Priya Bhasin, MBA ’23

In this episode of Sloanies Talking with Sloanies, host Christopher Reichert, MOT ’04, welcomes Priya Bhasin, MBA ’23, current group product manager on Microsoft Copilot. Bhasin traces her path from software engineer at Yahoo to more than eight years at Apple, where she helped scale search ads from millions to billions in revenue, and then to MIT Sloan on a sabbatical. There, a last-minute pivot at a Hack for Inclusion event produced the idea of a “Grammarly for bias.” With help from a team matched across campus and early code from a professor, the idea won the hackathon, advanced in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, and became Inclusively.AI, which sold to four enterprise customers.

The conversation then follows the venture’s evolution into Convi.AI, a broader tool for empathetic, inclusive conversation across internal communications, marketing, and customer support. Bhasin explains why she ultimately moved on: the rapid progress of frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic left a small startup built on off-the-shelf models without a defensible moat. She also reflects on how DEI investment has shifted in recent years, how the field struggled to tie its work to measurable outcomes, and how her experience as often the only woman in the room has changed over 15 years in tech. Along the way, she and Reichert discuss how the mode of communication shapes relationships.

Bhasin shares her optimistic view of AI, comparing it to the invention of electricity while acknowledging real risks like cybercrime, and describes how agents may reshape advertising, measurement, and the value chain between users, brands, and platforms. She stresses transparency about paid placements as a foundation for trust. Looking back, she says she would leave more room in her calendar and venture beyond the MIT Sloan bubble, and she credits system dynamics, product-bet frameworks, and negotiation coursework as tools she uses daily. Her parting advice to prospective Sloanies is to come in with an open mind, go deep on building, and keep space open for unplanned conversations.

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Priya Bhasin: Sloan strengthened my system thinking. While well-intentioned decisions can produce unexpected results, I often find myself asking if we are solving the right problem or getting better at just living with the problem.

Christopher Reichert: Welcome to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies. A candid conversation with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they're doing today. So what does it mean to be a Sloanie? Over the course of this podcast, you'll hear from guests who are making a difference in their community, including our own very important one here at Sloan.

Christopher Reichert: Welcome back to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies. I am your host, Christopher Reichert, and today my guest is Priya Bhasin, a 2023 MBA graduate.

Welcome, Priya, to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies

Priya Bhasin: Thanks for having me, Christopher. Excited for our conversation.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. So, some quick background on Priya besides her '23 MBA from Sloan.

She has a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science from the Indira Gandhi Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. Back in 2013, she was selected for an Indo-Brazil Research Fellowship in Machine Learning AI in Sao Paulo, Brazil. There were 5,000 candidates. I think she was one of five, if I'm not mistaken. She joined Yahoo as a software engineer.

Following that, she moved to Apple for over eight years in various roles, including as a product manager on the iPhone and led strategy and execution for ad relevance and personalization for a few years, among many other roles there. And then she was responsible for AI for Apple search ad teams, where she led a team focused on search retrieval, ranking, and recommendation products.

She scaled that business, that ad business, from the millions to the billions in revenue in one of the fastest-growing service businesses at Apple, which is saying something in a company like Apple, which is already huge.

In between, she shoehorned an MBA at Sloan where she co-founded Inclusively.AI, which evolved into Convi.AI, a conversational AI language model used to identify and reduce bias in enterprise communications, things like emails, chats, reviews, press releases. And it detected nuanced microaggressions and enabled more inclusive workplace interactions.

So, we're going to talk a bit more about that. She was backed by our friends over at General Catalyst. After Apple, she joined Moloco, an AI-native performance advertising platform, helping solve that age-old dilemma widely attributed to my hometown department store magnate, and marketing pioneer, John Wanamaker, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, trouble is, I don't know which half."

So currently, Priya is with Microsoft as a group product manager working on Copilot, and she identifies herself as a product builder. So did I miss anything you want to add?

Priya Bhasin: That's very comprehensive. Thanks for covering all that background.

