The AmplifierAbout
About the author
Not a researcher in artificial intelligence. Someone who used these tools seriously for a few years, watched what they did to his own work and thinking, and wrote down what he was doing differently.
In brief
Nandan Gijare spent nineteen years in Indian IT — CMC Limited, Patni, IBM, and finally Cognizant, where he ran the IT infrastructure business for the Benelux region — before leaving corporate life to build businesses of his own. He now runs two education ventures from Pune: I2CAN Education, founded in 2016, which has trained more than 15,000 doctors in aesthetic medicine and has centres in Pune, Mumbai and Mathura; and aFactor, started in 2026, which rebuilds vocational training around professional roles rather than tool lists. When ChatGPT arrived he went deep on it, used it in his own work for three years, and noticed that most people around him were getting worse with these tools rather than better. The eight things he was doing differently became the Amplifier Framework, and then the book.
Why this book exists
The introduction to The Amplifier opens with a confession, and it is the most useful thing to read about its author:
I am not a researcher in artificial intelligence. I do not work at a frontier lab. I do not have a PhD in machine learning, I have not published in any of the journals that matter in the field, and the people who are genuinely shaping what AI becomes over the next decade are not, in any meaningful sense, my peers.The Amplifier, introduction
What follows that is the reason the book is worth reading anyway. He had been around technology his whole working life and had watched tools arrive, generate hype, and either pay out or fade. This one felt different. So he read the machine-learning books, did small projects to ground the reading, and then — the part that mattered — started using these tools inside a business he was responsible for.
Over those months two things happened at once. His own work got better: more considered, more defensible, with long-standing blind spots surfacing because he was in regular conversation with something that did not share them. And most of the people in his professional network, using the same tools, got worse. Faster but thinner. More output, all of it indistinguishable from what anyone else with the same tools would have produced. They were not using the tools as collaborators. They were using them as substitutes, and the parts they were handing over had quietly begun to include the parts that mattered.
One weekend he sat down and tried to write out what he was doing that they were not. There were eight steps. In the abstract they looked obvious — and almost everyone he was watching was skipping at least three of them on every piece of work. That page became the Amplifier Framework.
I figured this out in roughly three years. Most of those three years were spent doing things I did not need to do. I want to compress, for whoever reads this book, the three years it took me into something closer to three months.The Amplifier, introduction
The work
Founder and Managing Director of I2CAN Education, which he started in 2016 to raise the standard of aesthetic medicine training in India. More than 15,000 doctors have been trained through it since. It now runs from centres in Pune, Mumbai and Mathura, and in 2026 it received the Maharashtra Udyog Bhushan Puraskar for excellence in aesthetic medicine education and training.
Co-founder and Managing Director of aFactor, started in 2026. Its argument is that education has become efficient at delivering content and poor at producing capability: people finish programmes holding certificates and tool names, unable to own a real outcome. So aFactor is built around roles rather than technologies — seven digital marketing roles across ten competency domains, a diagnostic that measures judgment under ambiguity instead of tool familiarity, and a rule that graduation requires portfolio proof rather than attendance. The same instinct runs underneath what this book argues institutions should be measuring.
He also mentors students through the Global Mentorship Initiative on career planning, professional communication and finding a first job.
Before that
Nineteen years in information technology, from 1997 to 2016. He began at CMC Limited, where over seven years he moved from Senior Engineer to Senior Network Administrator, leading an eight-person team running EMEA network operations for a global medical equipment manufacturer. Earlier projects there included a VPN migration for a global financial services firm, one of the largest VoIP-enabled wide area networks built in India at the time for a state Public Works Department, and hardware support for the main trading platform of India's largest stock exchange.
Then Patni Computers, on the team that built the remote infrastructure management centre in Mumbai; IBM, as Technical Manager for IT security, running SOX and SAS 70 controls and audit management; and seven years at Cognizant, where he moved from delivery management for US life sciences clients to Program Manager and then Regional Lead for IT infrastructure services across the Benelux region, carrying regional profit and loss from the Netherlands. He finished that chapter of his career as Global Operations Director at ARS Traffic and Transport Technology India before leaving to build his own businesses.
He studied electronics at the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology in Nagpur, graduating in 1997 ninth in the university merit list.
Speaking, workshops and press
Nandan writes and speaks on adult education and on what AI is doing to how professionals learn. For a speaking or panel invitation, a workshop for a team or a college, a press enquiry, or anything else, the fastest route is email: nandan.gijare@gmail.com. He is also on LinkedIn, where most of the thinking that does not fit in a book gets published first.
Get in touch
Write to nandan.gijare@gmail.com, or use this form and it reaches the same inbox.