New Delhi, Sept. 4 -- Every morning, Madhu Karuthedath, 42, the Bengaluru-based solo founder of the employer-brand consultancy The Quick Brown Fox Co., opens what looks like a small control room on his laptop. Several tools gather news, Claude turns the previous day's work into a prioritised checklist, ChatGPT helps him brainstorm and structure ideas, and runs them through Gemini for critique, and then hands the clearer brief back to Claude for implementation. While the engines work, does he take a break? No. He is waiting for one tool to share the output, checking another, and briefing a third.

In the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, the character Barney Stinson made a catchphrase out of suspense, inserting "wait-for-it" into everything, a...