Who is Alap Shah? The co-author of the viral AI crisis report roiling global markets

Alap Shah did not set out to become the face of an “AI scare trade”. Yet in the space of a few days, a dense macro thought experiment he co-authored began echoing across trading floors, boardrooms and policy circles. As markets grapple with what artificial intelligence could mean for jobs, profits and growth, Shah has found himself at the centre of a debate that is as economic as it is technological.

From Harvard to hedge funds to building Sentieo

Shah graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Economics with honours before embarking on what would become a 15-year career in professional investing. He began in public markets, working across large global equity portfolios at Viking Global and Citadel, two of the world’s renowned hedge funds.
He later moved into private markets, spanning leveraged buyouts and growth equity at Castanea Partners, and backing early-stage companies such as White Ops, Wiser, Earnest Research and Powerlytics. The shift from allocating capital to building companies came in December 2011, when he co-founded Sentieo, an AI-powered financial research and search platform designed for hedge funds, mutual funds, investment banks and corporates.

Shah served as Chief Executive until September 2020 and then as Chairman until May 2022. Over that period, Sentieo raised more than $70 million before being acquired by AlphaSense in 2022. Alongside this, he co-founded Thistle, a health foods subscription service, in April 2013 and continues to serve as its Chairman.

Since March 2011, he has been Managing Partner at Lotus Technology Management, and from September 2024, Chief Executive Officer of Littlebird in the New York metropolitan area.

The AI scenario that jolted markets and India

The market tremor stems from The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, published by Citrini Research and co-authored by Shah and James van Geelen. The report is explicit that it is a scenario, not a prediction. Even so, its framing of an AI-driven economic shock unsettled investors.

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It outlines ideas such as “Ghost GDP”, where productivity and corporate profits rise while wage growth weakens, and an “Intelligence Displacement Spiral”, in which automation trims payrolls, dents consumer demand and reinforces further cost-cutting. It questions whether traditional Software-as-a-Service models can defend their margins if AI agents begin replicating core functions in-house.

For India, the implications were stark. The report argues that the country’s IT services model, built on cost arbitrage, could face structural strain if AI coding agents reduce marginal costs to near the price of electricity. It envisages contract cancellations for large firms and pressure on the rupee should the services surplus narrow.

The market reaction was anything but academic. Software, payments and delivery stocks saw sharp sell-offs. In the US, shares of IBM recorded their steepest single-day fall in 25 years following the report’s release. A software-focused exchange-traded fund slid nearly 5% in one session.

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In India, IT stocks came under pressure as traders weighed the report’s warnings on contract cancellations and pricing power.