Professional Bio: Payal Arora is a Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University and co-founder of the Inclusive AI Lab. She is a leading digital anthropologist with two decades of user experiences in the Global South to help shape inclusive AI enabled designs and policies. Arora is the author of 100+ journal articles and award-winning books including “The Next Billion Users” with Harvard Press. Her new book with MIT Press “From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech” has been longlisted for the 2024 Porchlight Business Book Awards and won the Silver Medal by Axiom Business Book Awards 2025. Forbes named her the ‘next billion champion’ and the ‘right kind of person to reform tech.’ She has been listed in the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics 2025 and won the 2025 Women in AI Benelux Award for her work on Diversifying AI. 250+ international media outlets have covered her work including the Le Monde, Financial Times, Fast Company, Wired, Al Jazeera, The Economist, and Tech Crunch. She has consulted for the public and the private sector including UNHCR, Spotify, KPMG, Adobe, IDEO, Google, and GE and sits on several boards including for UN EGOV, and LIRNE-Asia. She has given 350+ keynotes and invited talks in 85 countries for events such as ACM Facct, Copenhagen Tech Festival, re:publica, COP26, World Economic Forum, and the Swedish Internet Foundation, and TEDx talks on the future of the internet and innovation. She is a Harvard University, Columbia University, and Rockefeller Bellagio Resident Fellow alumni, and currently lives in Amsterdam.
Not quite a professional bio: Payal Arora was born in India but was shipped off to San Francisco in her teens after causing much trouble with her Marxist artistic experiments in Kerala. Instead of starting her own Hare Krishna club in California, she waitressed and did street art, a perfect combination to remind her that poverty wasn’t that sexy after all. She sold her soul soon after and became an art dealer, selling expensive art with the right mix of cheap wine and cheese, but thankfully this was interrupted by her love affair with New York where she stumbled into research. In came her passion for global culture, technology and communication which she pursued by accumulating some good old ivy league degrees from Harvard and Columbia University so she could say stuff like ‘I went to school in Boston.’ Since then, she has been studying digital usage among the global majority and consulting for numerous private and public sector institutions like Adobe, Spotify, GE, KPMG, UNESCO, Google, and Dutch Brewers. To prove she isn’t just traveling all the time and eating great food, she has to publish articles and award winning books including ‘The Next Billion Users” book with Harvard Press and ‘From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South in Designing Inclusive Tech’ with MIT Press. She is currently a Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University and calls Amsterdam her home.
Payal Arora 