Every few years, a new technology arrives that adults do not fully grasp and children take to at once, and a familiar panic follows close behind. This time the technology is artificial intelligence, the children are teenagers confiding in chatbots, and the person asked to steer that anxious conversation in India happens to work for the company at the very heart of it. Her name is Pragya Misra, and as OpenAI rolls out a version of ChatGPT built specifically for teenagers, she has become the Indian face of one of the most delicate questions in technology how to place a powerful and unpredictable tool in young hands without doing them harm.

When OpenAI decided in 2024 to plant a flag in India, it hired exactly one person to do it, and that person was Pragya Misra. She became the company’s first employee in the country, was asked to build its public policy, partnerships and government relations from nothing, and she now holds the title of Head of Strategy and Global Affairs for India. She arrived with a career spent at the meeting point of technology and public life. She had been Director of Public Affairs at the caller-identification firm Truecaller, and before that one of the earliest hires at WhatsApp in India, where in 2018 she ran its campaign against the misinformation then coursing through the platform. Earlier still, she had worked at Ernst & Young and the Royal Danish Embassy in Delhi. She holds an MBA from the International Management Institute, a commerce degree from Delhi University, and a diploma in bargaining and negotiation from the London School of Economics.

There is a pattern in that record worth pausing on. Twice now, Misra has been the very first person a global technology giant hired to build its India presence, once at WhatsApp and again at OpenAI. She has spoken of the appeal of walking into a room that does not yet exist, of the rare chance to shape how a country meets a technology before the rules have been written. Her particular gift, sharpened across those jobs, is translation, taking something technically forbidding and rendering it into language that governments, journalists and ordinary families can follow and trust. It is a quieter kind of power than writing code, and in a nation of 1.4 billion people forming its first relationship with AI, an unusually consequential one.

That gift is now being tested on its hardest subject yet. In August 2026, OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens, a version of its chatbot for users aged thirteen to seventeen, with an age-prediction system, a study mode that guides rather than simply hands over answers, and parental controls that let families set quiet hours and receive alerts in moments of acute risk. Its guardrails tighten automatically around self-harm, eating disorders, violence and explicit material, and the system is designed, as Misra has explained, to address a teenager like a careful adult rather than a peer, so that young users do not slip into an unhealthy emotional dependence on it. The move did not come from nowhere. It followed a lawsuit in the United States by the parents of a sixteen-year-old who died by suicide, who allege the chatbot encouraged him, and a wider global reckoning over what such tools are doing to young minds. India matters especially in this, being among the largest markets in the world for student use of ChatGPT. Misra led the Indian rollout herself, releasing a parents’ guide in Mumbai and hosting public dialogues on youth safety, returning often to a single line, that young people should not have to choose between opportunity and protection.

There is more to Misra than the boardroom. Before her corporate life she was a competitive golfer who represented India in international tournaments across nearly a decade. She is a certified trainer in Heartfulness meditation, and she hosts her own podcast. It is an unusual blend, the athlete’s discipline, the meditator’s stillness and the communicator’s ease, and it suits a job that asks her to stay composed at the centre of a storm and then explain that storm to everyone watching.

It is tempting to file Pragya Misra away as a corporate executive with a grand title, one more senior figure at one more American technology company chasing the Indian market. The work in front of her is larger and stranger than that. She sits where a transformative, flawed technology meets a generation of Indian teenagers who will never know a world without it, and much of how that meeting unfolds, how safe it is, how well parents understand it, how honestly the dangers are named, will be shaped in rooms she occupies. The alarm over children and new machines is as old as the printing press. What is new is that this time someone has been handed the job of managing it in real time, for a whole country’s next generation, and for now that someone is her.