What does it mean to you? A Note on my Time at the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub

It’s always inspiring to interact with senior individuals from India’s administrative landscape, but when RBI ED Shri P. Vasudevan visited RBIH, it was the first time I felt my presence there was not just coincidence, but relevance. During his visit, I asked the ED a fairly generic question about which emerging technologies he wished were implemented from the perspective of the current financial ecosystem. I half expected a diplomatic non-answer, but his answer was directly relevant to the past nine months of my work as a builder on voice AI, six of them as a Design Intern at RBIH.

Shri Vasudevan said multilingual voice interactions and accessibility, almost immediately. Voice interfaces with support for the many languages of India, he said, were crucial, and they should be used to bring people into the formal financial ecosystem that modern interfaces and design have mostly excluded them from. I'd spent most of my PS-I working on that exact problem, so hearing someone so senior validate my efforts felt good. Not just resume-good, but holy-shit-this-is-real good.

Anyway, that's not the whole internship, just the bit I tell people first since it really means a lot to me.

I have been a Design Intern at RBIH for over half a year now, and the actual work ended up broader than I expected going in. Most of the early months were about voice AI, trying to figure out where it works, how it could be implemented, what the right way to implement it was and how it could be shaped to be something useful. In simpler words: engineering, tinkering and building to prove the technology was useful and scalable.

However, when Sahil Kini, our CEO, commissioned Project Dhwani (multilingual AI to enable millions of Indians to interact with their financial information by speaking to it), our focus quickly shifted to how it could actually get underserved people into banking and non-banking services, not as a gimmick feature but as a real access point.

This might seem like a very minor shift to many of you, but it was a completely new lane of thought. The question was no longer: is this technology useful, and can we prove that at scale? It became: how do we bring the people of Bharat in, with this technology as a part of our intervention?

The real work now was the product thinking, understanding what we were actually building and why. It was about proving to our many stakeholders why Dhwani needed to exist (something we are still working on) and more importantly, why the Reserve Bank of India should be building it in the first place. Every stakeholder had a different version of that question, and the answer and sell to each of them had to be genuinely different, since building for India means something different to each of them.

I think I came out of that stretch clearer on the difference between learning to build a product and learning to orchestrate agents to make a demo. Those aren't the same skill and I used to conflate them, and one is clearly more valuable and in demand than the other, regardless of what many AI builders will tell you.

This also speaks volumes about what being a designer means in the industry. As we move towards smarter and faster agents that can push out polished MVD(emos) in minutes, we really need to hunker down and decide whether what we are building is even worth building in the first place. If it is, the designer’s job is less about pushing pixels or building screens and more about nitpicking what is being built, how it’s being built and what it means to the people it’s being built for.

Another task I spent time on was creating onboarding flows for Pratirupa (RBIH’s central platform), which is a less exciting way of saying I spent a lot of time inside a codebase that wasn't mine, and Excel sheets with words and numbers I needed to bother many people to figure out. I quickly realised the task was less about ideating screens and more about trying to understand the concepts and people well enough to design for them instead of just around them.

If I'm honest, this was the biggest shift for me. I had to stop believing design happens in its own lane. I used to think you do the design part, hand it off, someone else does their part, and it gets shipped, you make tons of money and your boss praises you for your crazy design skills. That's not how any of this actually works. If you want to be useful anywhere, you need to be building alongside the people actually shipping the thing, which mostly just means being willing to learn stuff that has nothing to do with design software. It's not easy, but it is more enjoyable and rewarding than staying with what you already know and can do.

TypeScript is the small, dumb example of this. I picked it up because the team I was onboarding banks with was building in it, and I got tired of nodding along in meetings without actually following what was happening, and being unable to contribute meaningfully to any of the code being shipped. I'm still not going to call myself anything more than a novice at front-end code, but I can sit in that conversation now instead of just observing it, and that changes what you're actually allowed to contribute.

This was reinforced further each time I had to sit in on meetings where the discussions were about governance, regulation, and institutional incentives rather than building products. Knowing concepts like chit funds, the regulations for account aggregators and how ULI consolidates data is a greater necessity to being given a seat at the table than even knowing TypeScript or creating a component in Figma. Being a well-rounded designer means sitting in a team and adding value by bringing in design thinking and skill, instead of being a consultant for visual and usability work. This would be my only advice for future BITS Design School students: Be ready for a world you have never lived in, and don't pretend otherwise. Upskill in directions that have nothing to do with your design tools. Learn enough to follow a conversation, not to lead one. That alone changes what you get to contribute, and what rooms you are part of.

I also want to touch upon what working for the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub means to me. I started at RBIH in February, and my time here has been one of my most rewarding and heartening periods of my life. Many of you would think this is because of the prestige of working in one of the premier administrative institutions of the country, but it’s not. It’s about being given the opportunity to put effort to build something for the people of India, and learning while doing so. Very few people from our population of over a billion can claim this, especially so early in their lives, and I am glad that I am one of the youngest to say that I did.

What's still bugging me is that none of it has actually reached anyone yet. Everything I’ve worked on this summer is yet to hit scale, and I’m hoping that happens in the next couple of months. Until then, I'm mostly just left thinking about how much of this summer was learning to not do things alone.

And on that note, I’d like to highlight the biggest reward of being a part of RBIH, which is the people. Firstly, I’d like to thank Sujan, without whom none of this would have ever been possible. His advice and his hatred of slop still shape how I approach not just my internship but also my life. Next, I’d like to thank Geetika, Srishti, Naresh and Vishes for their continuous support and willingness to participate in my jokes. I’d also like to extend my gratitude to Mahesh, Rajat, Rhea, Abhyuday, Revanth, Gillan, Yogesh and Rajatha for their guidance and assistance across all the projects I worked on. Finally, I’d like to thank Abhishek Sir and Sahil Sir, for their continued mentorship and belief in me, and for pushing me to think deeper about what building for India can look like.