Christopher Reichert: Excellent. Well, I want to start our conversation with a pivotal moment at Sloan, in particular when you changed your Hack for Inclusion idea the day before the event, and you had a revelation. What if we made Grammarly for detecting bias? And so tell us about that revelation and how you built your team and brought in advisors from across MIT.

Priya Bhasin: Yeah, absolutely. Just to take a step back here, when I came to Sloan, you know, my plan was pretty basic. I was there on a sabbatical from Apple, wanted to go to Sloan, ramp up my skills, and then go back to Apple because I love building products. I love the detail that Apple had put into products and wanted to just go back.

And when I came to Sloan, I was surrounded by these builders and founders, people were building companies, they were building funds. And the bug got me. I wanted to try something of my own, too. And it's one of those very MIT ways of getting sidetracked. You know, I showed up for a hackathon that quickly turned into me figuring out whether there's a business here.

And so I joined this hackathon, which was essentially around DEI. We were brainstorming ideas a day before Hackathon on what we could potentially build. One of the ideas I was personally very passionate about and had seen at work, people would send these Slack messages which could rub you in the wrong way or sometimes the performance reviews, if worded correctly, could make it or break it for folks on your team. So just like coaching and writing in a way that's more inclusive was something top of mind.

That was the idea I had. Hey, what if we could build Grammarly, but for inclusive writing? And, you know, it's a very MIT thing. You can quickly go from an idea to building if you just bring the right folks along. The hackathon matched me with students from all across campus, very different perspectives. And I was like, wow, I have this amazing team. I had a designer on the team. I had somebody who had experience talking to customers. She was in sales before.

And just to like figure out how we could hack something together as a prototype, I emailed Professor Rama like a day before. And if you know Professor Rama, he's very busy. He has his hands full on a bunch of activities on campus. And he quickly responded back. There are multiple ways to respond back to a student email like this. He could have said, " Oh, great idea.”

He could have not responded at all. But he went a step further and he was like. That's a great idea. And here's some code. You could boilerplate code. You could start building our prototype with. I was just like fast track to building.

We built the idea. And next thing we know, we won the hackathon. And that just hackathon turned into MIT 100K competition. All of these were very validating events to know that, okay, there's something here. And then I spent the summer at Sloan and talking to customers, talking to different investors, figuring out if there's a business plan here. We ended up selling Inclusively to four enterprise customers who were using our product in their Slack, using it to write more effectively with their teams and partners.

Christopher Reichert: This was the summer between the first and second year of the MBA?

Priya Bhasin: That's exactly right, yeah.

Christopher Reichert: So that was your internship, essentially, was to kind of really push that forward business idea. That's great.

Priya Bhasin: Yeah, I had internships. I was pursuing other internships externally, but this picked up momentum so much, especially with 100K. We had the funding. We'd won like $25,000. So I was like, okay, I think I'm good for summer. I'm just going to spend time and see if there's a startup idea here or somewhere.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah, and I suppose you also had your job back at Apple. I mean, as a fallback, but I don't mean that in a negative way, but it's not as if you were necessarily aggressively looking for a pivot to a new organization.

Priya Bhasin: Yeah, I wasn't. And, you know, I was very humbled and very grateful for Apple for giving me the space to explore this. If you know Apple, it's very secretive. These kinds of sabbaticals aren't necessarily open for everyone. So, I was very grateful that I had that fallback option.

Christopher Reichert: I mean, I noticed actually, it was looking in your bio, you've definitely worked for high impact organizations. I mean, from Yahoo to Apple and now at Microsoft. I mean, these are companies that are at the forefront of their industries. You're kind of in organizations that have resources across the organization and also ability to have quick market impact.

Priya Bhasin: Yeah, that was one of the things that brought me to Sloan. I loved learning, building. All these companies brought incredible people together. So, it was like the great space for me to continue having a career. But I kept coming back to this question of how can I make bigger impact in the world? And I wanted to explore what that looks like without the big resources these companies bring. Can I build something without the Apple resources was the question I kept coming back to. And Sloan was just the perfect space to explore that. The hands-on culture gave me a way to actually explore, build something on the ground and gain experience.

