ShareChat hires creative directors as AI cuts microdrama costs by 40%: CTO Nitin Jain

Microdramas, short vertical series with episodes that run for one to two minutes, have become one of the fastest-growing formats in India’s media and entertainment industry. According to a March 2026 report by venture capital firm Lumikai, India’s microdrama apps earned about $300 million in 2025 and recorded around 450 million downloads and 100 million monthly users. Lumikai expects the market to reach $4.5 billion by 2030.

As Kuku TV, Story TV, EloElo and ShareChat’s QuickTV compete for a share of this market, more platforms are using artificial intelligence (AI) to make shows at a fraction of the cost of a live-action shoot. This has raised questions about the future of writers, actors, editors and camera crews as AI takes on some of their work.

Nitin Jain, chief technology officer at ShareChat, told The Economic Times Digital that the industry is clearly moving towards AI-made microdramas. He believes the shift will bring more people into content creation because “entry barriers have reduced quite dramatically now that a creator no longer needs a large set, a star cast or much capital to make a drama”.


“A lot of creators are really going to come and venture into this. And we, as a part of this ecosystem, are focusing on building this tooling which we can actually make more broadly accessible to the content creator both inside and outside,” he added.

Jain said picking a story, writing the script, deciding where to place cliffhangers and getting the cultural context right still depend on people. “Whatever people were good at in the form of being able to bring in their creative thinking onto the table, that particular piece still remains there and becomes more important when you are using AI drama.”

How ShareChat is staffing its AI teams

Mohalla Tech, the parent company of ShareChat, Moj and QuickTV, has committed Rs 100 crore to AI microdramas this year. Asked whether the investment would lead to more hiring in creative or technical roles, Jain said, “I think the answer is both.”

The company is hiring creative directors to produce AI dramas at scale. Jain said its product engineers will build the tools those directors use by “taking best-in-class tools and packaging and making them accessible in a way that it becomes easier for these creative directors to really drive their end-to-end process”.

Most of the engineers who take on this work will come from within the company. “I think a lot of this is going to happen through the internal redeployment of our product and engineering,” Jain said.

While most of ShareChat’s users live in India’s tier-2 and tier-3 towns, many of its senior AI specialists work abroad. Jain said that when ShareChat began building its AI team, few people in India had built social media recommendation systems at that scale. “This is a very niche talent. And that’s why we actually ended up building this team initially largely in Europe.”

Over the past six to seven years, ShareChat has paired its international teams with Indian engineers. Today, the core AI team is roughly half Indian and half international, though more of its senior members still work outside India. “Whenever we go for any expansion today, we go for expansion without any geographic limit, wherever we find the talent,” he added.

Job cuts and limits on AI spending

In 2023, ShareChat laid off hundreds of employees in several rounds. Its revenue grew by about 40% in FY26, and its chief financial officer has said its current staff can handle three times the traffic it sees today.

Asked whether AI would lead to further job cuts, Jain said the company was using the extra capacity to tackle new problems and had no plans to cut jobs as a result of AI. “Instead of looking at this as an opportunity to reduce the outcome, we are looking at this as an opportunity to be able to solve more problems,” he said, adding that the product engineering team is not growing at the moment.

Jain said the role of an engineer has changed. “Many engineers do not write the code by hand themselves anymore now. What they do is they basically supervise the output or supervise the code which is being produced.”

Jain said engineers once spent 30-40% of their time writing code. They now use that time to plan features with product teams, check code more closely before it goes live and build AI agents for departments such as finance. Production incidents have “dramatically reduced” as a result, he said.

ShareChat relies largely on Anthropic’s tools for engineering work and switches to cheaper open models such as DeepSeek and Kimi when spending runs high, Jain said. The company gives every employee, including senior leaders, a fixed token budget.

“Like me being a CTO, I have a budget as well. And when I reach my budget, largely things are clogged,” Jain said.

Jain said it is “very hard” to measure AI’s direct impact on the company’s profit and loss. ShareChat tracks how many product experiments it can run and ship, he said, and does “not really read too much” into metrics such as how much code AI writes.

Is ShareChat competing with its creators?

ShareChat produces its own AI dramas and offers AI tools to creators, raising the question of whether it competes with the people who post on its platforms.

Jain rejected that idea. “We spot the gaps in our UGC [user-generated content] and try to basically cover up those gaps with the help of our own AI content,” he said.

The company says it shares performance data with creators, translates their content into other Indian languages and has expanded revenue sharing across Moj and ShareChat. “We are simultaneously expanding on both frontiers,” Jain said.

AI titles account for about 10% of QuickTV’s catalogue, and the company plans to raise that share to 30-40%. Asked whether authenticity could still help creators stand out as more AI titles appear, Jain said the answer lies in “clear AI markers on the content so people know that whatever content they are consuming is actually an AI content”. He added that ShareChat does not want to pass off AI content as live action.

The Rs 100-crore investment is “being funded by the company’s own internal cash flow”, Jain said. He added that the money comes from neither fresh debt nor the more than $1.2 billion the company has raised.

A traditional series costs Rs 15-20 lakh to make. Jain said AI has cut that cost by about 40% so far, against a target of 70%. He expects cheaper models and an in-house AI studio that picks the best model for each scene to help the company reach its target.

Viewers still drop out of AI dramas earlier, however. About half of those who start an AI title reach episode 20, the company’s benchmark, compared with about 60% of those who start a live-action show.

“Right now there is no reason for me to believe that we will not be able to close this gap instead to surpass this,” Jain said.