Prashant Ivaturi

We are almost halfway through the year. If you are like most people, you started January with a few intentions. "Read more. Move more. Be more present. Learn something new. " Or perhaps you do not believe in resolutions at all and simply carried forward the quiet ambitions from the year before. Either way, the middle of the year offers something valuable. A chance to pause. Not to judge. To recalibrate. Six months is long enough to have built something meaningful. And still early enough to change course. Where I am As I reflected on my own year so far, I realized I had three priorities going in. The first was reading more . Over the last few years, books had quietly slipped down my list. Between work, travel, and family, they were always the thing I would get to later. This year I made progress. Two books stayed with me in particular. One was a gift from a close friend, and the other, I picked up in the library. The first was " The Mountain Is You " by Brianna Wi...

World Music Day,  Father's Day, and International Yoga Day - t hree celebrations, one common denominator. This weekend brings together three seemingly unrelated celebrations - World Music Day, Father's Day, and International Yoga Day. At first glance, they have little in common. One celebrates art. One celebrates relationships. One celebrates well-being. Yet, the more I reflect on it, the more I realize they all revolve around the same currency:  attention. Not the attention we seek from the world, but the attention we choose to give. The anatomy of presence As a father of two kids, I've learned that the moments my children remember most aren't the grand gestures.  They are the quieter moments - a shared joke, a walk to the grocery store, a conversation on a lazy afternoon that lasted longer than planned or even a meal together. Children have an uncanny ability to know when you're physically present but mentally somewhere else. The gift they value most is rarely...

(And what I learned by being afraid of it first.) Few years ago, I used to want to become an "AI Product Manager" . That was the next cool title to have.  I would see the title on LinkedIn, in job descriptions, in conference speaker bios, and feel a quiet pull toward it. It sounded like the future. It sounded like the place where the most interesting problems were being solved.  There was just one problem. I was afraid of it. There I said it.  Not professionally afraid. I mean genuinely uncertain. I did not have a data science background. I could not read a model architecture diagram with any real confidence. When conversations turned to training pipelines, feature stores, or precision-recall tradeoffs, I would nod at the right moments and resolve to read more later. I wanted to be an AI PM. I just did not feel like one yet. What I did not know then was that the journey to getting there would teach me something that had very little to do with AI at all. What I knew before...

Seven years. One brother-in-law. Several start lines. And one finish line in Mumbai that changed everything. I did not decide to become a marathoner.  I was not a natural runner nor did I run regularly. I was active, and went on hikes, and occasionally played sports. But in 2017 as I was about to return to India from the USA, my brother-in-law urged me to join a jolly bunch of runners near our home, with a lot of conviction, and very little patience for my excuses. His pitch was simple: run a 5K. Just that. He shared with me a training plan and took me along on runs. Nothing more. So I did.  And something strange happened at the finish line of that first 5K. Not in my legs - in my head. A wall came down. Some quiet internal voice that had always said you are not a runner went silent for the first time. That silence was addictive. The 5K becomes a 10K. The 10K becomes a habit. With the 5K barrier gone, my brother-in-law showed up again. Same conviction. Same plan. This t...

  From Scout Mindset to AI Mindset: The Leadership Skill Nobody Is Teaching A few years ago, I spoke to a group of my colleagues about something called the Scout Mindset (It is from a book by Julia Galef. Read it if you haven't).  The idea is simple. A soldier defends a position. A scout seeks the truth. The soldier asks: "How do I prove I'm right?" The scout asks: "What am I missing?" At the time, I thought it was a useful framework for leadership. Today, I believe it may be one of the most important skills for the AI era. Because AI is changing the rules faster than most of us are comfortable with. For decades, expertise was built on certainty. We studied a field. We accumulated experience. We became the person who knew the answer. That model worked when change was measured in years. But AI is compressing learning cycles. The answer we were certain about last year may already be outdated. The workflow we mastered may be automated. The technology we dismi...

The anxiety is real. Across industries and geographies, people are worried about their jobs. Companies are projecting productivity gains, reducing headcount, and pointing to AI as part of the reason. The uncertainty that follows is not imaginary - it is showing up in careers, households, and conversations everywhere. Over the past year, I have watched AI complete tasks that once took hours. Creating presentations, summarizing research, drafting requirements, analyzing data, generating code, and producing content - all in minutes. The capability jump is undeniable. At the same time, I have also seen organizations struggle to realize the value they expected. Not because the technology was lacking, but because the hard part was never just the technology. It was aligning people, processes, incentives, governance, and decision - making around it. This is why the current conversation about jobs deserves a more nuanced view. Because history keeps telling us something we tend to forget in the ...