AI Leadership: Lowe’s India Exec on Empathy in Tech
Key Highlights
Lowe’s India tech leader Meghana Mayya highlights the importance of empathy and human-centered leadership in AI, fostering inclusive tech perspectives.
Meghana Mayya, Senior Director – Technology at Lowe’s India, reflects on building AI responsibly and why empathy is a strategic advantage in engineering leadership. She emphasizes how inclusive perspectives shape the future of technology.
Mayya notes that the most important question in technology is no longer what we can build, but who we are building for and who gets to shape it. Her early career was spent deep in engineering, but as her roles expanded, it became clear that every technical challenge represents a human moment.
AI, according to Mayya, has changed the scale, but empathy sets the direction. At Lowe’s India, AI is being used to augment human capability, not replace it. Examples include streamlining quote generation for store associates, creating personalized outreach to reduce abandoned carts, and improving developer productivity by automating issue triage.
Mayya believes women in technology bring a strategic advantage. Women influence countless consumer decisions every day, building a powerful leadership perspective. She notes that effective AI and platform leadership is not just about optimizing isolated components but about seeing connections others might overlook, anticipating second-order effects, and intentionally designing with the full human journey in mind.
In the age of AI, leadership requires more than technical excellence. It requires the ability to zoom out and connect data, context, and lived experience. It demands ethical judgment, inclusion by design, and courage to slow down when impact matters more than speed.
Mayya’s leadership philosophy is to innovate boldly, lead responsibly, and care deeply. The future of AI will be shaped by the values of the people who build it, lead it, and decide how it shows up in the world.