Who keeps this ledger
Vijay Kumar
President & CTO, Xanadu Realty. Writing here about what AI costs and returns where trust is expensive and digitisation is thin.
I take cost and time out of businesses that deal in physical assets and run on documents, intermediaries and trust. That has been the job for twenty years, across four industries and three countries, and the instrument has changed several times. Right now the instrument is AI. It is not the point.
The reason I write is narrow. There is a great deal of commentary about enterprise AI and very little disclosure. Analysts publish frameworks, vendors publish surveys of their own customers, and almost nobody with a profit and loss statement publishes what a deployment actually cost them, what it returned, and where it failed. That gap is the whole subject of this site.
Most of what is here is first-party. Where it is my own operating data I say so explicitly, every time, because the moment internal numbers get mistaken for market research the credibility is gone and it does not come back. Where I use published research I give the source and the date it was fielded, not just the date it was printed — the gap between those two is where most stale claims hide.
What I got wrong most recently
In 2025 we ran a residential launch with no sample flat and no site office. 8,838 people registered for 1,419 homes. It was six times oversubscribed, and 8% of buyers completed without speaking to a human being.
I had expected that launch to show the intermediary was finished. It showed the opposite. Sixty-eight percent of registrations still came through channel partners, on a launch running entirely on AI. The job had split in two, and only the half made of information work had moved. That is our own data, one launch, five weeks — and I would not stretch it further than that.
Before real estate
Education and recognition
Executive General Management Programme at IIM Bangalore. M.S. in Software Systems from BITS Pilani. B.Tech in Information Technology from SASTRA, where I finished second overall in the university. Six Sigma Green Belt, and a CAPSIM business simulation certification.
Named among the 10 Best CTOs in India by TradeFlock in 2022 and a DT100 Digital Leader in 2023. I have spoken on a Forbes India panel about customer experience and in a fireside chat with the COO of LeadSquared about technology in real estate, and have written for The Times of India and 99acres. The full list is here.
Getting in touch
The fastest route is LinkedIn. For speaking or press, there is a form on the speaking page that reaches me directly.
The dispatch
Fortnightly, with the numbers attached.