K.N. Kasibhatla

Narasimha "KN" Kasibhatla has built a career out of implementing whatever buzzword the CEO read about on the flight home—big data, cloud, digital transformation, and now, inevitably, AI.

For more than twenty years, he has been handed the shiny new acronym of the moment and quietly asked to make it real, on budget, by a quarter that had somehow already started. He trained as an engineer in India, collected an MBA from the University of Chicago, and went on to serve as Senior Vice President of Martech Services at Harte Hanks, where he helped drag a proud old print business into the era of data, CRM, and personalization—and lived to talk about it.

These days, he works alongside companies as they set off on their own AI journeys, which mostly means helping leaders separate what AI can actually do from what a very confident LinkedIn post promised it would. He's come to see AI less as a magic button and more as an economic and organizational force—one that quietly rewrites how work gets done, how money gets made, and how many meetings it takes to get there. The technology, he'll tell you, is the easy part. It's the humans who keep things interesting.

For someone who has spent this much time in boardrooms, KN is, deep down, still just a guy who likes to build things. In his spare time, he writes code—for fun, which he understands is not a sentence most people say out loud. The rest of the time you'll find him traveling, chasing a golf ball into places it has no business being, or achieving world-class levels of doing absolutely nothing. Above all, he's happiest hanging out with his wife, Priya, and their two sons, Sachin and Varun, both budding physicians—which means the family now has someone to fix the code and someone to explain what's wrong with him.

If there's one belief that's survived every buzzword, every hype cycle, and every “this changes everything" keynote, it's a simple one: it's never too late to learn. Preferably before the next acronym arrives.