AI Business Trickery: Not a Good Sign for the Industry
January 19, 2026
In feat reminiscent of the Great and Powerful Oz, the curtain was pulled back on an UK AI company that turned out to be a great big real fake. The ACS Information Age reported that, “The Company Whose ‘AI’ Was Actually 700 Humans In India.” For eight years, Engineer.ai allegedly fooled the tech industry. It was allegedly founded by Sachin Dev Duggal, who served as the CEO of Builder.ai. Plus, he raised money. He pitched AI, and the check books came out. He acquired funding from Microsoft, Qatar, and SoftBank.
Duggal promised that his AI chatbot, Natasha, would be a no-code tool that could build apps six times faster than typical required work and would be seventy percent cheaper. Duggal embraced Silicon Valley baloney job titles. He dubbed himself the “chief wizard” borrowing from the 1939 motion picture “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Yep, the film had a robot too.
However, Engineer.ai declared bankruptcy after a Bloomberg investigation reported that Engineer.ai had been working with the Indian social media startup VerSe. Both were employing criminal financial actions. When these practices were revealed, Viola Credit, a major backer, wanted immediate repayment of its $50 million loan.
More information popped out in December 2025. The smart software Natasha was about 700 Indian app developers. These professional humans wrote customers’ software and adopted the behavior of bots. Not good. The cited source reports:
“Although the developers used a range of software tools in their work, coding was performed manually, meaning that while Builder.ai did eventually deliver apps to its customers, it was simply another player in an Indian offshoring industry attracting $27 billion ($US17.7 billion) annually. That puts the company in a completely different market segment than the one that propelled AI-hungry investors through four funding rounds before and after the debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT turned the global tech industry on its head.”
What other AI charades are operating using hyperbolic marketing and motion picture tropes? My hunch. Lots.
Whitney Grace, January 19, 2026
Comments
Got something to say?
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
