AI Founder, Executive, & Advisor | I help execs transform their insights into business growth

Supriya Gupta is a seasoned executive and AI strategy advisor, with over 20 years of experience building & scaling zero-to-one products & organizations to serve millions. Now, she helps founders and executives use AI to build better products and organizations. 

Most recently as a VP/GM at Credit Karma (acquired by Intuit for $7.1B), leading the AI transformation of every touchpoint, I brought a user-centric perspective to solving day-to-day financial needs. I built the AI-native Financial Assistant used by millions each month, as well as AI-powered personalization, simplifying consumers’ access to financial monitoring & products. Previously, I also drove AI innovations at Facebook, BrightRoll (acquired by Yahoo for $640M), and IBM, consistently turning cutting-edge technology into business impact.

Through scaling AI products and building cross-functional teams to 300+ employees, what I’ve observed is that building AI technology is only the beginning. Equally critical is applying AI to solve real problems for real people, at scale. These have been my guiding principles to building impactful products:
- Innovation needs guardrails, not barriers
- User adoption trumps technical sophistication
- Elegant AI whispers - so products simply work better 
- Feedback is an essential gift: User needs can evolve as quick as AI does
- While trust is always hard to build and easy to break, it is even more critical to get this right with AI

If you’re building impactful AI-driven products, scaling your business, or exploring the transformative potential of AI, I can help you with:
- Strategy: Build innovative AI solutions that solve real problems for your customers & your employees 
- Execution: Accelerate time to market by optimizing people, process, and technology
- Experiences: Implement AI intuitively to delight end users with outsized value

Featured Speaker: ScaleUp:AI Conference, Grace Hopper Celebration
Education: Wharton MBA, UIUC Engineering

Learn more about me here: https://www.supriya.ai/

Last week, I had the privilege of teaching a cohort of global execs on the realities of AI transformation, diving deep into the messy, human side of building AI-first organizations. Thank you to Duke University and Axialent for inviting me to guest lecture as part of their series: Building AI-Driven Cultures. 

As always, I came to share … lots of market data, case studies, and stories from the field … and left with just as many new insights. What stood out most:

- The “easy” wins aren’t always easy. Nearly every leader in the room had underestimated the hidden costs of building in-house: maintenance, compliance, and the relentless treadmill of updates and retraining. The sticker price is never the whole story.

- Adoption is personal. For many, the hardest part isn’t tech. It’s identity. “If AI does my job, what’s left for me?” That tension surfaced again and again. Taste, judgment, and lived experience are still the last mile. AI can get you to 80%, but the magic is in that final 20% only humans bring. 
👉 With that lens in mind, can we instead ask, what would you do if you could be 5x more productive? 

- ROI is a moving target. Most teams start with efficiency, i.e. can we save time? But the real breakthroughs come when you redeploy that time into higher-value work, or unlock net new value that wasn’t possible with humans alone. 
👉 The best pilots we saw did all three.

- Culture is the lever. You can have the best tools, but if people are still asking for permission to try things, you’re not there yet. The organizations making real progress are the ones that reward experimentation, celebrate learnings (even from failure), and put their AI champions on stage. 
👉 Leaders: you must explicitly incentivize this. 

- There’s no silver bullet to execution. Every organization’s path is different depending on the use case and their own capabilities, e.g. build, buy, or partner. The trick is knowing what’s truly core, especially when it comes to data, where you can (and should) lean on vendors, and how to create the conditions for real learning and compounding value.

Grateful for the honest conversations, the tough questions, and the reminder that building an AI-first org is as much about people as it is about tech. These are the messy, unglamorous details that actually move the needle.

If you’re leading transformation, what’s your “last mile” challenge?  

— 
I’m Supriya Gupta founder of The Agent C, a personal executive content platform. We help insight-rich, time-poor leaders publish authentic daily content in under an hour a week.

Follow for more insights on the future of work in the age of AI.

Supriya Gupta

Product leader with strong technical and business background. Extensive experience at start ups, growth stage companies, and global corporations. Passionate about solving complex problems & creating great products as well as building new organizations & leading teams.

Education: 
UPenn Wharton MBA, Management
Univ. of IL Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering, concentration of Wireless Communications 
Univ. of IL BS in Electrical Engineering, concentration of Electromagnetism

Specialties: Product Management, Product Strategy, Go to Market Strategy, People Management, Cross Functional Project Management, Entrepreneurship, Digital Media

Still feeling the afterglow from last week’s holiday dinner, with a room full of powerhouse women, each with a story that could fill a book (and, in at least two cases, actually did).

Days later, the conversations are still replaying in my head. What started as a night about executive presence quickly became something much more personal, and honestly, much more powerful. Our dinner started with a simple prompt: “What are you hoping to gain from this evening?”, and we found ourselves sharing the stories that shaped us. A career break that turned into a launching pad for a whole new life chapter, a product superpower uncovered from an undiagnosed "ailment", a prompt that got us all thinking about our own unfair advantages in life and how to make the most of them. 

We wrapped with a white elephant book exchange: each person brought a book that changed their career. The stories behind the gifts were as powerful as the books themselves: so many were about unlocking unobvious sources of power, especially as women. I scored Indra Nooyi's book - can't wait to read it over the holidays.

Thank you again to Deborah Liu Liu for opening her home, Kristin Chen for being a dream co-host, Sidebar & Ha Nguyen for the sponsorship and community, and every woman who showed up ready to share, listen, and support. 

Here’s to more rooms where presence means being fully, unapologetically yourself, and to the new stories we’ll write together in the year ahead. 🥂

Known valuable work >> well intentioned bueracracy. Progress >> motion. Water is also wet. 

Yet most all companies end up in the same place eventually - does it have to be this way? 🤔

Co-Founder/CEO @ Gamma

Slack’s founder noticed something weird as they grew. Every young PM they hired immediately wanted to hire someone. When he asked why:

"That person would do the product management, and I would do strategy."

That response reveals a physics problem eating your company.

Because these weren't bad people. They were smart and ambitious.

That's what made it dangerous.

Given their system, asking for headcount was the rational move.

Career progression correlates with team size. Comp bands jump when you become "manager of X." Your peers build empires and you get praised for scale.

So they asked for more people. Everyone does.

In budget meetings, no head of engineering or sales ever says "Good news - we can do this with fewer people."

The slider only moves one way.

C. Northcote Parkinson saw this in the 20th century.

He studied the British Navy. Between 1914 and 1928, they cut ships by two-thirds and sailors by a third.

Yet, strangely, administrators grew 78%.

Ships down. Sailors down. Bureaucrats up. What?

But swap "admiralty officials" for "product managers" and you get modern tech.

Parkinson found two mechanisms:

1. Officials want subordinates, not rivals.
2. Officials create work for each other.

Stewart called what comes next "fake work" - activities that look like work but don't move any customer outcome.

"Let's explore this space."
"We should have someone thinking about X."
"Can you own the strategy for Y?"

That fog is where Parkinson's Law thrives.

Every new hire makes it worse. Double the team, quadruple the meetings. Most of what they'll talk about is themselves.

The antidote is "known valuable work."

"Known" means a smart outsider could understand why it matters.

"Valuable" means a customer would be noticeably worse off without it.

The funniest thing Parkinson said:

"No one has been idle. All have done their best."

Everyone in the bloated Admiralty was busy.

They just weren't doing anything that mattered.

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