Every evening, Keshev Dutt spends a couple of hours in his home in northern India, teaching small business owners in Bangladesh and Nepal how to use artificial intelligence. Not for coding or building chatbots, but for something more basic: AI in Excel.
For $30 per head for a three-month program, Dutt, 28, runs classes in WhatsApp and Facebook groups, as well as on Zoom. He teaches how to automate inventory logs, generate invoices, analyze sales patterns, and build customer databases using AI-powered spreadsheet tools such as Copilot. The group sessions last 60 to 90 minutes, and are held twice a week.
“Most of my students run small shops, garment stores, tire repair units, beauty salons,” Dutt, who has a master’s degree in computer application, told Rest of World. “They tell me, ‘We don’t want to learn AI for big tech jobs; we want to use it to run our business better.’”
Since introducing his classes in March, Dutt said he has trained about 50 people. Many have signed up for additional modules.
They’re not trying to become data scientists. They just want to become better digital workers.”
