The View from the Office.

I met up with Nirav Shah, founder of Quantal AI, at the Hendricks Hotel on 38th Street. He had a cappuccino. I had the truffle mac and cheese and an iced tea.

Nirav grew up in Mumbai and came to New York to get a master’s degree at Columbia. He interned at UBS during the 2008 financial crisis and landed a full-time job on the quant trading team, building software for ETFs, credit default swaps, basket trading and automated systems.

He left in 2011 to start a tech company but visa restrictions meant he couldn’t stay in the U.S., so he moved back to Mumbai. His first product was a chatbot for organizations, built before Slack. It didn’t take off.

He spent three years working in his family’s textile business alongside his uncle. It had more than 500 customers and ran on relationships. He said the experience changed him from an introverted engineer into someone comfortable building friendships with customers.

COVID lockdowns hit textiles hard and in 2021, Nirav and his co-founder, also an engineer, started their current firm. The company builds AI products for clients and automates manual business processes. Much of the recent work is automating social media posts..

The company found its first customers on Upwork and has leveraged outbound LinkedIn campaigns to expand. It now has 50 employees, 30 of them engineers, mostly in India. The team grew from 20 to 50 in the past year. Nirav said his biggest challenge is delegating and building a management layer.

Over dinner he showed me a demo of a system built for a client that generates LinkedIn posts in English and Arabic using multiple AI agents. One researches topics, one writes, one validates facts, one creates images. When the client rejects a post, the system asks why and adapts. 

Since my business is ghostwriting social media posts for executives, it’s interesting to see how Nirav is building tech that automates that process. I’m more expensive but more customized and focused on trying to help clients find the stories and shape their narratives. 

The challenge as I see it is how to use the technology to be efficient but still use human judgement to write content that is effective in communicating. 

I use AI to monitor information, organize transcripts and check facts, but most AI-written content is still easy to spot and readers discount it when they see it. 

Nirav is in the U.S. visiting clients for four weeks. He’s in New York until Sunday before he heads to Chicago, Seattle and a conference in Las Vegas. 

You can connect with Nirav via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.