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:’ with MIT Press. She is currently a Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University and calls Amsterdam her home.
Professional Bio: Payal Arora is a Professor at Utrecht University and Founder of the Inclusive AI Lab, challenging one of the biggest blind spots in deep tech today: most innovation is being built for the few, while the next billion users are elsewhere. A digital anthropologist, she uncovers how majority of the world are already hacking, reshaping, and scaling technology in ways investors routinely overlook. Award winning author of “The Next Billion Users” (Harvard) and “From Pessimism to Promise” (MIT), she reframes risk as missed opportunity—and inclusion as common sense and the only sustainable pathway in building our tech futures. Forbes named her the ‘next billion champion’ and the ‘right kind of person to reform tech.’ Named among the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics (2025), and 2025 Women in AI Benelux Award winner on Diversifying AI, her insights have shaped global firms including Google, Adobe, and KPMG. Across 350+ talks in 85 countries, she pushes leaders to rethink where value is created—and who gets to define the future of AI. 250+ international media outlets have covered her work including the Financial Times, Fast Company, Wired, The Economist, and Tech Crunch. She has given 350+ keynotes and invited talks in 85 countries for events such as Copenhagen Tech Festival, re:publica, COP26, 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.
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Payal Arora 