Dr. Ayesha Khanna wants AI to earn its keep

Before Dr. Ayesha Khanna was explaining artificial intelligence to executives, she was running a magazine with a suspiciously extensive staff. Ego, her online publication for the South Asian diaspora in New York, carried her work under at least five pseudonyms. Fashion, films, books, Urdu poetry in translation: she supplied the cultural life and much of the apparent payroll. A founder's resourcefulness had found an unusually literary outlet.

Her day job involved building systems on Wall Street. The contrast is delightful, though perhaps the two occupations were less distant than they appear. Both required someone to assemble complicated material into something another person could use. Finance got the software. Her readers got the reviews. The pseudonyms, one imagines, spared everyone a rather repetitive contributors page.

Khanna was born in Lahore, to a father in the civil service and a mother who taught English literature. Political philosophy and public affairs were household subjects. Technology entered her intellectual life later. At Harvard, where she studied economics, encounters with Eastern European students helped her see mathematics as something beautiful and open to exploration. Columbia followed, with a master's in operations research; eventually she earned a doctorate at the London School of Economics.

The humanities remained part of the furniture. Her career would move through banking, cities, education and AI, but the person translating poetry did not disappear when the software engineer arrived. That combination helps explain the questions she still asks: who gets to use a new technology, who understands it, and whose life becomes easier once it is installed?

Wall Street supplies the practical examination

For more than a decade, Khanna worked on large trading, risk management and data analytics systems on Wall Street. These are rather unforgiving places to acquire a technological education. A compelling idea has to survive data, infrastructure and other people's decisions. The work gave her experience of software operating inside institutions, where a system's usefulness depends on much more than its elegance.

Her early advisory work also crossed organisational boundaries. Financial institutions including Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, UBS and Deutsche Bank appeared among her clients. The recurring business was connecting strategy with information technology: how an organisation changes what it does, rather than merely purchasing something new. Long before today's chat interfaces made AI a daily conversation, she was working on the machinery behind decisions.

Books supplied another route through the subject. Straight Through Processing appeared in 2008. In 2012, she and her husband, geopolitical strategist Parag Khanna, co-authored Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization. The titles make an entertaining pair on a shelf: the first sounds ready for an operations meeting; the second is prepared to rearrange civilisation before lunch.

Their range matters. Khanna's professional story stretches from the mechanics of financial systems to the social consequences of technological change. She co-founded the Hybrid Reality Institute to examine those consequences. It is a useful preparation for the present AI debate, which frequently begins with a product demonstration and ends, several minutes later, with a prediction about the fate of work.

Singapore becomes the working address

In 2012, the Khannas moved from London to Singapore with their two children. They later became Singapore citizens. The move combined family considerations, including education, with a professional interest in applying their experience in Asia. For someone studying smart cities, Singapore offered a place where the subject could be encountered on the way to an appointment.

Khanna's account of the country puts citizens close to the centre. She has described digital services that help small business owners find support and programmes that help older residents become comfortable with technology. The important unit, in that view, is the person trying to get something done. A city can acquire an impressive collection of systems and still leave its residents wrestling with ordinary tasks.

She also became involved in education policy, serving on Singapore's Ministry of Education steering committee in 2014. Her public service has included boards such as the Infocomm Media Development Authority, Ngee Ann Polytechnic and Sport Singapore. The combination brings her into contact with the institutions that shape both technical capacity and people's opportunities to develop it.

Her Singapore story therefore has two tracks: building businesses and helping people prepare for technological change. Those tracks meet repeatedly. An enterprise needs people capable of using its systems; a country needs people capable of participating in its economy. Neither problem is solved simply by announcing that the future has arrived. The future is famously punctual at conferences and rather less dependable at the office.

“I believe that the true purpose of AI is to amplify human potential.”

Ayesha Khanna

The demo must survive Monday morning

Khanna co-founded Addo AI in 2017. Its work has included AI and data projects for organisations such as Singapore transport operator SMRT, telecommunications company Singtel, Japan's Sompo and Pakistan's Habib Bank. These are businesses with existing operations and customers, which makes implementing AI a practical undertaking with consequences beyond the presentation screen.

Today, she describes Addo as a specialist AI and data engineering firm with 300 engineers. Its listed partners include SAP, Mastercard and KPMG. The company is building workflows involving AI agents, with governance included in the engineering. That last detail deserves attention. Giving software more responsibility creates a corresponding need to decide how it is supervised and where accountability sits.