Christopher Reichert: I wanted to ask you about Convi.ai and Inclusively.AI. What was the transition between those two?

Priya Bhasin: We had Inclusively, which was essentially focused on this idea of inclusive writing. But as we started talking to customers, we discovered pretty much every vertical that we were talking to cared about this idea of empathetic conversation.

So inclusively started with an internal productivity tool where teams can talk and interact more inclusively. Then we spoke with marketing teams and they were like, oh, we want to present our brand as like something that can be DEI-ified. Essentially, like make sure the brand content we put out there is catering to all different audiences.

Similarly, when we spoke with the customer support teams, they were very keen on this use case of can we have conversation, the chatbots that are more empathetic with customers. We have a frustrated customer on support call. Can we teach our support staff to be more empathetic with them? And so, all these different use cases that we discovered as part of research over the summer, we were like, I think this Inclusively is something just broader. People care about empathetic conversation, both internally as well as externally when representing a brand and talking to customers. So, we transformed this brand from Inclusively to Convi.AI essentially to make conversations more inclusive.

Christopher Reichert: So you extended your sabbatical after Sloan for Convi.AI. Is that the idea?

Priya Bhasin: So the timing of this whole thing was super interesting. When we started Inclusively, this is like 202, late fall. And then we spent six months building, talking to customers. We had a prototype. But then just when I committed my summer to build this thing full speed, the first version of ChatGPT came out. And I was trying ChatGPT, and I was very proud of the fact that our model could detect nuances that ChatGPT couldn't at that point.

So, I was still like, okay, there's something here. And then Anthropic came. Anthropic put out a paper talking about alignment of AI. And what we were working on was also essentially the alignment problem: making sure the models aren't toxic and they are not biased when they're communicating with different users.

So, it was like a different flavor of the problem that these frontier labs were solving. But as I spent more time, I quickly saw how rapidly the frontier labs were making progress. And it was one of those wise decisions of, OK, you can spend all the time you want, but you also need to be wise when you hold the company. And I felt like we didn't have a moat because we were using off-the-shelf models, and it needed much more investment.

But I had a great time going from zero to one, building a product. Seeing how fast the progress was at OpenAI and Anthropic just made me want to dive into more AI-centric teams. And that's when I was very keen to join a big company like Microsoft AI, which is building its open and closed models at the time.

Christopher Reichert: I read somewhere years ago that the mode of communication that you choose matters almost as much as what you say. So, for example, Facebook is great for, say, college friends or grad school friends or that sort of thing. But it would be impersonal if you used it to communicate with your mother or your brother or sister.

Same thing, let's say telephone, right? And maybe that's not so true nowadays, but maybe 20 years ago, 25 years ago when this was written, sending a text to your partner might seem more personal when picking up the phone and talking to them would have been the mode.

So depending on the relationship you have with the person, the mode of communication can either push them forward or pull them closer. And I've always been conscious of that where do I imagine they sit in that hierarchy of relationship rings? Is it going to push them away or pull them in?

Priya Bhasin: It is. And, you know, there is actually, there's some research that validates what you're just saying. Essentially, it's not just like the mode of communication matters, but who you're talking to also matters. Like if, for example, I have an exam, and I speak with my mom on the phone just before the exam. There has been research that shows that your oxys goes up, it calms you down much better than if your mom just sent you a text message.

So, you know, like voice makes a difference when you talk to loved ones over just like text messages. So, these are little things that just remind her to be more intentional, talk to your parents, talk to your kids. or just like passive messages. And there's some research backing that.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. Well, I'd be curious to know when you're, is it a girl or a boy that you have?

Priya Bhasin: It's a boy.

