India, May 2025: The conversation around artificial intelligence in creative industries tends to fall into two camps: breathless optimism or quiet dread. What it rarely does is land in a room with the kind of clarity that two of India’s most globally recognised designers brought to Pearl Academy, India’s first AI-first design institute. Couturier Rahul Mishra and designer-entrepreneur Masaba Gupta each took the stage for intimate masterclasses, and between them delivered something the industry has been struggling to articulate: a framework for how a creative person actually leads in a world being reshaped in real time.
Masaba did not mince words. “Train yourself in AI like your life depends on it,” she told the room. And then, characteristically, she reframed the conversation entirely. The risk of AI isn’t replacement, it’s revelation. “People fear AI not because of what it can potentially do, but because it can reveal your true potential.” At her company, she has stopped accepting the answer that something can’t be turned around quickly. If a presentation can be built in seven minutes with the right prompt, the question shifts from can we do this to how sharp is your thinking. But she drew a hard line too. “AI is cold. Never forget, human touch is warm, human thinking is warm.” The goal is to use the speed AI creates to do more of what machines cannot: show up with a point of view that is genuinely your own.
Rahul Mishra approached the same question through the lens of craftsmanship. A complete AI advocate by his own description, he reminded Pearl Academy students that the sketch is five per cent of the journey. The physical construction of a garment, the part that no algorithm can replicate, is the other 95. “Work on your craftsmanship. That will never be replaced.” His prescription for using AI was counterintuitive: let it take time away from the screen so you can spend more time at the machine. He also named a use that went further than productivity, AI as a stress test for originality. “If it looks like somebody else’s work, AI will flag it right away. It’s a very good tool to research how unique your vision is.”
The stories they told about their own journeys are, on the surface, very different. His is one of patient craft, eight weeks spent on a single corset for Ariana Grande in an industry that turns such things around in eight days. Hers is faster: a brand started at 19, a pivot triggered by a foil-print piece that flew off the shelf, a beauty line born from never finding her own skin tone in any store. But underneath the difference, both identified the same engine. “Only 1% of people get the why,” Mishra said, not what to make, not how to make it, but the deeper question of purpose that sustains a creative life. Masaba said it differently: “I don’t think in life you get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate.” Know what you’re asking for. Know why it matters.
What Pearl Academy created, in hosting these two voices, was not simply a masterclass series. It was a mirror held up to an industry in transition and a generation being asked to lead it.
