Meta's India and Southeast Asia VP Sandhya Devanathan joins OpenAI as APAC talent war heats up

The context of Devanathan's departure from Meta is telling. She is leaving after more than a decade at the company, which has been the subject of growing scrutiny over issues such as online safety and content moderation; according to a person familiar with the matter, she was deeply involved in the company's decision-making process in India. Her departure triggers organizational adjustments at Meta in one of the world's largest internet markets — per TechCrunch, after Devanathan leaves, Meta's India managing director Arun Srinivas will report directly to Benjamin Joe, the company's vice president for Asia Pacific. For OpenAI, Devanathan's arrival is a key piece in its APAC expansion: over the past two years, OpenAI has opened five offices in the region — Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, and Delhi — and India and Southeast Asia are among the fastest-growing AI markets with the largest user bases in the world.

This APAC talent war is a microcosm of the global AI competition. Over the past year, executive movement among AI giants — OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic — has clearly accelerated, from research scientists to product leaders, and now to regional business executives like Devanathan. Talent has become the 'second battlefield' for AI companies. For OpenAI, India and Southeast Asia are not just key markets for user growth but also important landing points for enterprise AI services: India's vast developer ecosystem and Southeast Asia's rapidly digitizing SMBs are potential customers for products like ChatGPT Enterprise. Devanathan's regulatory experience at Meta is especially valuable — in markets where regulation is tightening, such as India and Indonesia, a regional leader who understands the local regulatory context often matters more than technical capability in determining whether a company can gain a foothold.

From a broader perspective, Devanathan's move sends another signal: the focus of AI competition is shifting from 'model parameters' to 'market penetration.' When model capabilities converge, whoever enters emerging markets faster, understands local users and regulations better, and builds deeper government-enterprise partnerships will win the next phase of growth. OpenAI's consecutive poaching in APAC is essentially filling its 'localization' gap — using compensation and vision to pull the people who know these markets best away from companies like Google and Meta that have cultivated them for years. For Meta, holding its APAC base steady under the twin pressures of regulatory scrutiny and talent attrition will be a significant test.

For readers following the AI industry, the biggest takeaway from this move is that the AI race is no longer decided by model capability alone — organizational capability, market penetration, and localization matter just as much. OpenAI's consecutive APAC poaching is a clear signal of its transformation from a 'technology company' into a 'global commercial organization.' And the talent drain at giants like Meta and Google reminds us that in the AI era, the scarcest resource is never compute or data, but people who understand both technology and markets. In the coming period, India and Southeast Asia will serve as the litmus test for every major AI company's localization strategy.