When Sandhya Devanathan joined Meta in 2016, the technology industry was still largely talking about the promise of digital transformation. A decade later, she is leaving one of the world’s biggest consumer technology companies to join OpenAI, the company at the centre of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. The transition is more than another high-profile executive move. It reflects a change in what technology companies need from their senior leaders. The next battle in AI will not be won only by building better models. It will also be about building markets, partnerships, regulatory relationships and ecosystems around them.
Devanathan seems particularly suited to that task because she has spent much of her career doing precisely that. An engineering graduate with an MBA from Delhi University’s Faculty of Management Studies, she spent more than 15 years in financial services before moving to Meta. Her career at Citi and Standard Chartered gave her experience in retail banking, payments and digital businesses before she made the unusual transition to consumer technology. People who have worked with her describe her as an operator who combines analytical rigour with an ability to build relationships across businesses and markets.
Building businesses across Asia
Her Meta report card is built around regional expansion rather than a single marquee product. After joining the company in Singapore, Devanathan worked on building its businesses in Singapore and Vietnam and was involved in e-commerce initiatives across Southeast Asia. In 2020, she took charge of gaming for Asia-Pacific, giving her experience of running a business that had to deal simultaneously with consumers, creators, developers and commercial partners. She subsequently moved to India to head Meta’s operations and later took on responsibility for Southeast Asia as well.
India gave her perhaps the most important part of that experience. Under her leadership, Meta continued to deepen its engagement with businesses, creators and developers, while WhatsApp’s role in business messaging became an increasingly important part of the company’s India strategy.
The experience will be relevant at OpenAI, which is entering markets that are considerably more complicated than simply selling an AI chatbot. Devanathan’s newly created role covers Southeast Asia and Australia, including consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement and operations. The breadth of the mandate is revealing. OpenAI does not just need executives who understand AI. It needs people who can translate the technology into adoption across businesses and consumers while managing governments and regulators that are still working out how AI should be governed.
Her experience in banking may prove useful here as well. Financial services taught her to operate in heavily regulated environments where technology, consumer behaviour and government policy are closely intertwined. Meta added another layer — the ability to build platforms and ecosystems at enormous scale. OpenAI now brings the two together, with AI regulation evolving even as businesses race to deploy the technology.
OpenAI steps up its regional push
The timing of the move is also significant for OpenAI’s India strategy. The company has opened its first New Delhi office, appointed Prabhjeet Singh as managing director for India and stepped up its engagement with enterprises, developers and policymakers. While Devanathan will not directly run India, her experience leading Meta’s India and Southeast Asia operations gives her a familiarity with the region.
There is also a broader shift underway among frontier AI companies. India and Southeast Asia were initially important to AI companies because of their large user bases, developer talent and rapidly expanding digital economies. They are now becoming markets that require dedicated investment, local partnerships and senior executives on the ground. The appointment of country and regional leaders at companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic suggests that the AI race is entering its next phase: not just who can build the best model, but who can build the strongest ecosystem around it.
For Devanathan, therefore, the challenge at OpenAI will be very different from running Meta’s India business, but the underlying job will be familiar. She will have to persuade businesses to adopt a new technology, work with governments as rules evolve and build partnerships that make the platform relevant to local