I started in technology more than 25 years ago. Since then I’ve built, sold, supported, hosted, automated, and scaled digital businesses across India, Bahrain, and the US. Today I’m focused on helping businesses: • Implement AI practically • Automate repetitive work • Build reliable business systems • Improve customer experience • Scale through technology Building: • AutoChat • Hostao • COKIQ Here I share lessons from real projects, real failures, and real implementations. Follow if you’re interested in AI, Automation, SaaS, Hosting, and Digital Transformation.

AI Chatbot for Customer Service: A GCC Pre-Launch Checklist reji.​pro/blog/ai-chatbot-customer-service-checklist-gcc

How to Choose an SEO Agency in Bahrain: 12 Questions to Ask reji.​pro/blog/how-to-choose-seo-agency-bahrain

AI Workflow Ownership Map: A Checklist for Founders (2026) reji.​pro/blog/ai-workflow-ownership-map-checklist-founders

From Oct 21, Indian telcos have to sell voice + SMS only packs in monthly sizes, not just the 84-day and yearly ones. Airtel went first this weekend: ₹185 for 28 days, unlimited calls, 300 SMS, no data. Good for customers. But if your business sends OTPs or payment reminders only on WhatsApp, look at who this hits. Most dual-SIM users will be fine. WhatsApp follows the number, not the SIM, so data on the second SIM keeps it working. The ones you lose are single-SIM, low-usage customers: parents, older shop owners, people who recharge mainly to keep the number alive. Often the exact people a reminder is for. And it won't show up anywhere obvious. The message sits on one grey tick, Meta only bills delivered messages, so the invoice looks fine. You see it a month later as a missed renewal. What I'd set up this week: - OTP: show "send by SMS" after 30 seconds instead of WhatsApp-only - Reminders: if there's no delivered status in 3 to 4 hours, send the SMS version - Keep your DLT templates active, even if you moved everything to WhatsApp - Track what share of messages stay on "sent" each month. If it climbs after Oct 21, now you know why

🎙️ New Malayalam podcast alert! WEEKLY AI BRIEFING — the week's AI news in simple Malayalam, what it means for YOUR business, every Sunday morning. First episode: Oct 25. Follow now! #WeeklyAIBriefing

🎙️ New Malayalam podcast alert! WEEKLY AI BRIEFING — the week's AI news in simple Malayalam, what it means for YOUR business, every Sunday morning. First episode: Oct 25. Follow now! #WeeklyAIBriefing

Google Ads starts enforcing its updated business name rule tomorrow, Oct 19. The news is the loosening: the name on your ad can now differ from your domain, if it's your recognised brand, Google can verify your link to the domain owner, and you sell directly on that site. The line I'd read twice is still on the policy page today. Once you've done Advertiser Verification, the business name must match your domain or the name you verified with. For most companies in the Gulf and India, that's the legal name from the trade licence or GST certificate you uploaded. Think "Al Noor Technical Services Co. L.L.C." The field allows 25 characters. Google's way out for a name that's too long or doesn't match is Brand Verification. That needs an active registered trademark. Plenty of small businesses have a licence, a domain and a logo, and never filed one. What I'd check this week: - The business name on your live ads. Generic or location names like "Dubai AC Repair" aren't allowed, and neither is "Sale at..." - Whether it matches your domain or your verified name. - If your trading brand fits neither, start the trademark filing now. Registration takes months. Resellers don't get the new exception. If you only sell Brand X, "Brand X" alone can't be your ad name.

Most UAE e-invoicing posts on my feed this week are providers saying "appoint us before Oct 30". Fair enough. That deadline is real for companies with AED 50m+ revenue, and go-live is Jan 1. But I'd choose an e-invoicing provider the way I'd choose hosting, because that's what it is: infrastructure your billing now depends on. The clause most people skip: if your system or your provider's system fails, you have to notify the FTA within 2 business days. Late notice is AED 1,000 a day, and it applies to the receiving side too, not just the issuer. So before signing, I'd ask: - Are you on the MoF accredited list today, with a number? Since Oct 1, pre-approval alone doesn't count. - When you have an outage, how fast do you tell me, and in writing? - Do you draft the FTA notice, or do I? - While you're down, are my invoices queued and retried, or do I resend them? - Can I see your incident history from the pilot months? A sales demo won't show you any of this. Your first outage will.

Google Cloud Storage in us-central1 failed uploads and writes for 12.5 hours on Oct 8. Next morning it came back for almost 6 more. Per Google's report, the repeat was caused by an incomplete rollback of an upload feature. Two things I'd take from it if you run a business site or a small SaaS. First, in an outage like this your homepage still loads. What breaks is the write side: file uploads, form attachments, invoice PDFs, the nightly backup landing in a bucket. A monitor that only checks the homepage stays green all day. In hosting, the outages that cost clients real money were rarely the ones where the site was down. Those get noticed in minutes. It was the ones where everything looked fine. So add one check that writes something. Submit a test form, upload a small file, and alert if it doesn't arrive. After any provider incident, confirm last night's backup actually completed, not just that the job started. Second, a rollback is a change too. If your plan for a bad deploy is "we'll roll back", test that path the way you test the deploy. A homepage check watches the shop window. Someone should be watching the till.

