The AI talent war is coming for Big Tech’s Asia executives
Rest of World Ananya Bhattacharya
OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring Asia leaders from Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta. They need execs who can sell AI, handle regulators, and win trust in places like India and Singapore.
Based on reporting by Rest of World, Ananya Bhattacharya — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
The AI talent fight has moved well beyond model builders. In Asia, OpenAI and Anthropic are pulling senior people out of Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta to staff up in places like India and Singapore, where the real job is turning AI into sales, partnerships and policy access.
One of the clearest signs came last month, when Meta’s India and Southeast Asia vice president, Sandhya Devanathan, left after a decade to join OpenAI as vice president for Southeast Asia and Australia. Rest of World says that was at least the ninth hire by a U.S. AI giant from an American big tech company in Asia over the past year. That is a pretty specific shopping spree.
The pattern makes sense. In the U.S., frontier AI labs are fighting over researchers and engineers. In Asia, the prize is different: executives who can work with regulators, manage business development, and convince companies and governments that the product is worth trusting. Deepali Vyas of ZRG Partners described the role as closer to a mini-CEO than a standard regional sales lead.
The people getting picked usually have something rare: they know how Silicon Valley works, and they know how local markets actually behave. Sanchit Vir Gogia of Greyhound Research called that “dual institutional literacy.” It is a useful phrase, and a polite way of saying that generic American-tech experience is not enough when you are trying to make AI stick in India.
The source also points to a simple shortage. Neeti Sharma of TeamLease Digital said there are only so many executives with the right mix of country-level P&L experience, regulator dealing, and enterprise trust-building. That is why the same names keep coming up, and why AI companies are now raiding the Asia benches of Big Tech instead of just chasing famous researchers in the Valley.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when hype runs into actual markets: the people who can sell, negotiate, and survive government scrutiny become more valuable than the folks with the slickest demos. The industry keeps talking about frontier models, but the boring middle — distribution, policy, trust — is where the money gets made. OpenAI and Anthropic understand that. Most of the rest are still pretending a good benchmark score opens doors in New Delhi.
Read more about this at: Rest of World
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