Peeking Around The Corner At SXSW With Microsoft’s AI Leader, Aparna Chennapragada

By Laurel Donnellan and Darryl Brown Jr. (Originally published at Forbes.com) 

At this year’s SXSW Innovation Conference in Austin, Texas, a city that already holds a chapter of her own story,  I sat down with Aparna Chennapragada, the Chief Product Officer for AI Experiences at Microsoft. She leads a global team of roughly 500 people across Oslo, Tel Aviv, New York, and beyond, building AI products she believes will fundamentally change how we work.  She was a presenter this year at a session titled “How to Build AI-First Products: Models, Memory and Mastery,” alongside Kartik Hosanagar, a professor at Wharton. 

She is one of the clearest thinkers I have encountered in years of covering leaders for Forbes. And as someone whose own father spent 40 years at IBM and whose lane at Forbes is Compassionate Leadership, I found in her a rare figure: a technologist who keeps the human being squarely at the center of everything she builds.

"My jam is living one year in the future and bringing it back to the present." 

The Only Non-Doctor in the Room

Chennapragada grew up in a family of physicians in India. Dinner table conversation, she recalls, included "long Latin names of diseases I had no idea about." Her father was a doctor by profession but a sculptor and artist by choice, which is a distinction that would quietly shape everything she would later build.

She attended an engineering school in India where there were three girls and roughly 400 boys. Rather than letting it deter her, she used it as a catalyst. She came to the University of Texas at Austin to study computer science and then left midway through her studies for a PhD. 

"It was the internet boom," she explains. "My professor was leaving to start a startup. And of course, my mother was a bit disappointed; she joked, 'At least I thought you'd be a fake doctor.'"

The decision to leave the PhD program was the first chapter of what later became her defining philosophy: your relationship with a domain is yours. It isn’t dictated by family expectation, cultural pressure, or the number of people in the room who look like you. "Even if you are among the few," she says, "find your passion and hold on to it for dear life."

From Austin, she moved to Boston to work at an MIT startup building the first wave of the commercial internet. Then came more than a decade at Google, where she led the team that created Google Lens, a product that lets you point your phone at the world and understand it. Then Microsoft, where she now leads AI product development.

The Failure That Hooked Her

Before Google Lens, Chennapragada built something that didn’t work. Or rather, something that worked brilliantly and arrived ten years too early."It was basically a ChatGPT or a Google Assistant," she says, "before its time. It could tell you if your flight was delayed, if there was traffic, or suggest an article you should read. The CEO loved it. We won an Innovation of the Year award."

And then it quietly died. The technology wasn’t ready. The market wasn’t ready. By most conventional metrics, it was a failure. Chennapragada describes it as a turning point. "That failure made me lean even more into looking around the corner. I got hooked on: what are the key ingredients for innovation that need to come together? And one of them is timing." She mentioned how she loves the fact that there is no “right answer” to the question of when or which products should be released. She then talked about the risks of such an approach. Sometimes you’re not one year ahead,  you're five. Sometimes you're exactly right. 

Google Lens landed at precisely the moment the world had started photographing everything: meals, storefronts, even strangers’ shoes. "People wanted to know: where can I buy that for cheap?" One woman in India, who was unable to read English, used the app to translate store signs she had been too embarrassed to ask about. "I didn’t even think of that as a use case when we built it," Chennapragada says. "But that interaction with users, that’s everything."  

AI: The Antidote to the 9-9-6 Culture

"I want AI that helps us think better, not think for us." She goes on to talk about the 996 culture, 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week, that has become shorthand for Silicon Valley ambition. "The whole point," she says with characteristic directness, "is that AI can work 24/7 so that you don't have to."

At Microsoft, her team is now releasing Copilot Cowork, a desktop AI agent that can open your browser, locate your receipts, and file your expense reports without you touching a single tab. "The goal is for AI to take the mundane stuff out," she says. "Let us do the meaningful things."

Playing with Clay: White Space as Strategy

Her father was a doctor and a sculptor. He taught her that creativity needs room to breathe, what she calls "white space," and she has built that philosophy directly into how her team operates and develops their creativity. 

Once a year, she oversees what she calls FHL, Fix, Hack, Learn, a full week in which all meetings are cleared and everyone is handed tools, time, and a maker’s headspace. "You can’t squeeze creativity into a 30-minute meeting," she says. If there’s something a member of her team would like to learn about, we always go to the team member who specializes in that area and learn from them; it’s a very bottom-up approach. Last year, more than 40 demos emerged from it. She spent the Monday after like, she quotes, "a kid in a candy store." Three were greenlit for production.

Running a globally distributed team also requires what she calls "thinking async", a cultural norm she has baked into her team's operating model with the very AI products they are building. Meeting agents join calls, summarize the most critical information, and follow up on action items. A personal AI assistant can tell the difference in importance between a message from the CEO and a note sent to all 500 people on her team.

This process allows for something she calls ROMO, the Relief of Not Missing Out, by using AI agents to summarize meetings across time zones so that leaders in Oslo and India, like her team, can stay informed without sacrificing sleep or family time.

Stand-Up Comedy and the Joy of Human Imperfection

Her teenage son encourages her to pursue her hobby of stand-up comedy. While taking him to open mic nights on Mondays, she decided to go in and watch the performances one day. Her son turned to her and told her she was funnier than the comedian who had preceded him onstage. She proceeded to write some bits and even went on to do a few shows.  

"In stand-up, sometimes you bomb," she says. "And that’s fine. You just pick up where you left off." The parallel to product development is not lost on her. “You're not in a vacuum. It's interactive, just like building something for customers. If it's not useful to them, it doesn't matter how cool the demo is.”

Why This Is Women's Moment in Tech

Before we parted, she offered a reflection that stuck with me. "This is a good moment for women," she says. "The skills that get called feminine, steering, managing, coaching, giving feedback, those are exactly the skills you need to manage a team developing AI agents. I tell my women mentees: this is your moment to shine."

Half of her eight-person leadership team is women. The ratio, she noted with a quiet smile, is a lot better than the engineering school back in India.

Two Lessons for the Road

As we wrapped the interview, I asked her for two more lessons to share with my Forbes readers:

For life: Curiosity. "Find the thing that makes you tick and hold on to it for dear life, even when it's not the most glamorous, the most visible, the most powerful thing. Curiosity is my fuel. It's my joy."

For leadership:  “It is so easy right now to feel isolated and fractured. All of these tools, all of this technology, have to be applied to a productive purpose. Think about the human at the center. Customers. Employees. Neighbors. Community.”She pauses. "The tools may evolve, but the purpose stays the same: making life, and work, more human."

For a leader building the next generation of intelligent systems, that may be the wisest intelligence of all.