"Hey devs,
Long-time lurker, rare poster. Wanted to share something practical rather than another ""AI will replace us"" doom-scroll.
Quick intro: I'm Krishna Chaitanya, 3.5 years as a Technology Analyst at Infosys, based in Andhra Pradesh. My job is 60% reporting, 30% data pulls, 10% Slack. You know the drill.
Here's the problem I was sitting on for years: one end-to-end report was eating 6 to 10 hours of my day. Data extraction from multiple sources, manual Excel formatting, building visuals, sanity-checking, and finally delivering. Standard tech analyst grind.
The entry point: a ₹9 workshop
Early 2025, Instagram reels kept pushing me content from be10x. You've probably seen them. Two IIT Kharagpur founders, heavy on Excel + AI demos. They run a 3-hour intro workshop for ₹9, which is basically free.
I went in skeptical. Came out paying for the full course that week.
Why? The Power BI live-data demo showed me, unambiguously, that the way I'd been building reports was multiple generations behind what's possible today. It wasn't a marketing reel. It was someone rebuilding, in real-time, the kind of work I was manually stitching together.
What I actually implemented
The course covered:
- AI-assisted Excel workflows (automations for data cleanup, lookups, conditional logic)
- Power BI dashboards with live data connections
- Python for data analytics, specifically pandas + basic scripting for data transformation
- Using AI for domain-specific resume alignment and output formatting
The biggest unlock for me wasn't learning new tools. It was learning how to chain AI into existing tools. Excel I already knew. Power BI I'd opened once. Python I'd been avoiding since college. The course stitched them into one coherent workflow.
The measurable result
6-10 hour report → 30 min to 1 hour.
That's roughly a 90% reduction in time-on-task for my main deliverable. I validated this across multiple report types. Consistent.
The side effect I didn't plan for
With the saved time, I rebuilt my resume using AI. Properly. Not ""list every project,"" but actually structured for the job type I wanted. The AI helped me convert responsibility-speak into impact-speak, with domain-aligned keywords.
Submitted. 10 to 15 interview calls came in within weeks. One converted into an offer with a 150% salary hike.
Joining the new company second week of next month.
Why I'm sharing this here
The AI hype cycle is doing a good job of making everyone feel either inadequate or overconfident. Neither helps.
What helped me was a structured, practical, low-ego course that treated AI as a tool to make me better at my existing job. Not a replacement for my brain. Three months later I'm making 2.5x what I was.
If you're sitting on the fence about AI upskilling because you don't know where to start, the ₹9 bar for be10x's workshop is probably the lowest-friction way to test whether the approach clicks for you.
Not sponsored. Just a guy who got a 150% hike and thinks more people should know what worked.
AMA in comments."
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