Tech and humanities entrepreneur offers perspectives on emerging markets, media, and education
If there is a common path to becoming a college professor, Rishi Jaitly hasn’t traveled it.
With experience leading public policy and partnerships for both Google and YouTube in India and South Asia, he later was Twitter’s first employee in mainland Asia, helping the company’s global expansion as vice president. While he serves as an advisor for OpenAI in his spare time, Jaitly’s primary charge is as the founder and leader of Virginia Tech’s Institute for Leadership in Technology, which offers the nation's first executive humanities leadership certificate to mid-career tech professionals looking to use the humanities to broaden their leadership skills.
With his deep experience driving new product proliferation and adoption across the world, Jaitly is uniquely positioned to speak about technology in emerging markets, entrepreneurship, the impact of technology on the media ecosystem, and the future of tech in education.
Jaitly discussed some of these topics heading into the launch of the second year of his class at Virginia Tech.
So much of the attention on emerging tech goes to the hype around the potential of future products on the cutting edge. You’ve worked a lot with technology as it has infiltrated emerging markets. What can we learn about tech’s ability to both scale and sustain from its successes and failures in those markets?
Much of the narrative in and around global technology centers on the West and how innovation emanates from and lands in industrialized nations. During my experiences at Google, Twitter, and OpenAI, I’ve observed that emerging markets are dynamic too. Indeed, many present themselves with inspiring — and competitive — entrepreneurial ecosystems of their own. So for global companies, “rest of world” countries offer not just markets to be tapped but also lessons to be learned about what it takes to grow a sincerely global organization, product, and culture.
We’ve seen the media ecosystem be completely reformed several times over by emerging technologies in the past few decades. What role do you believe tech currently plays, and how do you believe it will continue to change and impact the media?
In many ways, media in human societies has always been raucous and fragmented. Indeed, we may look back on the 20th century as an anomalous period in which culture and broadcast media experiences were shared at population scale. The recent wave of fragmentation in media, driven by technology, is likely here to stay and grow. So it is even more incumbent on leaders across sectors to ensure citizens are digital-media literate.
How do you see the future of technology and education driving and working with one another?
The barrier to entry around learning has never been lower — from YouTube and Khan Academy to Coursera and ChatGPT, it’s now possible for learners of all stripes and types to grow their capacities across topics at an astonishing scale and speed. In this era, it will be essential for incumbent educational institutions to ensure they are anchoring in value propositions that not only harness — but transcend — what technology makes possible.
What factors make Virginia Tech not just a place where the future of technology can be created, but a particularly welcoming home for fostering growth and innovation?
As a leading research and engineering institution, Virginia Tech has, for 150 years, been anchored in tomorrow. But what I find distinctive about the university is its ability to lean on timeless values just as much as it leans into the future; indeed, I describe Virginia Tech as both “fuzzy” and “techie.” With 150 years as a senior military college; our motto, Ut Prosim (That I May Serve); and campuses in close proximity to the national capital, we offer a distinctively public-interest orientation to our growth and innovation spirit. It’s why, in my mind, it’s no coincidence that the Institute for Leadership in Technology was founded here at Virginia Tech.
What other questions about technology and higher education are you thinking about these days?
One of the more interesting questions animating me of late is: What’s the superpower of the future? In our AI-ascendant age, what skills and sensibilities are likely to break through in the coming years and decades? What will constitute leadership — and stewardship? My hunch is that, in an era in which computing and commercial know-how have never been more accessible, part of the answer will center on the humanities, and the role serious liberal arts experiences play in heightening one’s capacity to introspect, imagine, storytell — and story listen.
