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‘India needs to carve out its seat on the AI table’ – in conversation with Khushboo Agarwal, Karya >
by Madanmohan Rao [November 01, 2025]
In this series of interviews, innovation platform MXR.world (‘mixers across the world’) showcases design leaders speaking at the upcoming DesignUp 2025 conference in Bengaluru (https://25.designup.io). In our earlier interviews, we featured design strategist Arvind Lodaya and NetBramha founder Aashish Solanki.
Positioned at the intersection of design, technology, and business innovation, DesignUp celebrates the strategic and human impact of design in shaping products, services, and organisations. It explores how design culture and ecosystems drive innovation, inclusion, and transformation across industries.
In this interview, we feature Khushboo Agarwal, Lead - Product Design at Karya, where she designs for impact—blending optimism, art, and inquiry in equal parts. Her work is at the intersection of design, research, and storytelling to build tech-for-good platforms that serve rural Indian communities.
With a background in art and a deep curiosity about how the world works, Khushboo believes design is a space to explore, ask, and evolve—with users leading the way. Khushboo isspeaking at the ninth edition of DesignUp about designing for the next billion—where English is the error state, and comics, local languages, and printed prompts unlock true usability and trust.
In this exclusive interview, Khushboo talks about meaningful design, digital inclusion, ecosystem impacts, leadership mandates, design opportunities for youth, and how can India seize the ‘AI moment.’
Madan: How do you see design influencing systems beyond individual products — such as mobility, healthcare, or sustainability ecosystems?
Khushboo: Designers have the power of visualisation. We can make whole rooms of people dream about a hopeful future. And we can make it happen, with the utmost care and detail required.
I have always seen design as a field that combines various other fields like sociology, anthropology, history, culture – it is an amalgamation of the human society and provides a way of building for it. You can never look at any product in isolation.
Everything belongs in an environment, where it interacts with people, with systems, with processes. And design can touch upon all of these and intervene for the better! In today's world, it is even more important to have design voices in traditionally 'non-design' ecosystems because everything comes down to an interaction and an experience for everyone involved.
I would argue that only designers have the sensitivity that is required to truly understand these ecosystems.
Madan: What does meaningful design impact look like — not just in metrics, but in how it changes people’s behaviour or decisions?
Khushboo: Meaningful design impact is when you see a product being truly integrated in someone's life for the better. Something that brings them joy. Something that they are excited to use and advocate for.
It might not even be the best design out there, but it can still have a great story and a great pay-off for the ones using it. It's when you see excitement and eagerness for people to learn more rather than treat it as another tool.
Madan: What can be done for India to truly seize the ‘AI’ moment for local as well as global advantage? What are our strengths, and where are the gaps?
Khushboo: Our strengths as a country are our diversity and our languages. The global West looks at us as mere data workers but we have so much to offer. To truly seize the AI moment we have to create a space for our diverse voices to fill the gap that exists in AI today.
India needs to carve out its seat on the AI table. Maybe even command it. The speed at which AI has evolved has left out a lot of voices, owing to the fact that these voices are very rare on the internet in the first place.
But we can change that – slowly and steadily. It is a double-edged sword but if we don't amplify our voices, we could be in danger of being erased, or worse, misrepresented.
Madan: How is Karya helping create a more inclusive AI ecosystem and empowering grassroots community – can you share three examples here?
Khushboo: At Karya, our projects aim at bringing in voices of marginalised communities across India, whose languages and cultural knowledge have historically been excluded from technology, into the AI ecosystem. We are working towards a future of AI which represents the full diversity of people through fair compensation, visibility and agency in the process.
Through one of our projects, we'll soon be publishing a recipe book in collaboration with women of Jharkhand and Bihar! The book is filled with images taken by the women themselves who explain in detail about the ingredients, tools and cooking methods they use –all sourced through our app! The storytelling and perspective remain entirely theirs, and through this we get to explore how cultural knowledge can influence digital futures.