Christopher Reichert: I'd be interested to see when he gets his first communications device, who knows what it'll be, how that goes. Well, I was thinking about the environment that we live in and with DEI in particular, how much it's changed in five years, four or five years. So thinking about sort of the wisdom you had to pivot back to Apple and then over to Microsoft, right?

Priya Bhasin: Yeah, I think we all went from being like DEI being rogue to suddenly the budgets were slashed for DEI orgs. Many DEI orgs were cut with the layoffs happening recently, so I felt like there is a little bit of a 180 shift that happened in last five years, definitely during COVID when teams were remote, there was a need to create these spaces and we hired essentially new org structure, DEI with staff, there were DEI HR partners, investing a lot of resources to make sure people feel heard.

But now what I saw, even during the research we were doing through Inclusively, I think there was just this fear of how do you tie something like DEI with an outcome or a dollar value to it? And teams were struggling with that. And that's what we were trying to build with Inclusively so it's just not just communication; can we show the executive team and the ROI for their investment around DEI? Can we show reporting on how it has helped teams, how productive teams are once they communicate more effectively with each other?

I think a lot of the layoffs and a lot of budget cuts happened because there wasn't right tooling. There was a lot of investment suddenly, but teams weren't staffed with the right tools to show the outcome of these investments. And I think I wish that there was better tooling.

Christopher Reichert: You mentioned that you've been in technology and engineering roles, or at least environments, most of your career. And you've evolved into leadership roles, but still have found yourself to be oftentimes the only woman or very few women in the room, and how that affected your outlook, particularly maybe the hack for inclusion you know fed right into, I mean, it resonated with you this notion of inclusion because you were the subject of exclusionary language… hey guys how's it going whatever it might have been, right .

Has it evolved to be more inclusive, generally speaking, in the industries that you're in or the rooms that you're in, let's say, of late?

Priya Bhasin: I would say that the times have shifted a lot since I started in tech. So this is like 15 years ago when I started. I was the only woman on the team, the only engineer. For a while, when I was doing product and AI, I would spend a lot of my time working with people with other genders and it was like there were some times when things were rough. For example I have this distinct memory where in one of the reviews it was me and my engineering counterpart and one of the engineers from another cross-functional team goes “Why don't you look at the code, honey?”

We were both like, “oh, what just happened?” And even though we were shocked in the moment, we didn't react to it right off the bat. We just stayed quiet, moved on. And then me and my engineering counterpart talked about it on how, like, that was bad. We didn't speak up. That was the culture at the time. But over time, as I've navigated different teams, different cultures, I've learned to speak up in the moment, give feedback.

And Sloan was very helpful to learn the discipline of how do you give feedback in the moment versus wait it out and do your point, like use the right channel of giving feedback. So times have definitely changed. I don't hear comments like that in the rooms anymore. People are more subtle with their language.

But I also think that it's definitely, more art than science. There's not as explicit exclusion that happened today, but things are still very subtle. It's always something that's running in the back of my mind.

One thing I love about Microsoft is I have a lot more women around me, like my engineering leader, my boss, just like a lot of women leaders. And I've seen that makes a huge difference. If you have someone you could look up to. It just makes a difference in your productivity, makes a difference in how your ideas get propelled further. That wasn't something that I saw a lot of when I was new to the tech.

Christopher Reichert: Pivoting to AI, there's been a lot of talk of, well, a lot of negative talk, a lot of wonderment in AI, right? People are amazed at the capabilities of AI, how it can, particularly, you know, generative AI for the masses, if you will, and access for consumers to agentic AI, if they can wrap their head around it. Obviously, companies like Microsoft and, prior to that, when you were at Apple, the teams there of which you were a part of were much more deeply embedded and involved in embedding this technology in the products or utilizing it at least. So, are you as worried as what we're now hearing about the 10% possibility that we're going to die?

Priya Bhasin: You know, I'm an optimist, and I don't buy the whole argument about 10%. I just think of AI as something that's bigger, like inventing electricity. You know, when electricity came, it just like opened avenues that no one had anticipated. I feel the same way about AI. It's just going to be, it's going to change our lives in a lot of ways. A lot of that is unclear exactly how, both personally as well as at work.

