From Twitter to Harvard: rethinking leadership in the age of AI

When I led Twitter’s operations in India, leadership was often about rapid execution—navigating a landscape where information traveled at the speed of thought and influence could be won or lost in a hashtag war.  

But it wasn’t until I arrived at Harvard Kennedy School as a Mid-Career Master in Public Administration (MC/MPA) student that I began to rethink the meaning of leadership in the era of AI—where power no longer lies in communication, but in shaping the very algorithms that mediate reality itself. 

At HKS, the corridors buzz with global discourse on power, policy, and purpose. Meeting leaders like former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong MC/MPA Mason Fellow 1980, former Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, and former Massachusetts Governor and Professor Deval Patrick revealed a consistent thread: true leadership is not about dominance; it is about stewardship.  

Lee spoke eloquently about building trust in public institutions—not through force, but through quiet, consistent competence. Listening to him, I realized in an AI-mediated world where distrust and fragmentation can scale as easily as truth, leaders must earn legitimacy every day. 

Varadkar’s insight was equally striking: leadership must be personal. In choosing to step down voluntarily, he demonstrated that true power comes not from clinging to office, but from knowing when to leave on one’s own terms.  

As AI begins to automate decisions and impersonate authority figures, the human element—authenticity, humility, values—will become the irreplaceable differentiator for leaders. 

My conversations with business innovators reinforced these reflections. Speaking with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Co-Founder of Perplexity AI Aravind Srinivas, I was struck by a new dimension: leadership is now inseparable from design. Schmidt noted that when he helped scale Google, leadership meant making product and technology choices that could empower billions without unleashing chaos. Today, as AI increasingly writes its own rules, leaders must anticipate second-order consequences—not just for customers, but for society itself. If you are not consciously designing for societal resilience, you are inadvertently designing for societal collapse.

The opportunity to speak at forums like the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations (HPAIR) further clarified this for me. Sharing lessons from my journey with young leaders from around the world, I could sense a shift: leadership isn’t about being the voice in the room. It is about creating the room where diverse, even uncomfortable voices can shape collective intelligence.

My journey from Twitter to HKS has reshaped my view of power and responsibility in the AI era. Leadership has moved beyond command-and-control. It is about sense-and-respond. It is less about having all the answers and more about asking the right questions. It is not about predicting the future but preparing to serve a world that is unpredictable by design.

In the age of AI, the true leader will not be the one who shouts the loudest or codes the fastest. It will be the one who understands the architecture of trust, who listens fiercely, who designs for dignity, and who, above all, remembers power is not given to control others. It is given to lift others up.