Back in 2017 I wrote a short post here about home automation in India. The gist was simple. It was still a rich techie’s hobby, the prices were silly, and the aam janta was watching from the sidelines. But I bet that competition would crack those prices open, and one day regular folks would benefit.
Then the blog went quiet for a few years. Life happened. I forgot I had even made that prediction.
So when I came back to TechBuzz recently and re-read that old post, I had a small moment. Because I was mostly right.
In 2017, a “smart home” in India meant spending lakhs. Imported hubs, a consultant, wiring you didn’t understand, an app that worked when it felt like it. It was a flex, not a convenience.
Walk into a middle-class home in 2026 and it’s a different story. A 999 rupee Wi-Fi bulb. An Alexa someone gifted during a Diwali sale. A smart plug that made the old geyser “smart.” A Mi camera on the front door. Nobody calls it “home automation” anymore. They just say “Alexa, lights off” and go to sleep.
That’s the part 2017-me got right. Prices fell, and the aam janta walked in, not through some grand system, but one cheap gadget at a time.
A few honest things I’ve noticed:
- The cheap stuff is genuinely good now. A 1,000 rupee bulb does 90% of what a 10,000 rupee setup did in 2017.
- But the ecosystems still don’t talk to each other nicely. Mi bulb, Alexa, Wipro switch, getting them to cooperate is still a weekend project.
- Privacy is the thing nobody asks about. There’s a mic in your living room now, always listening for “Hey Google.” In 2017 we worried about price. In 2026 maybe we should worry about that.
But here’s the bigger thing I didn’t see coming in 2017. And honestly, it’s much bigger than bulbs and plugs.
Back then, if you wanted to actually build something, automate something, wire two systems together, you had to be a coder. That capability belonged to guys with a technical background. The rest of us watched from the sidelines, the same way the aam janta watched home automation.
That has changed completely. Today I see ordinary people, forget the big companies, regular guys, writing code, connecting systems, automating their own work, building things that would have needed a whole team a few years back. A lot of the credit goes to the models. Thanks to Anthropic and OpenAI, to Claude and the rest, for putting this kind of power in normal hands. You describe what you want in plain language, and the thing gets built.
I have my own opinions on this, and I’m still forming them. AI has come in and quietly taken over. Not in a dramatic, sci-fi way. In the same quiet way the 999 rupee bulb took over the living room. You don’t notice the moment it happens. You just wake up one day and it’s already running half your life.
And it goes much further than home automation. Forget the home. Today the whole life is automated. Your shopping, your travel, your writing, your code, even your decisions, a good chunk of it runs on something automated in the background. The one thing that is still fully yours is your thought process. What you want. What you choose to build. What you point all of this at. That is the only input still required from you. Everything else is on tap.
Funny thing about blogging for 17 years. You get to argue with your younger self. 2017-me was excited that bulbs would get cheap. 2026-me is sitting here watching people build entire systems just by talking to a model, and slowly realising the real automation was never about the home at all. It was about who gets to create.
What about you. Did you go down the smart-home rabbit hole, or are you now the one automating your own work with AI? I’d genuinely like to know.