.com goes up 7% on Nov 1. Wholesale moves from $10.26 to $10.97, so about 71 cents a year more before your registrar's markup. Renew early if you want. It's not what makes businesses lose domains. Look at the other domain story this month. Verisign is set to delete around 22,000 firstname.lastname.name domains, with ICANN's approval. One owner has used his for email for almost 25 years and had paid renewals through 2040. Paying didn't protect him, because the level above his name was never his. The small-business version of this, which I've watched for years in hosting: The domain sits in the web designer's account, not yours. The renewal reminders go to an email on that same domain. So once it lapses, every "last chance" notice lands in a mailbox that no longer works. The card on auto-renew expired last year and nobody noticed. Ten minutes this week. Log in to your registrar yourself. Put the contact email on a different domain, or a mailbox you'll still read in five years. Check the card. Make sure your business email runs on a domain registered in your company's name. 71 cents you can absorb. Losing the address your bank and customers write to, you can't.

WordPress.org now checks every plugin update with several AI models plus Jetpack Scan during a cooldown, and blocks risky releases automatically. In July it caught a backdoored update to a ~20,000-install plugin before it went out. Good. But that gate protects the update pipe. In years of cleaning hacked sites on shared hosting, the bad update was rarely the problem. The update that never arrived was. This week is a neat example. Bricksforge, a paid add-on for Bricks sold outside the directory: unauthenticated PHP upload, attacked since Oct 7. The fix is 3.1.8.10. If the licence lapsed, that update probably never reached you. Ninja Forms and WPC Product Bundles: both on wordpress.org, both have fixes out, and both are being hit with the same payload that plants a hidden admin account. The sites at risk are the ones still on old versions. Ghostscript: not a plugin at all. A crafted PDF gave Wordfence code execution on a test WordPress site. Only your host's package update fixes that. So the 10-minute job: open Plugins and mark everything that doesn't update from wordpress.org, plus anything with auto-updates off. Next to each, write who watches its changelog and whether the licence is still active. Every "nobody" is your real risk list. And ask your host whether their Ghostscript build has the fix for CVE-2026-39919. Don't go by gs --version alone, distros backport fixes.

Saw a founder here this week trying to build an agent that reads leads from Excel and sends each one a personalised WhatsApp message. He was stuck on the API. The API is the easy part. What breaks a sheet like that: The opt-in. Meta's rule is looser than people think. It doesn't have to mention WhatsApp. But the person must have agreed to hear from your business, by name. A bought or scraped list fails that, and the blocks will sink your quality rating. The first message. Outside an open chat it has to be an approved template. Free text only works after they reply. The daily limit. A new business portfolio can message 250 unique numbers in 24 hours outside open chats. Verify the business and it goes to 2,000. So a 5,000-row sheet on a new account takes 20 days, not 20 minutes. The silent failures. WhatsApp caps how many marketing messages one person gets from all businesses. Some rows will fail with error 131049. Wait 24 hours before retrying. Retry loops make it worse. So before writing any sending code, add four columns to the sheet: where they opted in, status, error code, retry after. That sheet is the real system. The API call is the small part.

Let's Encrypt starts issuing 64-day certificates in staging today. Production follows on Feb 10, 2027, and 45 days comes in 2028. Most advice I'm seeing says grep your cron jobs for 60, 80 and 83. Fair. But from years of running hosting, the renewal is rarely what fails. The copy is. Certbot renews the cert on the web server. Nobody updates the copy someone pasted into the load balancer, the CDN, the mail server, or that old panel still serving a client's webhook. At 64 days, renewing at two-thirds of the lifetime, that manual step comes around about every 6 weeks. Paid certs are not safe either. Anything issued after March 15 maxes out at 200 days, so the first of those started expiring around Oct 1. If you installed one by hand in March or April, check it this week. What I'd do now: Make a list of every place a cert is installed, not just every domain. Have one renewal hook push to all of them and reload the services. Monitor expiry from outside on the real hostname and port. Mail on 465 and 993 is the one people forget. Count copies, not domains.

WhatsApp replies are no longer free. Since Oct 1, Meta bills every service message a business sends inside the 24-hour window, per delivered message. Same rate as utility messages in your market, and no volume tiers. Most bots I see were built when replies cost nothing, and it shows. What I'd fix this week: 1. Stop splitting one answer into 4 bubbles. Every delivered message is a charge. "Hi!" + "Thanks for reaching out" + the answer + "Anything else?" is now 4 charges for 1 answer. 2. Kill filler auto-replies. "We received your message" followed by the real reply costs double for zero value. 3. Use the 72-hour free entry window. Chats that start from a Click-to-WhatsApp ad or your Facebook Page button get free service messages for 72 hours. Route sales conversations through that door. 4. Do the math before switching to Meta's own Business Agent. It's billed per token, and Meta's own example puts a simple "what time do you open?" exchange at 16 to 20 US cents. 5. Track cost per resolved chat, not per message. That's the number that tells you if your bot is earning its keep. Free replies made lazy bot design cheap. That ended two weeks ago.

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After 25+ years in technology, my hardest lesson was learning to finish. Many ideas became company registrations, trademarks, brands and technical setups. My new rule: finish and stabilize before starting again. What is harder for you: starting or finishing?

നിങ്ങളുടെ business-ിലെ എല്ലാ enquiries-ഉം personal WhatsApp-ലാണോ? ഉടമ തിരക്കിലായാൽ reply വൈകുന്നു, follow-up നഷ്ടപ്പെടുന്നു, customer history ഇല്ലാതാകുന്നു. WhatsApp പ്രശ്നമല്ല. വ്യക്തമായ enquiry system ഇല്ലാത്തതാണ്. നിങ്ങളുടെ പ്രശ്നം: 1, 2, 3, അല്ലെങ്കിൽ 4? #MalayaliBusiness