Ayesha Khanna

Ayesha Khanna is Founder and Director of the Hybrid Reality Institute, a research and advisory think tank focused on the intersection of technology trends, data intelligence and geopolitics.

A technology and innovation strategy expert, Ayesha has over ten years of experience advising clients on scenario analysis, new product development, market entry, digital branding and customer experience. Her clients have included Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, American International Group, and Deutsche Bank. Ayesha is frequently interviewed in the media and was recently featured by the New York Times. She is a regular speaker at industry, marketing, and academic conferences related to emerging technology trends and intelligent cities.

Ayesha is the author of Straight Through Processing (Reed Elsevier, 2007), and was series editor of The Complete Technology Guides published by Reed Elsevier. She has also written for diverse publications such as BusinessWeek, TIME, Newsweek, Forbes, Strategy+Business, and Foreign Policy. She also blogs on human technology co-evolution at Big Think.

Ayesha is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation, a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and one of the organizers of TEDxGotham. In 2010, she co-chaired the Innovation Advisory Board for the New York City congressional campaign of Reshma Saujani.

Ayesha has a BA (honors) in Economics from Harvard University, an MS in Operations Research from Columbia University and is writing her PhD in Information Systems and Innovation at the London School of Economics.

PERSONAL JOURNEY
My journey started in villages in Lahore doing micro-finance and jails in Rawalpindi advocating for women’s rights. But after college, I took a sharp turn and became deeply immersed in technology and innovation strategy on Wall Street for many years. A life-long city dweller, I expanded my work from finance to entire cities, seeing the potential of how city-wide technology platforms could give citizens better government services and access to education, healthcare and information. But the path is riddled with the challenges familiar to me from my days in development economics: the need to protect civil rights, privacy, justice and equitable access. As cities become the center of all human activity in the early 21st century and countries rush to add urban intelligence to their crumbling infrastructures, one must tread surely but carefully towards technology-enabled �smart cities�.

WORKS
Straight Through Processing (Reed Elsevier, 2007), and was series editor of The Complete Technology Guides published by Reed Elsevier.

WEBSITE
ayeshakhanna.com