What has changed
A person in front of a population-scale screen asks two questions. Kya likha hai? What does this say? Isme mera faida kya hai? What is in it for me? People who cannot answer both on their own ask a relative or an agent, and often pay an intermediary.
AI agents can now answer both questions by voice, in the person’s language, at the moment of use. Digital public infrastructure (DPI) lets a government allow those agents to act for people safely, at population scale. My rule for this design: anyone who faces an agent has an agent of their own.
What I bring
- The design behind the new Aadhaar app: 69.7 million downloads and 13.8 million updates by users between 21 June 2025 and 14 October 2026. I also directed the redesign of uidai.gov.in.
- Design and field research for the early EkStep platform, which became Sunbird and DIKSHA, with more than 200 million learners.
- An AI-first national DPI in 2026: offline-verifiable QR credentials, guardrailed AI content generation with adversarial checks, and a multilingual voice assistant, built through AI coding agents and handed over.
- Five working instruments for comprehension, including Kya Likha Hai (KLH) and the comprehension artefact. See Work.
I advise UIDAI on design, and I declare that role at the start of every engagement.
How an engagement can start
Knowledge session · half a day. For your team: comprehension, agents and DPI, shown on the working instruments.
AI on DPI · for multilaterals, foundations and governments. A reference design for the comprehension layer, audits of the journeys where people drop out into assisted or paid channels, and a capacity module for your teams. A day rate in US dollars, or a fixed fee.
Journey audit · 2–4 weeks. I find the step whose failure pushes people from self-service into assisted, physical or paid channels, and I design the fix.