Her language about the job is deliberately operational. She asks which decision a system improves, who uses it and what happens when it produces an error. The appeal of the approach is its stubborn proximity to work. An organisation has customers, existing technology, competing priorities and people who must understand a change before they can make it useful.

Communication has already required concrete changes inside Addo. Looking back on its early period, Khanna recalled replacing project managers with people who communicated better and arranging AI and data engineering workshops for stakeholders. It is a revealing managerial anecdote. The obstacle demanded a change in people and working relationships. Even in an AI company, a useful explanation could be as necessary as a clever model.

A place at the robotics table

One incident Khanna has recalled gives the education work a particularly sharp edge. At a hackathon, she watched a girl helping assemble parts for a robot. The girl's mother moved her away and put her son forward instead. Khanna remembered the girl's ability, and the opportunity being quietly withdrawn. No elaborate theory of exclusion was required; the scene had supplied its own illustration.

In 2014, she founded 21st Century Girls, known as 21C Girls. The Singapore charity provided free coding, AI and robotics education. Its work included Code in the Community and Empower: AI for Girls, with partners and supporters including Google and Ngee Ann Polytechnic. Her public professional record places her leadership of the charity from March 2014 to June 2024.

The charity has since concluded its operations. Its purpose continues through her work with Amplify, the media and education company she founded to help people apply AI in their professional lives. Scholarships for women in mid-career extend the question beyond the schoolroom. Access to technical learning matters at the point when somebody is already working, with experience that deserves to remain useful.

Khanna's argument about participation also reaches into the technology itself. She has spoken about how teams with different backgrounds can help identify bias in AI systems. Broadening participation changes who gets to ask questions before a system is put into service. The girl at the robotics table belongs in that discussion, along with the women already inside organisations whose practical knowledge can shape what gets built.

The conversation travels

Board work gives Khanna another view of adoption. She serves as an independent director of Johnson Controls, whose business includes building technology. Earlier appointments include AVEVA and L'Oréal's scientific advisory board. Such roles place technology alongside investment, oversight and organisational responsibility. A board has to consider how decisions will hold up after the excitement of an announcement has passed.

She also hosts AI Across Borders. The guest list ranges from Google scientist Jeff Dean to entrepreneur Nour Al Hassan and Singapore artist Niceaunties. Finance, language, hardware and art share space in the programme. For a host whose interests once supported several magazine identities, the format seems a sensible way to let the subjects meet under one name.

The geographic range is part of the appeal. Her podcast includes stories from Asia, Europe and elsewhere, allowing the discussion to follow people building and using technology in different settings. An Arabic language technology company and a Singapore artist have different questions to answer. Putting them within the same series makes the AI conversation less dependent on a single industry's favourite preoccupations.

Her public presence now spans talks, interviews, a newsletter and education. Recognition has followed, including Forbes's coverage of Southeast Asian women entrepreneurs in 2018 and Reuters Events' enterprise AI recognition in 2026. The more interesting continuity is her interest in explaining the subject. The magazine editor, the adviser and the podcast host all need another person to understand what they mean.

Experience still has a job to do

In an April 2026 podcast conversation with Money Majlis, Khanna discussed AI adoption, governance and how professionals can work with intelligent assistants. Her emphasis on domain knowledge gives the debate some welcome texture. A person who understands customers, banking or operations brings something consequential to a system's design and supervision. Experience does not become irrelevant because a new tool can produce an answer quickly.

Amplify carries that interest into professional learning. The aim is to help people acquire practical fluency while retaining the judgment their work requires. There is a particular generosity in taking the experienced learner seriously. A changing technical vocabulary can make capable people feel like beginners; education can give them a way to ask useful questions again.

Khanna is also working on Built To Operate: Designing Companies That Win With AI, which her current biography lists as forthcoming from Wiley in 2027. The proposed subject brings her back to the organisation: how a company is designed to use the capabilities it acquires. Her route to that question has included trading systems, public institutions, classrooms and conversations with people making things.

That is the thread running through an unusually varied working life. Technology keeps changing the equipment. People still need the confidence to approach it, the skill to question it and a reason to make room for it. Khanna has spent much of her career working on those conditions. Somewhere between the trading desk, the magazine and the robotics table, she found a subject large enough to keep all her interests employed.