The first time I sat in the audience of a corporate keynote, I counted three things: the number of people on stage who looked like me (zero), the number of topics that felt relevant to where business was actually going (one, barely), and the number of times I thought "I wish I could book them for my team" (seventeen).
I am a South Asian immigrant founder. I came to the United States with a laptop, a student visa, and the uncomfortable awareness that I would always have to work twice as hard to be seen as half as credible. That experience of being simultaneously inside the room and invisible in it taught me something no business school case study could. The currency of the AI era is not capital or connections. It is knowledge, credibility, and the ability to communicate both.
Legacy speaker bureaus were built in the 1970s and 1980s by gatekeepers for gatekeepers. Their rosters are a museum of yesterday's innovation. Their fee structures punish independent speakers and reward agents who have never seen the inside of a machine learning pipeline. Their diversity, if you can call it that, is a handful of familiar faces recycled across the same Fortune 500 circuit year after year.
I built iShruti because I have been the person in the audience who needed a different voice on stage. And I have been the person with something worth saying who could not find a bureau willing to return my emails.
The name is the argument
Shruti is a Sanskrit word meaning "that which is heard." In the Vedic tradition, shruti refers to sacred knowledge that was not written down, but spoken and passed from teacher to student across generations. The idea that knowledge lives in the act of transmission, not in the artifact of a document, feels precisely relevant to what the best keynotes actually do.
The best speeches I have ever heard did not change what I knew. They changed what I was willing to believe. They rearranged something in the room, and in the people in it, that no slide deck or white paper could have reached.
That is what iShruti is for. Not presentations. Transmissions.
What I saw in the L&D market
I spent several years close to enterprise learning and development. I watched procurement teams spend six weeks sourcing a speaker, cycle through three agents, pay a bureau a commission in the range the industry treats as standard for introductions they could have made themselves, and still end up with someone who had not updated their core material since the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the people who were actually living inside AI transformation, the practitioners and researchers and sector specialists and the Global South founders who had built things under real constraints, were invisible to the same buyers. Not because they were unknown. Because the infrastructure that connects speakers to buyers was built for a different world.
The big bureaus work on relationship. Their agents have books of business built over decades. A new speaker without an existing network, without a TED talk, without a media profile already assembled by someone else's PR machine simply does not exist in the bureau world, no matter how good they are. I have written up the full mechanics of that in what is wrong with legacy speaker bureaus.
I have seen this pattern before. It is the same one that kept immigrant talent out of venture capital for two decades. The same one that kept diverse founders out of accelerator programs. The same one that keeps getting disrupted by someone who decides the existing infrastructure is not a constraint but an opportunity.
The topics changed and the rosters did not
Here is the thing about the AI era that most people in the speaking industry have not fully absorbed. The topics that enterprises actually need help with in 2026 are not the topics that built the careers of the speakers on the legacy rosters.
Digital transformation? Done. Everyone has a mobile app. Cloud migration? Old news. Blockchain? Please.
The actual questions keeping L&D leaders and CHROs awake in 2026 are these:
- How do we reskill a large share of our workforce for jobs that did not exist three years ago?
- What does AI governance actually mean for a company that is not a tech company?
- How do we maintain psychological safety in a workforce that now includes both humans and AI systems?
- What does leadership look like when your team includes agents, assistants and algorithms alongside people?
These questions require a new generation of voices. Healthcare AI practitioners who have deployed models in clinical settings. Workplace psychologists who study human-AI collaboration. Former regulators who understand the compliance landscape. Immigrant entrepreneurs who built global companies from zero infrastructure. Those are five of the ten kinds of AI speaker a Fortune 500 books in 2026, and almost none of them are on a legacy bureau's homepage.
Why I am the person building this
I want to be honest about something. I am not a speaker. I am a builder. I have run teams, shipped products, navigated the strange bureaucracy of American institutional systems as an outsider, and learned how to find the right person for the right room at the right moment.
That combination of operational instinct, outsider perspective and a stubborn belief in the value of real expertise is what building a marketplace requires. It is also why verification is the part of this business I care most about. When you have spent years being asked to prove yourself twice, you build a company that asks everyone to prove themselves once, properly, and then vouches for them.
What iShruti is, exactly
iShruti is a two-sided marketplace. On one side, enterprises: Fortune 500 L&D leaders, conference organizers, progressive institutions who need speakers for events, offsites, all-hands and training programs. On the other, a curated roster of AI-era speakers with verified expertise, real booking infrastructure, and the tools to build their thought leadership over time.
The business model is straightforward. Our commission is 17.5% of the speaker fee, and it appears on the quote as its own line rather than disappearing into the total. You can read the whole of it on our pricing page, including what we do and do not charge for.
The moat is not the commission rate. It is the quality of the roster, the relevance of the topics, the range of the voices, and the boring operational excellence of the booking experience. Anyone can claim to be an AI expert. We check, and how we check is written down in public so you can hold us to it.
The longer view
iShruti is the first product in what I think of as knowledge infrastructure. Human expertise is undervalued and hard to find across every sector, and the tools to locate it, verify it, package it and deploy it do not yet exist in a form that serves the next generation of experts or the next generation of buyers.
iShruti is the wedge: the marketplace for live, synchronous expertise. What comes later is a longer conversation, and I would rather earn the right to have it by getting this part right first. My argument for why that expertise is becoming more valuable rather than less is in the future of human expertise.
This is not a side project.
To the speakers who are not on a bureau
If you are a practitioner, a researcher or a founder who has been told the speaking circuit is not for you yet, not until you have the book and the TED talk and the media profile and the agent, the infrastructure is changing.
iShruti exists for you. We are building the roster from the outside in, finding the voices first and creating the conditions for buyers to find them. You do not need to already be famous. You need something real to say, a track record of saying it well, and the credibility of someone who has actually done the thing they talk about. That is the standard, and you can apply directly without an introduction from anyone.
To the buyers
If you are an L&D leader who has been booking from the same three bureau catalogs for a decade, and who has been quietly disappointed by how often the "AI transformation" talk turns out to be a warmed-over innovation keynote from 2019, you deserve better.
You deserve a bureau that has actually mapped who is building real things with AI right now, who is studying how it affects workers and organizations, and who has the credibility to walk into a room of skeptical engineers or nervous HR professionals and leave them with something they are still discussing a year later.
Where we actually are
We went live in June 2026. We are early, and I would rather say that plainly than imply a scale we do not have.
There is no public roster page yet, because I will not publish names I have not finished verifying. What exists instead is a process: you send four things about your event, no account and no discovery call required, and you get a shortlist of verified names back within 24 hours. That is how it works, start to finish.
The promises attached to it are specific enough to be enforced. If a speaker cancels, we replace them within 72 hours or you pay nothing. If your audience rates the speaker below 8 out of 10, our commission comes back. Both are written up on the guarantee page rather than living in a slide I show you once.
If you have been waiting for a bureau built for this moment rather than the last one, tell us about your event.