Sridhar Vembu, who recently became Zoho's Chief Scientist from its CEO, said the "Big Capex (BC) era" in AI is gone. "Now we're in the After DeepSeek (AD) era," he stated. "It was [earlier] assumed that Big Tech will own AI, and everyone else will pay tribute...DeepSeek has made state-of-the-art reasoning widely available to all," he said.