What does Prima Partners do?

Prima Partners is the advisory practice of Prasanna Walimbe. It operates in three modes: AI & IT strategy advisory for CXOs, corporate AI enablement and delivery, and angel investment plus mentoring for early-stage founders in fintech, supply chain and applied AI.

Who is Prasanna Walimbe?

Prasanna Walimbe is a deep-tech operator with 20+ years of experience across AI evaluation and safety, AI/ML architecture, and financial research. He is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IIM Calcutta and a Certified Independent Director advising boards on cross-border AI investments, operations and compliance.

Which sectors does Prima Partners focus on?

Fintech and BFSI, supply chain, manufacturing, and applied AI across enterprise use cases. Assurance work is mapped to the EU AI Act, ISO 42001 and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.

How do I engage Prima Partners?

Email pw@prima-partners.com to start a conversation. Engagements run globally on a remote-first basis from Dubai.

What is AI governance consulting and what frameworks do you use?

AI governance consulting maps an organisation's AI systems, decisions and controls to a recognised risk framework — typically the EU AI Act, ISO 42001 and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework — and closes the gaps. Prima Partners runs checklist-based evaluations, model-risk reviews and board-level assurance for financial services, supply chain and applied-AI use cases.

Do you serve boards as an Independent Director?

Yes. Prasanna Walimbe is a Certified Independent Director and advises boards on AI strategy, cross-border investment and operations, and compliance obligations across jurisdictions — with a specialisation in fintech, supply chain and applied AI.

Do you offer corporate AI training and enablement?

Yes. Corporate AI enablement includes executive workshops, leadership AI literacy, hands-on programmes for delivery teams, and practical playbooks — AI realism vs hype, ML deployment, GTM for AI products, and the founder's mindset inside corporates.

Do you mentor or invest in startups?

Prima Partners writes angel cheques and provides hands-on mentoring to pre-seed and seed founders in fintech, supply chain and applied AI. Support covers technical architecture, GTM, commercial modelling and board readiness.

Which AI model should an enterprise standardise on?

The Stanford 2026 AI Index shows the performance gap between top models has collapsed, so standardising is now a switching-cost and security decision rather than a capability one. Reframe long-running evaluations around integration risk, data-egress controls and exit paths instead of another round of benchmarks.

Should companies slow junior hiring because of AI?

The Index's data on entry-level task exposure argues for redesigning the junior role, not deleting it. Cutting the pipeline solves an immediate headcount problem but removes the bench that becomes your senior engineers and managers by 2028.

Where do AI agents actually belong on the enterprise roadmap?

The Index's agent-benchmark results locate a narrow band of workflows where agentic systems clear the reliability bar today — mostly bounded, tool-using tasks with human review. Broader deployments across open-ended enterprise workflows are a 2027 conversation and should be scoped as such.

Can enterprises trust reported AI productivity gains?

The Index places self-reported productivity uplift directly beside realised-output figures and the two diverge sharply. Boards should measure cycle time, defect rate and unit economics on specific workflows rather than treat satisfaction survey scores as evidence of P&L impact.

Who should sign off on enterprise AI governance?

The Index's transparency scores show foundation-model vendors are disclosing less each year, so control cannot be inherited from the vendor stack. Governance sign-off belongs with an internal owner running a checklist mapped to the EU AI Act, ISO 42001 and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.

The Dead Battery in the Kill Switch

2026-08-06 · Responsible AI · 10 min read

A switch you never test is just a battery quietly going flat.

The analysis

"There is a kill switch" is the most reassuring line in any AI governance pack, and the least examined. The RBI's draft model-risk guidance makes it an explicit requirement, and the newer UAE and neighbouring regimes arrive at much the same place. The phrase quietly smuggles in four assumptions: that the switch works, that someone is authorised and willing to pull it in time, that a human can then take over, and that there is a safe state to fall back to.

The record of automated failure is a record of each assumption breaking at the worst moment. Knight Capital in 2012 could in principle be stopped, but stopping it required humans to first diagnose which of eight software components was misbehaving; roughly forty-five minutes and around USD 440 million later the firm was gone. The 2010 Flash Crash produced circuit breakers, which halt a machine but cannot repair the market state the machine created — a halt buys time, it is not itself a safe state. The 737 MAX had two trained pilots in the loop and a documented override procedure, and crews in later simulator recreations had under a minute to identify a system some had never been told existed.

For anyone running automated decisions the transferable lessons are unglamorous. Define the safe state before you define the switch: what the business runs on for the hours or days after the model is off, who staffs it, and at what throughput. Test the fallback under load rather than on paper, because an unexercised manual process degrades exactly like an unexercised battery. Give the switch an owner with unambiguous authority to use it without escalation, and rehearse the decision, since most delay is organisational rather than technical. And instrument the trigger, because a control that depends on a human noticing an anomaly in a dashboard is only as fast as the slowest observer.

The board question is therefore not whether a kill switch exists. It is when it was last pulled in anger, what happened to the business while it was off, and who signed off on the result.

Full essay on Substack: The Dead Battery in the Kill Switch.

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Discuss this with Prasanna: pw@prima-partners.com · book a 30-minute call.