But as an optimist, I believe that it's all going to be for the good. Yes, there are risks. There are risks around cybersecurity. There can be like, cybercrimes, and there are bio risks that Dario had pointed out from Anthropic. I think those are very real concerns, which we should all be worried about. But at the same time, I think about AI as when we build software, we do the testing, we make sure it doesn't go rogue. And when we are building this technology, the alignment is a new form of testing. We have to make sure AI is aligned with the values and the society that we belong to.

And as we are building this, we tested against all the risks that have been highlighted. I don't think it's going to kill humans. That's just too pessimistic of a view. But it's going to be a huge change. And I can't imagine for my sons, like right now we're having this debate, should we put in funds in 529? Is school going to be a thing in the next 20 years? You know, and these are the conversations that are very real. They feel more real now. So we just don't know how that's going to take shape in the next few years.

Christopher Reichert: Your public profile says that you're teaching AI systems to understand what people want and you're building evaluations to help people deliver what people want. Everything up to the point of approval, right? And so how does that work? I mean, I know I said earlier at the introduction that, you know, John Wanamaker was famous for... He knows that 50% of his advertising is wasted. He just doesn't know which 50%. So now certainly we have a lot more data on individuals. But it's less of the broadcast method that was prevalent for many years, just stick an ad in a magazine or throw it on broadcast television. It's much more personalized, but it's certainly imperfect. And tell us about how you're working to perfect that.

Priya Bhasin: The measurement in advertising is still very much a big elephant in the room. You know, advertisers are spending. But how you measure the ROI for that ad spend is, it has gotten much better. But it's like an ever-evolving space with privacy, with new laws in Europe, things are changing very rapidly. And I think with agents, the advertising gets really interesting when there's an agent on both sides of the platform.

So you have users who are using an agent to now find the best product. And then there's an agent on the advertiser side. These brands are trying to figure out how do you show up for AI that users are using? How do you be more discoverable for the agent that the user has? And so they have to think about, you know, embedding. It's not just keyword stuffing that advertisers used to do in their description, but it's more about how do you create that narrative about your product, what it offers beyond just like the description of your product.

So, I think on both sides, user side, as well as the brand side, the agent discovery becomes very different. I think user journeys will compress quite a bit. Now the user is not going through the full funnel, clicking on the ad, making a conversion.

ChatGPT launched this ad product where you're having a conversation, and then you see like the ad pop up. What's different here is you can click on that ad pop-up and chat with the brand about the ad itself. So you can go much deeper. It's not just like click, add click, and then convert. That's not happening anymore. You're actually talking to the brand in a more conversational way. And so how do you attribute value to this conversation is the crux of the question.

I think the concept of value chain shifts in a pretty meaningful way. So previously in web era two, we had three parties: the user, the advertiser and the platform. And most of the value stayed between the platform and the advertiser. Advertiser is paying the platform to acquire the user. And what that platform owns is the user data. They are trying to use the data to figure out which user is interested in which product and servicing those products. And in the end, the user is not getting any economic benefit from seeing an ad.

I think what's changing, what might change with web era 3 is the value chain should shift a little bit to the user as well. So now there's an agent at play. Users are using agent.

Christopher Reichert: The other part of this that I'm curious about is the trust side of things, right? You know, one of the things that I think scares people is when you give away a lot of data, is that, you know, people always were scared, like, well, I don't trust... Facebook with my data, or I don't trust. I mean, we can go down the list of names of organizations that we don't trust, right? So with these agents who are out, you're tasking them with finding something for you. How do we surface that trust component?

Priya Bhasin: I think that comes from good product judgment. So, you know, the trust question essentially connects both the sides. If my assistant recommends a product, I want to understand whether it fits my needs or whether someone paid for that placement. Being transparent about whether this is a paid placement versus genuine product discovery is a good start.

Christopher Reichert: So, as you were working at Apple and you decided to go to school for an MBA, how did you choose Sloan, and why did you choose Sloan?

