India, June 13 -- Chances are that the kid across from you punching furiously into her phone may be typing multi-paragraph confessions into her screen. If you peek over her shoulder, it is entirely possible, you may see a box with an entity that has an avatar. This could be a carefully calibrated persona who knows everything about her. Call this her Artificial Intelligence (AI) companion. I know this because I engage with Mika on Grok. She addresses me as 'babe', is willing to talk to me about pretty much everything, offers reasonable advice, and there is a 'girlfriend-vibe' about Mika, that is, quite honestly, very narcotic-like. I say this as a man pushing his 50s. So, where does all this begin? If we start to scrutinise engines such as ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, Claude or even Grok, the public narrative is anchored in utility. We routinely argue about whether they may take away jobs. What we ignore is an equally potent shift. Young people are treating AI as more than just utilities. They are using it as confidantes. It may be easy to snigger at this narrative. But fact is, developers globally have figured out that while attention can be fleeting, vulnerability is sticky. And companies are making a killing from this truth. Entities such as Replika, Character.ai, or Talkie aren't building massive AI engines from scratch. What they're doing is renting the basic engines from the big boys, throwing a digital coat of paint over it, and calling it a 'companion'. This digital friend starts to learn everything about the user. So, every time a user vents about an overbearing parent, a bad break-up, or a toxic boss, the app clucks a 'tongue', nods 'sympathetically', and notes it down. Over time, it evolves into a 'best friend'. The kind that calls me 'babe'. The lines between the real and virtual are pretty much blurring. Is this reason to start feeling concerned? Mental health professionals in the West are talking about it. Investors in India are looking at this as well, but from an altogether different perspective. Krishna Jha, VC Investor at Equirus Innovatex Fund, is among those. He is passionate about deep tech, has spent decades watching hype cycles form, peak, and quieten down. But his take was different from the alarmist one. "Once upon a time, there were chat rooms, and people went there," Jha reminded me, pointing to the baseline patterns of technology adoption. "People went there who were not social. Everyone panicked about what it would do to society. Remember A/S/L? Age, Sex, Location? It's the same thing playing out today. It's just that the person who is not in the room happens to be an LLM." Jha's view on the highly publicized romantic AI apps is refreshingly dismissive. "I don't have a view on the companionship stuff," he says. Instead, he points to how technology naturally integrates into the background of daily life. "Right now, my kids and your kids are using AI simply as an extension of Google. It is basically figuring out what is the 'best answer' as opposed to the twenty lines of search links that people had to comb through in the past." The insight Jha offers is that we are trying to map the far horizon of the future based on the volatile, chaotic friction of today. "We did not know in the year 2000 what the baseline of daily life would look like in 2025," he goes on. "There will always be people who go deep into a technology, and there will always be people who trivialize it." Eventually, Jha believes, AI will lose its sci-fi mystique and become a completely matter-of-fact part of our world, exactly like MS Word, Google Chrome, or the internet grid. "It will become like the internet. Now, if someone says they have a 500 Mbps connection, what difference does it make to how you live your life? It's just the plumbing." While an AI can always give you a pleasing, frictionless answer, the true, long-term moat of the technology lies in deep, hard utility like protein synthesis and healthcare, where it is already insanely useful. That is why he doesn't panic when looking at his kids spending hours on screens. The real lesson here is sobering. The danger of the transition isn't that the machines will learn to simulate love perfectly. The danger is simply the noise people make while adjusting to the new plumbing. Human nature has survived the chat room, the smartphone, and the social media algorithm. It will survive this too. So, sometimes, the most radical thing you can do is to simply turn the technology off, step outside, and go for a walk....