, to-do lists, everything. If it’s not on my calendar, it won’t happen. That’s just the truth.
The thing that really shapes my mental clarity is ten minutes of transcendental meditation every morning. I learned it at MIT, through a teacher who is actually Deepak Chopra’s sister-in-law. It’s simple, but it gives a lot of clarity.
And then I read my ten personal mantras. Every day. I read once that if you read your principles every day, they become part of you, they stop being words and start being wiring. So that’s what I do. It sounds small. It’s not.
What’s one childhood incident that shaped who you are today?
I grew up in a very big family, lots of cousins, lots of Sunday lunches at my grandfather’s home. Every Sunday, without fail, if I’m in Hyderabad, I’m there. That’s been true since I was born.
But if I had to pick one thing, it would be those Sunday gatherings. Every dinner, every Sunday, was business talk. Big business talk. My grandfather, my father, my family, the problems they were discussing were enormous. I was young and absorbing all of it without even realising it. I think that’s where my hunger came from. Not from pressure, I never felt it as a burden. I genuinely saw the scale of what was possible when smart, driven people put their minds to something. And I just wanted to be part of building something like that. Myself. My own thing.
What are your thoughts on Gen Z work culture, and how do you shape your work style to align with them?
I think the real insight about Gen Z is that they have a much cleaner relationship with purpose than any generation before them. They won’t do something just because you told them to, or because it comes with a corner office someday.
What I will say to any Gen Z is this: find something you genuinely enjoy and become its expert. In the world of AI, general knowledge is getting commoditised at speed. What won’t get commoditised is being really, genuinely, obsessively good at one specific thing. That’s still irreplaceable.
At Equal AI, we run on outcomes, not hours. But we move fast. And I think the best Gen Z talent actually loves that, they don’t want to sit in a structure and wait. They want to build. So we give them the freedom and the responsibility together.
What’s the biggest lie the industry is telling itself about AI right now?
AI is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something as profound as electricity or fire. The biggest lie the AI industry is telling itself right now is that capability automatically creates value. It doesn’t. Real value comes when intelligence becomes trusted, affordable, and deeply embedded into everyday human workflows, not just demos, benchmarks, or billion-dollar valuations.
What problem in the world still frustrates you enough to keep you awake at night?
The sheer volume of noise that the average Indian has to wade through just to go about their day. We have over a billion connected people, and their phones are ringing constantly. Spam. Fraud. Unsolicited sales calls. Unknown numbers. It’s relentless, and it’s getting worse.
The phone call was once the most direct, human way to reach someone. That’s been completely broken. And the people bearing the worst of it aren’t the ones with the tools to filter it, they’re the ones who can’t afford to miss a call. A farmer waiting for a loan approval. A family expecting a call from a hospital. A first-generation borrower who can’t tell a genuine lender from a scammer doing a convincing impression of one.
That’s the problem that genuinely frustrates me, and it’s exactly what we built Equal AI to solve. An intelligent call assistant that works for you: screening unknown callers, handling the noise, and making sure only what actually matters gets through to you. In your language. Without you having to do anything.
What’s a decision you made that looked risky at the time but turned out?
Launching Equal AI, when we already had something that was working well and didn’t need to be disrupted.
Equal Identity had found its footing. We were powering identity and data sharing infrastructure for over 101 million Indians, processing more than a billion transactions, with some of the largest banks, NBFCs, and financial institutions in the country as customers. It’s a real business, with real scale, solving a real problem, and it continues to grow.
The question was: do we stay in our lane, or do we take what we’d built and go directly to consumers? Building a B2C AI assistant from scratch, in a category where the biggest tech companies in the world were already competing, was not the obvious next move for an enterprise infrastructure company. A lot of people around me questioned it.
But we had a thesis: that voice, not text, would be the real unlock for AI in India. That over a billion people who’d never typed a query into ChatGPT would talk to an AI if it met them where they already were, on a phone call, in their language.
We launched the Equal AI call assistant in October. By January, we were at 75,000 monthly active users. By February, 383,000. By March, 850,000. Now April, 1.1M. That kind of trajectory doesn’t happen by accident, it happens when the insight was right and the timing was right.
So looking back, the risk wasn’t walking away from what was safe. The risk was building something entirely new alongside it, and that’s the bet that’s paying off.
What brands of gadgets do you use every day?
I use two phones, a Samsung Trifold and an Apple iPhone. Each has its purpose and I genuinely can’t choose between them. For fitness, I wear a WHOOP band daily, it’s become non-negotiable for tracking recovery and keeping me honest about how I’m actually performing, not just how I think I am.
When people look back at your work decades from now, what do you hope they say you changed?
That he actually believed AI could make ordinary life easier, simpler, and more productive, and then went and proved it.
There’s no shortage of people building impressive technology. What’s rarer is building technology that genuinely works for the person who has no idea how it works under the hood, and doesn’t need to. The farmer. The first-generation borrower. The working professional is drowning in spam calls. People whose lives can be meaningfully better if the right tools reach them in the right way.
That’s the version of the future I’m building towards. Not AI as a novelty, but AI as something so embedded in your day that you stop noticing it, you just notice that things got easier. Your calls got handled. Your documents got shared seamlessly. Your financial decisions got smarter. All of it accessible, friendly, and safe, in your language, on the device already in your pocket.
If decades from now people say that Equal made technology feel less intimidating and more human for millions of Indians who were otherwise being left behind, that’s enough. That’s more than enough.
What’s harder: taking a bold decision or sticking with it when things go wrong?
Sticking with it. Absolutely no comparison.
Taking a bold decision is a single moment. You feel the clarity, you make the call, you move. There’s adrenaline in it.
But what comes after, when the numbers are off, when a key person you bet on doesn’t work out, when the market takes longer than you thought, when the easy version of the idea starts looking attractive, that’s where character gets tested.
What part of AI genuinely excites you—and what part quietly worries you?
What excites me about AI is voice. That’s the real unlock for India.
Most people think AI is a text-interface product. But over a billion Indians have never typed a search into Gemini or ChatGPT intentionally. Writing and reading aren’t the primary mode for hundreds of millions of people; speaking is. The moment AI becomes truly voice-first, multilingual, and conversational, it becomes democratic in a way nothing before it has been. That’s what we’re building with Equal AI’s call assistant: you don’t type, you just talk