Tech entrepreneur Prashant Gupta, who grew up in Belagavi along with his two friends Sheldon Telles and Muzaffarali Shaikh, launched BAIS at Eefa with a message: AI won’t replace you, but it will reshape your job, and the region’s students aren’t ready yet. Six of the city’s business, education and civic voices then debated what they called “the Belagavi gap”. Batch 1 starts in October.
Before launching BAIS – BiCSoM’s AI School, Prashant Gupta ran an experiment. His team put a short AI challenge on Instagram, and thousands of students across North Karnataka took it. The challenge, called the Context Score, gives you a real business task and grades, out of seven, how well you brief an AI to do it.
“Surprisingly, most of the students got a score of two out of seven,” Prashant Gupta told the audience at the launch of BAIS – BiCSoM’s AI School, at Eefa Belgaum on Club Road on Monday, September 22. “The fact is that we are still living at a very basic prompting layer. Contexting is where we all should be.”
Closing that gap is the reason BAIS exists. The evening brought together business owners, educators, professionals and students, and ended with a panel on how Belagavi is responding to AI.
“Should I laugh, or should we solve for it?”
Gupta opened with a story from the day before. His mother asked him to sit down, looking very serious, and told him: “AI is dangerous.”
“That’s been my bread and butter for the last nine years,” he said. “So should I laugh, or should we solve for it? Solving was a much better option than laughing.” BAIS – BiCSoM’s AI School, he said, is there to clear up the wrong notions about AI, particularly among the citizens of the region and business and management students.
His message was not meant to scare. “AI is not going to replace humans, that is for sure. It is going to reshape,” he said. But he warned that the next three to five years will be uncomfortable, and that they will hit hardest in middle-class families whose first aspiration after a degree is a job, “because a lot of mundane, regular, repetitive jobs will be taken away by AI.”
“Don’t learn the technology. Learn the mindset.”
BAIS – BiCSoM’s AI School does not teach coding, and Prashant Gupta was clear about why. “Trust me, building an AI agent is not difficult,” he said. “We used to take about 16 weeks to make a quality website. Today the same site is done in three days. AI knows technology. It’s not that you have to learn technology for AI. It’s a mindset.”
“Somebody learning marketing for three years, there’s no need to teach him programming. You need to teach him the AI mindset.”
At BAIS, that mindset has three parts:
- Context: brief the AI the way you would brief a new colleague, with the business, the customers, the numbers and the rules.
- Loop: turn one good result into a routine. AI drafts, you review, and it gets better every time.
- Judge: catch what the AI gets wrong, whether invented facts, wrong numbers or bias, before your manager does.
A Belagavi boy comes home
Prashant Gupta grew up in Belagavi and did his BBA at Bharatesh College of Business Administration. He has been working in technology since 2002–03 and his corporate career began only at 30, around 2009–10, when he left his father’s business and joined a tech company in Bengaluru. There he helped build one of India’s top 10 mobile gaming studios, where one of his titles, a drag racing game, crossed 10 million downloads back in 2012. In 2018 he and his wife, Rakhi Gupta, founded BiCSoM Technologies, a mindful remote-first software and design lab.
He told the audience that he thinks about Belagavi every day, and what he could do for the town. BiCSoM, he said, has always been about spotting talent where others don’t look. One of its hires took his design interview sitting on a street under a streetlight, between food deliveries. Today he is one of India’s top UX designers, working for a multinational.
“Kids in Bangalore are already doing this,” Gupta said of AI skills. “Our region needs it thoroughly.”
Prashant Gupta at the BAIS launch: “AI is not going to replace humans. It is going to reshape.”
Childhood friends, one mission
Prashant Gupta, Co-founder – Sheldon Telles and CMO – Muzaffarali Shaikh go back a long way: they grew up playing Contra and Mario together in the ’90s. Sheldon Telles, a partner at ABD Financial Services, admitted that AI was never his strong suit.
“It’s been difficult for me to actually get Prashant to speak our language. I’ve constantly reminded him: please do not drown us in terminology,” Telles said. “AI was not really something I was strong at, but I’ve levelled up over the last few months. I’m convinced this initiative is essential to help people level up. It’s not just survival mode. The opportunity in this chaos is too large to ignore.”
Chief Marketing Officer Muzaffarali Shaikh thanked Prashant Gupta “for getting us all, making us uncomfortable, and telling us: guys, let’s do it again.”
Your own AI, trained to work like you
Every BAIS student starts by choosing one of four “horizons”: a job with a company outside Belagavi, a job with a company in Belagavi, their own startup or family business, or remote work for a company in the US, the Middle East or the UK “sitting from Belgaum”. The eight weeks are then tailored to that goal.
Over the course, each student builds an AI Harness. “AI harness essentially means the AI behaves like you,” Prashant Gupta explained. Let the AI handle the daily, mundane work, he said, so people have more time for relationships and each other.
The payoff comes at the job interview. Prashant Gupta described two smart students he had met: “Tomorrow when they’re going for a job, if somebody says, ‘Show us what you have done with AI,’ they’ll not have a context.” A BAIS graduate will have a working harness to show. The course ends with a public Demo Day, where students defend a capstone project before industry professionals, followed by a Placement Sprint support covering AI-assisted job search and mock interviews.
The course is open to BBA, B.Com, BA, BSc, MBA, LLB and CA students, as well as working professionals and business owners. It needs no coding and no paid software, and classes are held at Plot No.24 and 25, CTS No. 6111, Opp Veer Savarkar garden, BUDA colony, Shanti Nagar, Tilakwadi, Belagavi -590006.
