PAYAL ARORA

THE DIGITAL ANTHROPOLOGIST
Author, Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures, co-founder of the Inclusive AI Lab and FemLab

“If you say the world is getting better, you may be in danger of being called naive, insensitive, or out of touch. On the other hand […] if you say that ‘catastrophe is imminent,’ you may expect a MacArthur ‘genius grant’ or even the Nobel Peace Prize.”

THE PROVOCATION
Western academia is drowning in pessimism about AI.

Payal Arora spent two decades studying the billion tech users in the Global South and found something that unsettles the dominant narrative:

The communities most exposed to AI's harms are often its most hopeful, most creative, most agentic users.

She calls the Western doom spiral "pessimism paralysis" and has built a career dismantling it, one data point at a time.

HER WORK
Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures, Utrecht University

Co-founder, Inclusive AI Lab, a Global South-driven debiasing initiative, and FemLab, a feminist future of work initiative

Author of The Next Billion Users (Harvard Press) and From Pessimism to Promise (MIT Press)

Consultant to Google, UNESCO, UNHCR, Adobe, Spotify and more

Named by Forbes: "The right kind of person to reform tech"

While others theorise about AI's dangers from conference rooms in the West, Arora is in the field: LISTENING: to women in Bangladesh who found confidence selling saris on Facebook Live

to young people in rural Rajasthan building creative economies from nothing

to Afghan women for whom the internet is one of the only spaces left.

Her work shows:
The Global South isn't behind - it’s often a decade ahead

Pessimism is a geographical luxury.

Inclusive AI is a fundamental human right.

She reclaims techno-optimism not for the tech bros, but for the billion people the industry forgot to design for.

FURTHER READING

Books:
The Next Billion Users (Harvard University Press) — reframing how we understand digital life beyond the Western lens

From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech (MIT Press, 2024) — longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards, Silver Medal winner at the 2025 Axiom Business Book Awards