I’m Indy Nagpal, Co-CEO (AI and Innovation) at Arbitr, formerly Straker, an ASX-listed company. Arbitr helps companies use artificial intelligence (AI) to create content at speed while making sure what they publish matches what they’ve actually approved, across markets and languages.
I’ve spent three decades at the intersection of language, technology and people: building systems, leading teams, and thinking carefully about what it means for organisations to work alongside intelligent machines. I write about it here and on LinkedIn. My writing on AI, organisations and power is read in 50 countries.
My background is unusual. A Master of Applied Psychology sits underneath the engineering. That combination of human behaviour, statistics, and 30 years of watching probabilistic computation evolve from mainframe punch cards to millisecond inference shapes how I approach AI: not as a purely technical endeavour, but as an organisational and human one.
My perspective spans large enterprises navigating AI adoption at scale and early-stage AI ventures finding their footing, where the questions are different but the underlying tension between capability and judgement is exactly the same.
In May 2026 I was felicitated by the Consul General of India in Auckland for contributions to New Zealand’s technology sector.
Outside work, I’m a long-time supporter and, since 2025, an executive committee member of Prayas, New Zealand’s largest South Asian community theatre group. It brings together art and community, and gives the South Asian diaspora here a way to tell its own stories on Auckland’s stages. It keeps the rest of what I do grounded.
What I think about
Most organisations fail to extract value from AI not because the technology is inadequate, but because the hard problems are human: governance, judgement, institutional memory, and the balance between automation and oversight.
What’s perhaps unusual is that I’m as comfortable in the architecture of encoder-decoder models as I am stepping back to ask what the business metrics should even be, and whether the model is actually moving them.
I’m particularly interested in the gap between AI capability and enterprise deployment reality, and in what competitive strategy looks like when model capability is no longer the primary constraint. Voice-native AI, agentic workflows, specialist small language models: the interfaces are already changing who can direct intelligent systems, and how.
University work
I work with universities on how AI is taught and put to use:
- Auckland University of Technology (AUT): industry member of the programme review panel for the Bachelor of Computer and Information Sciences, including its proposed AI major (2026)
- University of Auckland: guest lectures in the Master of Commerce and the Master of Artificial Intelligence (2026)
- AUT Technology Leaders Seminar Series: invited speaker (2026)
Open to speaking and university work
I speak on AI strategy, enterprise adoption, and what it actually means, practically and organisationally, for businesses to work alongside intelligent systems. Keynotes, panel discussions, executive roundtables, workshops, guest lectures and student mentoring.
If you’re organising something where these topics matter, I’d welcome the conversation. Details and a contact form are on the speaking page.
Kinarey
किनारे (kinārē) is a Hindi and Urdu word meaning the shore, the edge, the bank of a river. The place where land meets water. Neither one thing nor the other, but where the most interesting things happen.
That’s what this site is. A place to think at the edge: between technology and strategy, between research and practice, between what AI can do and what organisations are actually ready for.