When the right people are in the room
There is a particular kind of energy that fills a room when the right people find each other. I felt it for the first time in Bangalore in 2025, standing at the edge of a rooftop venue watching a room of founders, executives and investors — many of whom had never met — lean into conversations they didn’t want to end. This motivated me to organize a gathering as part of the Kellogg Tech Venture in India (TVI) elective, and something in that moment told me: this was more than a one-time event.
We had over 500 registrations, a waitlist of 300 and a room of more than 170 leaders from across the top business schools gathering at Evergreen House in Koramangala for the second annual AI Leadership Forum.
TVI: Learning that goes beyond the classroom
TVI is one of the most distinctive Executive MBA (EMBA) electives. A cohort of executives travel to India for 10 immersive days visiting startups, meeting founders and engaging with business and cultural ecosystems. This is not a tour rather it is an immersive cultural experience, helping dismantle assumptions.
For me, returning to India as an executive was layered with meaning. I was born in the Jammu and Kashmir region, formerly one of the largest princely states of British India, and built my career in the United States. TVI helped me see my home country through a completely new lens: as a student, as a business strategist and as someone trying to understand where the next wave of global innovation would come from.
At the center of that experience was Professor Mohanbir Sawhney. Professor Sawhney is, in many ways, the gravitational force of TVI. His reputation as one of the world’s leading voices on innovation, digital transformation and AI is what draws executives from across industries to this elective. What surprised me is how fully present he is outside the classroom. He doesn’t just lecture. He reviews event plans, gives his time freely during sessions and spends hours in conversation with attendees and local business leaders alike. He is not just teaching about connection. He models it.
A catalyst for what comes next
The idea for the first event was simple: create a space for genuine connection among leading business school alumni and seasoned executives already in Bangalore for TVI. What happened exceeded every expectation. 65 people showed up with conversations spilling past midnight. Careers were discussed and business collaborations were seeded. One attendee described it as the most valuable professional evening they’d had in years not because of any formal agenda, but because of who was in the room and the shared context that brought them there.
The success of that first gathering led directly to a question I didn’t expect to be asked: would I make it annual? The answer felt obvious. In 2026, I co-hosted the second edition with Phalgun Chidanand ’20 MBA and adjunct faculty member Vamsi Krishna Wuppalapati. None of this would have come together without Colette Feldges, director of the Kellogg EMBA Program, who has attended TVI for over a decade and brings an irreplaceable institutional heart to everything she touches. Feldges has watched India’s ecosystem evolve up close, year after year, and her enthusiasm for what this community can become is genuine and infectious.
Together, we expanded the forum’s scope significantly, bringing in a keynote from Professor Sawhney, a founder and VC panel featuring voices from across India’s AI landscape including leaders from Upekkha, the Gates Foundation and Gradient Advisors. What began as a student initiative had become an annual institution. It now operates entirely beyond the boundaries of any academic program and is driven by the community it created.
“Events like this forum are a direct expression of what the EMBA experience makes possible: alumni-led, community-sustained and globally connected.”
Seeing AI through a different lens
The keynote that anchored the evening came from Professor Sawhney, and its central question was deceptively simple: in a world where AI tools are now everywhere and nearly universal, what actually makes a professional irreplaceable?
His answer landed hard in a room full of accomplished people. The tool, he argued, is no longer the differentiator. With three-quarters of workers already using AI daily and two-thirds of hiring leaders now requiring AI proficiency, the baseline has shifted. What remains scarce, and what India’s next generation of talent must urgently build, is discernment. It’s not about information processing, but the capacity to frame problems, navigate ambiguity and take responsibility when things go wrong.
He drew a sharp distinction between AI elevating novices and AI hollowing out experts. A newcomer gains structure and speed from AI. An experienced professional who stops exercising their own judgment loses the very instincts that made them valuable. Expertise, as Professor Sawhney put it, is a muscle. Stop using it and it wastes away — regardless of title, tenure or degrees.
For India specifically, the stakes are enormous. The IT talent model that built a multi-billion-dollar industry (large volumes of junior engineers doing routine coding and support billed by the hour) is exactly where AI displaces labor first. The question facing India’s ecosystem isn’t a matter of adapting but how quickly it can shift from volume to value.
Sitting in that room, surrounded by founders and operators who are living this transformation daily, the message hit differently than it would in a classroom. This wasn’t theory. It was a live case study, playing out in real time, in a country where the stakes are highest.
That shift in perspective is, in many ways, the whole point of TVI — and of this forum. India is not a case study in AI adoption. It is a case study in AI creativity, in building under constraints, in solving problems that the rest of the world hasn’t yet acknowledged as problems. Sitting in that room with founders and operators who are living this reality every day does something to your thinking. It expands it.
What I found — and what I’m building
If TVI taught me anything about myself, it is this: I have found my passion in connecting people. Not networking in the transactional sense, but the deeper work of identifying who belongs in a room together, creating the conditions for genuine exchange and watching what becomes possible when the right people meet at the right moment. That is a form of leadership I did not have language for before Kellogg.
Events like this forum are a direct expression of what the EMBA experience makes possible: alumni-led, community-sustained and globally connected. The opportunities that multiplied in that Bangalore room are not incidental to the Kellogg experience — they are the Kellogg experience. It extends well beyond graduation, carried forward by those it has shaped.
An invitation
If you are an EMBA student reading this: lean into the moments that TVI offers. Not just the company visits and the classroom sessions but the edges of the experience: the dinners, the hallway conversations, the late nights where something unexpected gets said. And if you find yourself wanting to build something from it, build it. The community will show up.
We are already planning for the third gathering taking place in 2027. What started on a Bangalore rooftop with 65 people is becoming something that will outlast any single cohort, any single elective, any single year. That is what community looks like when it’s built intentionally, and that is what Kellogg, at its best, makes possible.
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The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Kellogg School of Management or Northwestern University.