In early 2025 I was consulting for a business building practical management education that was AI enabled. We spent four or five months building it — carefully, thoughtfully, with a lot of effort from a lot of people.
By the time we were done, we weren’t needed anymore.
Not because we’d failed. Because the AI tools we’d been using to build the product had, in the time it took us to build it, become good enough to simply be the product. The market didn’t need a specialised management education AI. Anyone could just open Claude and ask management solutions. We’d built something and the ground had shifted underneath it while we were building.
That experience clarified something I’d been circling for a while. Even the consulting I do — sales enablement, demand generation, the strategic thinking I’ve spent years developing — I could see it going the same way. Not slowly. Fast. Experience and instinct, the things that made human consultants valuable, were exactly what AI was getting better at every month.
The Question That Replaced the Wrong One
So I stopped and asked a different question.
Not what can’t AI do — that felt like the wrong frame. But: what do I love doing so much that I’d do it regardless? What do I know in my hands, not just my head?
Food. It has always been food.
I’ve been cooking since my grandmother let me make little rotis on the edge of her tava. I bake at 7am because I want to, not because I have to. The knowledge is instinctive — how dough should feel, when chocolate is tempered right, why one batch of shortbread behaves differently from the last. That’s not something I learned from a course. It lives in my hands.
Which is how, this year, I started Chom Chom Pantry — a small-batch biscuit business, made by hand on a tea estate in Kotagiri, in the Nilgiris.
I believe, genuinely, that as the world fills up with AI-generated everything, people are going to start craving things that were made by a person. Tactile things. Imperfect things. Things with soil and a story behind them.
CCP is my bet on that world. You can see what that bet looks like, in the shop.
It’s a small bet. A drawer box of biscuits from a tea estate. But it’s the bet I believe in.
P.S. There’s this absolutely marvelous little Kuala Lumpur bookstore I once discovered on Instagram: Kasa Suasa. It stocks indie titles, slow-living books, and independent design. Someone there has really very good taste! They’re how I discovered Breathe Magazine, which is exactly what it sounds like: illustrated, unhurried, built around the idea that paying close attention to ordinary things is worth your time. I always feel Kasa Suasa’s books and my Sundays have so much in common!
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Chom Chom Pantry · Kotagiri, Nilgiris
