OpenAI, Anthropic Poach Big Tech Leaders in Asia — SkimNews
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- OpenAI and Anthropic are poaching senior executives from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta across Asia — including India and Singapore — to build regional teams, sell products, and engage policymakers
- Sandhya Devanathan left Meta after a decade last month to join OpenAI as vice president for Southeast Asia and Australia, marking at least the ninth hire by a U.S. AI giant from an American big tech firm in Asia in the past year
- Unlike in the U.S., where frontier AI labs compete for top researchers and engineers, the most sought-after executives in Asia are those who can translate AI capabilities into market adoption, according to ZRG Partners' Deepali Vyas
- OpenAI's Asia-Pacific director Kiran Mani joined from India's JioStar in March after 13 years at Google, while first India hire Pragya Mishra came from Truecaller, having previously been WhatsApp's first India hire
- The pool of executives who've run country-level P&L for global tech companies in India is tiny — "maybe a few hundred people across all of Big Tech India," per applied AI researcher and Fortune 500 adviser Arjun Jaggi
- OpenAI and Anthropic declined interview requests about their Asia-Pacific hiring strategy and recent hires
- Leadership scarcity is "more pronounced because experience cannot be created overnight," with every major tech company competing for the same small group of proven executives, per TeamLease Digital CEO Neeti Sharma
Why it matters: With only a few hundred executives across all of Big Tech India capable of running country-level operations for global tech firms, AI labs and incumbents are now competing for the same tiny leadership bench — a scarcity that shifts leverage to proven executives and forces both AI newcomers and established players to fight over the same proven operators as the contest moves from building models to capturing markets.
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