Prabha Jha went to MIT xPRO to deepen her understanding of artificial intelligence. The experience grew into something broader: conversations with fellow executives inspired her to help create a book about how AI affects people, industries, and society.
Learning AI through people as well as coursework
Jha, who works at Verizon, has a bachelor’s degree in information technology from the University of Calcutta and earned an MBA while working. As AI began changing business operations, she felt curiosity alongside the uncertainty many leaders experience. She wanted to take part in the changes taking shape.
She chose MIT xPRO’s AI for Senior Executives program in part because it included in-person learning. The chance to meet peers mattered to her alongside the program’s material. She describes the course as a significant investment of time and money, but says it strengthened her AI skills, gave her confidence to develop multiple AI solutions for Verizon, and built professional relationships.
Those relationships became a major part of her education. Jha estimates that “30 percent of what I was learning was from the program, material, and professor [while] 70 percent was my peers and the interactions.” Meeting people with different backgrounds and geography helped make an unfamiliar and sometimes unsettling subject easier to discuss from multiple perspectives.
A disruption became another chance to connect
Jha’s path through the program changed when she spent two weeks in the hospital with a severe infection, two months before she was due to finish. She could not graduate with her original cohort. With help from MIT staff, she joined the next cohort instead, which brought five more days on campus with 100 new peers.
The change gave her additional time to learn alongside others, and the material had been refreshed in the six months since her first cohort. What had seemed like a setback became a useful extension of the experience. Jha valued the new conversations and the opportunity to make connections in person.
One gathering helped shift how she thought about the subject. At a “salon gathering” at the home of Manolis Kellis, a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, students shared personal stories about AI. One peer spoke about exploring AI solutions as part of her effort to find a cure for her mother’s Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
That account made AI feel personal to Jha: a technology people could connect to deeply human concerns. The conversation stayed with her and prompted a question beyond the classroom: how could these experiences be recorded and shared?
Turning classroom conversations into a book
Jha suggested creating a book with her peers. One year later, she and 20 other leaders released The AI Anthology, a collection of essays about AI’s influence across industries and society. Its starting point was the group’s varied experiences, including stories that reached beyond business efficiency and revenue growth.
The collaboration reflects one lesson Jha hopes readers will take from the book: leaders may need to rethink what they count as success. Revenue, cost reductions, and time savings translated into dollars remain familiar corporate measures. But Jha argues that considering AI’s effects also means asking what it can contribute to quality of life and to how people use their time.
That shift in perspective does not remove the practical questions businesses face. It widens them. Alongside asking whether AI can reduce costs or speed up work, leaders can consider how it might help people, support their responsibilities, or create value that a financial measure alone may not capture.
Putting AI to work with responsibility
Jha sees businesses as needing to learn about and embrace AI. She also believes it can help create a better world. At Verizon, she connects that belief to the company’s responsibility as a provider of reliable service and critical infrastructure for groups such as first responders and children.
In her experience, AI can help accelerate progress and increase impact, including in work that might previously have required a larger team. For Jha, that possibility makes the technology an opportunity to adapt, grow, and invest in herself, even as leaders work through the fears and difficult questions that come with it.
Her next initiative focuses on small and medium-sized businesses navigating AI implementation. She aims to help them identify the tools they need, understand how AI fits their operations, and decide how to measure success. The goal is to let businesses focus on their strengths and how they can create value.
Jha’s story links that practical work to the peer conversations behind The AI Anthology. Understanding AI, in this telling, involves both deciding how to use it and listening to the different reasons people want to use it in the first place.