Sandhya Devanathan’s post went up on LinkedIn on the morning of Aug. 28: after more than a decade at Meta, she was resigning, taking a short pause, and preparing for the next stage of her career. By the end of the day, the destination was public. OpenAI said it had hired Devanathan, most recently Meta’s vice president for India and Southeast Asia, to run its business in Southeast Asia and Australia, a position the company created this month.
Devanathan starts in October and will work from Singapore. Her remit covers consumer growth, enterprise accounts, partnerships, operations and regulatory affairs across the region, OpenAI said. She reports to Kiran Mani, the company’s managing director for Asia-Pacific.
The appointment shows how the contest for artificial-intelligence talent has migrated to Asia, where the world’s largest AI companies are racing to build local teams ahead of a wave of regulation and enterprise spending. Devanathan joined Meta in 2016 and spent a decade climbing its Asia ranks, most recently overseeing one of the company’s most important emerging markets. Her exit strips Meta of a senior operator at a moment when the company is defending its social franchises against a new generation of AI rivals.
OpenAI has been hiring regional executives for months. Days before Devanathan’s announcement, the company named Prabhjeet Singh, a former Uber executive who ran the ride-hailing company’s India and South Asia business, as its head of India. The two appointments, made within the same week, give OpenAI senior leadership in two of Asia’s biggest growth markets.
Meta’s difficulties in India help explain the timing. The company faces regulatory pressure in the country over competition and privacy, and its push to seed an AI assistant across WhatsApp and Instagram has drawn questions from developers and policymakers. For an executive of Devanathan’s standing, joining OpenAI means trading the constraints of a mature social-media company for the growth curve of a lab whose valuation has made it one of the most valuable private companies in the world.
Analysts said the hire fits a broader pattern: AI companies are no longer competing only for researchers and engineers, but for operators who can manage governments, partnerships and enterprise sales across borders. Southeast Asia, home to more than 600 million people and some of the fastest-growing digital economies in the world, has become a priority for OpenAI as regulators from Singapore to Indonesia draft AI rules and as local banks and retailers weigh adopting the technology.
Devanathan’s background matches that brief. At Meta she spent years managing relations with governments and businesses across South and Southeast Asia, experience that carries over to a company whose regional growth depends on winning regulatory trust. People familiar with the matter said OpenAI’s leadership expects her to build teams on the ground rather than run the region from San Francisco.
Her move also shifts the competitive balance in the region. Meta has poured resources into its own AI assistant and reached billions of users through its messaging apps, but it trails OpenAI in enterprise adoption and in the race to sell AI tools to governments and large corporations. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all built substantial operations across Southeast Asia, and each has named AI a growth priority for the region.
The timing matters for another reason. Governments in the region are moving faster on AI rules than many companies expected. Singapore has published guidance on AI governance, Indonesia is drafting its own framework, and Thailand and Vietnam have announced national AI strategies. A regional head who can speak to regulators in multiple capitals, rather than a distant executive flying in for meetings, has become a necessary asset.
Devanathan’s decade at Meta included leadership roles spanning India and Southeast Asia, and her departure was noted inside Meta’s regional offices, where she was seen as a steady hand during a period of repeated restructuring. The company has not named a successor, according to a person familiar with the situation.
OpenAI’s plans in the region are broader than a single hire. The company has said it will open an office in Singapore and expand partnerships with local cloud providers, and it is recruiting for sales, policy and engineering roles across the region. Its bet is that Southeast Asia’s enterprise market, long dominated by incumbents, will adopt AI faster than past technology cycles, and that being early will matter more than being big.
For now, the two announcements this week capture the mood of the AI talent market in Asia. An established operator leaves a social-media giant for a fast-growing lab. A former ride-hailing executive joins the same week. The region’s AI war has moved beyond model benchmarks into the quieter contest for the people who run countries’ biggest technology businesses.