Another exciting project we are working on is Karya Learn – a hub on our app where our communities can learn complex skills to engage in higher income tasks and to learn market-relevant skills.
In another project, through partnerships with organisations like Google, native speakers of languages such as Lepcha and Kokborok are helping bring their languages online in authentic ways. Their voices and expertise shape how these languages appear on global platforms.
And as a part of the data industry, we supported the publishing of a framework, developed with the Aapti Institute, that reflects the lived realities of data workers.
Madan: How do you view GenAI – as a serious challenge for designers, or an indispensable tool? How does one upskill oneself in this context?
Khushboo: I would say it is something in the middle. It can be a super useful tool of course but only when used cautiously and carefully. We are well aware that AI lacks a lot of context, especially when it comes to the nuances of our culture.
You ask a question in Hindi, expecting an answer rooted in the Indian context, but the response you get is still more Western leaning. Biases are inbuilt in GenAI. Even how we might prompt to generate a certain image might come from our own biases.
How do you recognise that and how do you tackle that? It can only happen through true human-ness, I would say. The upskilling that is required is almost meditative, introspective reflection on our practices and biases and an openness to unlearning.
We need to upskill in identifying these underlying nuances that are built in so we can think critically about every information that is presented to us. We need to acknowledge that everything that is built in the world today, has been built by someone. Everything has been built with a certain intention. And we have to recognize that, acknowledge that, and then choose how it interacts with us and our environment.
Madan: What exciting new opportunities are opening up in design for youth today?
Khushboo: The world is changing every other day and it's hard to keep up. But I see huge opportunities opening up for designers if we detach ourselves from our identity as 'designers' and think of ourselves as generalists or problem solvers through the lens of research, technology and people.
The age of 'specialists' is slowly declining and what is more important than ever is to be a thinker. A strategist. Have a vision. Move beyond traditional design and you will find opportunities of intervention cropping up everywhere. Speculate about the future, be invested in it and be hopeful about it.
There can be no prescriptive list of jobs that designers would be holding even two years from now. It is up to you to really define your own practice through your life experiences and your value systems.
Madan: What are your three tips or words of advice for aspiring 'design entrepreneurs' today?
Khushboo: Firstly, slow down and REALLY understand the problem you are trying to solve and ask yourself why you want to solve it. It is easy to get lost in the operations of things, but do we really need another app, another software, another digital product?
Secondly, be true to yourself. Don't throw away your identity as an individual, hold on to it, cherish it, represent it. Otherwise, everything starts looking the same. Today when the whole internet is available to us and we are so easily influenced, do you have a corner on this internet that you can call yours?
Thirdly, have solid role models and mentors. The ones who ground you, the ones who question you, the ones who force you to slow down. When you get lost in the maze, is there someone to pull you back up to the 100 feet view? Is there someone you can be honest with about your mistakes, your shortcomings and your hopefulness for the future?
Madan: What role should design leaders play in ensuring that innovation remains humane, inclusive, and ethical?
Khushboo: Bring in more voices! In the tech world, the humanities often finds itself clawing at the edge of a cliff. Can design leaders be the ones who pull them up? Junior designers often lack context and are not as exposed to the bigger picture and the impact a small design decision could have.
Can we create spaces for them to experience this first-hand? These learnings, when they keep trickling down to everyone building a product, help in grounding every decision in the ethical foundations of innovation.
Madan: Any other parting comments or remarks you would like to make?
Khushboo: What helps me find comfort in my work every day is knowing that my work impacts actual lives. That is a huge responsibility, but it is one that really pushes you to do your best and ask difficult questions in a room of leaders.
One of my dearest mentors, Nitin Jerath, often asked me to reflect on my practice and build towards it. I find myself going back to this question whenever I feel lost in the day-to-days of managing stakeholders and a team.
So, think, reflect, introspect and you will find yourself in the right place eventually. Until then, think about how designing for and with care can be one of the pillars driving good products forward!
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