AI Labs Poach Big Tech's Asia Leaders — SkimNews
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- OpenAI and Anthropic are recruiting senior executives from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta to staff teams in India and Singapore focused on selling products and engaging policymakers, per Rest of World's reporting.
- Sandhya Devanathan, Meta's India and Southeast Asia VP, left after a decade to join OpenAI as VP for Southeast Asia and Australia — at least the ninth hire by a U.S. AI lab from a U.S. tech giant in Asia over the past year.
- The qualified talent pool is tiny: Arjun Jaggi told Rest of World that only "a few hundred people across all of Big Tech India" have run country-level P&L, negotiated with Indian regulators, and built enterprise trust at scale.
- OpenAI's Asia-Pacific director Kiran Mani joined in March from JioStar after 13 years at Google; Pragya Mishra, OpenAI's first India hire, came from Truecaller and was previously WhatsApp's first hire in India.
- OpenAI and Anthropic both declined Rest of World's requests for comment on their Asia-Pacific hiring strategies or their recent hires.
- The competition has pivoted from model-building to market capture: Deepali Vyas of ZRG Partners said AI labs now seek executives who can "operate as mini-CEOs" handling partnerships, policy, and business development in new regions.
Why it matters: With only a few hundred India executives qualified to run country-level P&L and engage regulators, and at least nine already migrating from Big Tech to AI labs in the past year, incumbents face a thinning succession pipeline at the exact moment AI is reshaping enterprise sales and policy relationships across the region — a gap that, per the source, will only slowly close as leaders emerge from GCCs and startups.
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