Priya Bhasin: You know, at Apple, I was learning, I was building and working with incredible people. But I always wanted to make bigger impact. I felt like there was a clock ticking in the back of my mind where I was running out of time to make that impact. I wanted to explore what else I could be building without the Apple resources. And Sloan's hands-on culture really, really jumped out. It was like a perfect space to explore those questions.

The entrepreneurship ecosystem was a big part of that. The 100K (Martin) Trust Center focused entrepreneurship pods. These were incredible resources and helped me meet with people from different experiences and backgrounds to see how these opportunities can come together. So that was a big part of why I chose Sloan, just to explore entrepreneurship, have that space and time to do that and be very focused on that exploration.

Christopher Reichert: But looking back, is there anything, if you had a do-over or a class that you missed, is there anything that you would want to go back and do over or actually do?

Priya Bhasin: So many. I think there's just so many classes that I wanted to take, but I didn't have, you know, if anything, if I were to do over, I would keep my calendar more empty. I think it was a surprisingly hard thing to do at MIT. I felt like the calendar was too full.

But one thing I would do differently is go outside the Sloan ecosystem and make more like fluid conversations with the broader MIT, like meet with undergrads, researchers, faculty, explore things that are outside your, what I would say like things that have nothing to do with my career. It's just like a fascinating ecosystem and I wish I could spend more time outside the Sloan and I would definitely prioritize that and keep my calendar a little bit more fluid for these natural conversations, bump into people, just learn more about their background.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah, I've heard that before from previous guests as well. So, what did you learn at Sloan that you use most often today?

Priya Bhasin: I think Sloan strengthened my system thinking. The system dynamic class, going deeper on why well-intentioned decisions can produce unexpected results, was pretty interesting. So, I often find myself asking if we are solving the right problem or getting better at just living with the problem.

For example, when I joined Microsoft, the product team I was part of was overwhelmed with high volume of customer tickets. And everyone jumped in to help customers, which makes sense. But that was leaving no time to fix the underlying issues of the problem. And team was very reactive, which often ended up generating more work, which was overwhelming for everyone, product, engineering, and even leadership. And so I started questioning if we can look beyond the immediate fix and have a more sustainable way to solve the underlying issues.

And you drew on lessons from organizational processes to navigate through the three lenses. How do I propose this staff in this new area? It was definitely an old guard versus a new guard of, oh, we've tried this before. And, you know, me coming in and saying, hey, this is something I've seen other companies do.

Before Sloan, I also was very focused on working hard, and Sloan just armed me with a bunch of tools and frameworks that helped me get more conviction at the strategy. You know, Don Sulls framework on identifying product bets. I still use that today to figure out what's going to work, what's not going to work, where it's going to be, how's the P&L going to look like? It's the negotiations class, which is extremely helpful, especially when you're negotiating for resources with engineering versus working with cross-functional teams. Negotiation is something we do every day, and these are some things that I use a lot just in day-to-day, which I learn from Sloan.

Christopher Reichert: And finally, any parting advice to prospective Sloanies?

Priya Bhasin: The famous saying at MIT is, you know, when you come here, you'll be drinking from the fire hose. You look in a direction, and it's just going to propel you deep in that direction. I loved how I got sidetracked and jumped into entrepreneurship. So I would say come in with an open mind, explore as much as you can, and then just go deep on building it and make some space for your calendar. Make sure you have those spaces for fluid conversations.

Christopher Reichert: Well, that's excellent. So I want to thank Priya Bhasin, a 2023 MBA graduate, for joining us on this episode of Sloanies Talking with Sloanies.

Priya Bhasin: Thank you, Chris, for having me. And thanks, everyone, for listening in.

Christopher Reichert: My pleasure. If you have any ideas for future guests or topics you'd like me to explore on Sloanies Talking with Sloanies, drop me a line at crf@sloan.mit.edu or in the podcast inbox at sloanalumni@mit.edu.

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