The Belgaum gap: six voices from the city
The evening closed with a panel moderated by Shedlon Telles. “The tools dropped at the same time across the country. 18 months, 24 months, all of us have the same tools,” he said, opening the discussion. “What is different is how each city has reacted and used those tools. That’s what we call the Belgaum gap.”
Faizan Saith, Partner, Feroz Saith Group, set the tone with some candour. “The only AI that I know about is this robovac that keeps roaming around my house cleaning the floor. My son calls him Alfred for some reason. I hope I’m not Batman.” His real estate business, though, is about to put WhatsApp AI agents to work on one of its biggest residential projects Sarvotham Residences,, sorting buyer enquiries by budget and locality. When an audience member asked whether AI takes away people’s choices, he replied: “It is us deciding what AI does for us. That is what he (Prashant Gupta) is here to teach.”
CA Vinayak M Asundi of Attitude Professional Academy, who has trained more than 20,000 students, offered the line of the evening: “Use AI: actual intelligence, not artificial intelligence.” His advice to young professionals was to question every answer AI gives them. “Knowledge is no more the differentiator. It is how well you use this knowledge, how well you communicate with people,” he said. “Your client is going to pay you for your judgment.”
Naba Tenginkar, who works in Decathlon’s customer relationship management team while pursuing her BBA, spoke for the students in the room. In her first job she uses AI to understand figures such as average basket value, so that she can “ask better questions to someone who’s more experienced”. Her warning to her peers: “Trusting AI is good, but blindly trusting it and then going wrong somewhere because of it is a different thing.”
Rayhaan Mujawar, whose businesses span transport, real estate and retail, admitted that his office still enters 200 to 300 parcel receipts by hand every day. “People who know AI, or know how to use it, will replace people who don’t,” he said. “As a town, I’m really proud that we are getting to a point where people start getting to know AI.” He also said his group has received permission to open a BCA college, and that it will collaborate with BAIS so that its degree students get exposure to AI.
Vrushabh Patil, Successor Chairman of Gomatesh Vidyapeeth, pointed out that today’s kindergarten children will one day work on technologies that haven’t been invented yet. His prescription: learn new things, learn the same things in different ways, and unlearn what has become obsolete. Calling diploma students “the most unexplored” talent, he said BAIS had “come at the right time” to work with him on closing the gap between what employers want and what graduates have. “We say that the future is already here, but it is not equally distributed.”
Dr Nitin Khot, economist, environmentalist and social activist, congratulated the team “for having the courage to bring a very consequential technology of our times to Belgaum, and within the reach of ordinary students.” He recalled how London’s 5,000 street lamplighters lost their work to electric lighting and found new jobs as the economy grew. “But this is a different beast altogether,” he said. “This AI is not just a technology. This is an agent. It can take decisions.” White-collar jobs will feel it first, he said, and he urged BAIS to reskill professionals returning home from the IT industry. His challenge to the team: “Belgaum has traditionally punched above its weight. How Belgaum will reach out to you is how you reach out to Belgaum.”
The conversation spilled into the audience. When a city advocate asked how AI could help lawyers, Prashant Gupta said legal research across half a dozen law books, once a day’s work, now takes a minute or two, as long as the AI is given the right context. “If you just prompt it, you’ll get a hallucinated or slop response for sure. If you learn contexting, you’ll get a much better response.” The advocate invited him to speak to his association’s members.
(L–R) Naba Tenginkar, Vrushabh Patil, Rayhaan Mujawar, Dr Nitin Khot, Faizan Saith, CA Vinayak M Asundi and Sheldon Telles (moderator), discuss “the Belgaum gap” at the BAIS launch.
Video link of Panel Discussion on the Belagavi Gap – https://youtu.be/C9vVf4TKxgw
Batch 1: the details
Classes run for eight weeks, 16 contact hours in all, at the BAIS campus in Tilakwadi. Seats in Batch 1 are limited to 30.
Batch 1 begins in October 2026 and graduates in December 2026.
Applications are open at https://www.bais.ac/apply/
Four asks to Belagavi
Prashant Gupta closed with four requests to the room. They apply to every reader:
- Send us one student. “If you see that this kid is going to land up in some queue for a job, and is wasting his time, send him to us.”
- Take the test. The Context Score is free at https://www.bais.ac/assess/context-score. “It’s a fun thing. It will take only three minutes.” Most students scored two out of seven. Can you beat it?
- Give the students a real problem. Business owners, employers and educators are invited to hand BAIS a real challenge for students to solve with their AI harness, “so you would really see the difference.”
- Spread the word.
Not sure which horizon is yours? The free Horizon Finder at https://www.bais.ac/assess/horizon helps you work it out.
“AI is here to stay,” Prashant Gupta said as he signed off. “Let’s enjoy the change.”
About BAIS
BAIS – BiCSoM’s AI School is North Karnataka’s first functional AI school, an initiative of BiCSoM Technologies Pvt Ltd. It teaches students, working professionals and business owners in Belagavi, Dharwad and Hubballi to use AI in real work through its Context, Loop and Judge method. The founding team is Prashant Gupta (Founder, BiCSoM Technologies, BAIS), Sheldon Telles (Co-Founder, BAIS) and Muzaffarali Shaikh (CMO, BAIS). Campus: Plot No. 24 & 25, CTS No. 6111, opposite Veer Savarkar Garden, BUDA Colony, Shanti Nagar, Tilakwadi, Belagavi 590006.
Website: bais.ac · Email: hello@bais.ac