Geetha Rajan: The Strategy Leader Redefining How Fortune 500 Companies Think About AI

As Director of Corporate Strategy at Freshworks, a publicly-traded SaaS company, Rajan drives high-priority strategic initiatives that shape the company’s growth, investment decisions, and execution — with a particular focus on AI adoption. 

Business Insider published a prominent as-told-to essay with her in February 2026.

But it’s her decade at PwC, where she advised Fortune 500 companies across healthcare, financial services, and technology on growth strategy and digital transformation, that gives her a uniquely comprehensive view of how large organizations succeed — or fail — at integrating AI into their operations.

Rajan’s claim to fame crystallized in mid-February 2026 when Business Insider published her insights on the three critical mistakes she sees workers making when adopting AI tools. The piece, based on a conversation with Rajan, went viral across business media.

Her core message: Don’t outsource your thinking to AI.

“AI is getting really good at doing things we used to do ourselves—sometimes better, often faster. So it’s no surprise that we’ve started handing over more and more tasks,” Rajan wrote in a December 2025 piece for Freshworks’ The Works blog. “But there’s a line. When we start outsourcing the thinking, we lose twice: first, to the risk of mediocrity (AI may sound confident, but it’s not always correct), and second, to a slow erosion of our own strategic muscle.”

This philosophy — that AI should amplify human thinking rather than replace it — has become her signature message and resonates across industries grappling with AI integration.

Professional Journey

Rajan is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and brings more than 15 years of experience advising Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups on AI-driven transformation, growth strategy, and operational excellence, according to her Inc. magazine author biography.

Her LinkedIn profile reveals an impressive trajectory through some of the world’s leading consulting and technology firms:

At PwC, she spent nearly a decade in progressively senior roles, including as Engagement Manager and Managing Consultant. There, she provided expert guidance to healthcare clients on strategic initiatives and led upskilling efforts across the organization.

Before PwC, her experience included:

– Product Integration Consultant at Wells Fargo, where she gained deep insights into the financial healthcare landscape

– Senior positions at CGI and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where she demonstrated leadership abilities and business acumen in product ownership, business analysis, and consulting

According to her LinkedIn endorsements, colleagues describe her as “exceptional at everything she sets her mind to” with “diligence and enthusiasm” that “brings excellence not only to her work but those who are fortunate enough to work with/for her.”

Shaping AI Strategy

At Freshworks, Rajan serves as Director of Corporate Strategy, where she operates at the intersection of business strategy and technological transformation. The company, which went public in 2021, provides customer service, IT service management, and CRM software to more than 75,000 customers globally.

Her role comes at a pivotal moment for Freshworks. In January 2026, CEO Dennis Woodside announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the company serves over 6,000 customers who are paying for AI capabilities, demonstrating strong market adoption of AI-powered solutions. The company is targeting $100 million in AI revenue as it intensifies its focus on large enterprises and mid-market companies.

In November 2025, Freshworks launched an agentic suite comprising prebuilt AI agents tailored for four industries. Rajan’s strategic leadership helps guide these product decisions and their market positioning.

Beyond her corporate role, Rajan has emerged as a prominent public voice on AI adoption, publishing regularly in leading business publications.

**Inc. Magazine:** In January 2026, she published “Try This Field Guide for Optimizing Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Gamma,” offering practical guidance on which AI tools work best for specific tasks. Her bio there describes her as “an expert in AI-driven transformation, growth strategy, and operational excellence.”

“The executives who get the most value from AI aren’t the ones who picked the ‘right’ tool,” she wrote. “They are the ones who understand what each tool does well, and they interchange them accordingly. Think of it like your very own productivity stack, or better yet, your own team of specialized employees.”

**Freshworks Blog:** Her December 2025 piece “Strategic Decision-Making in the Age of AI” articulated a framework that has influenced how organizations approach AI integration. She emphasized that “the best teams are leveraging AI to amplify their thinking, not replace it,” citing Freshworks’ 2025 Global AI report showing that organizations treating AI as a strategic partner rather than a replacement achieve significantly better outcomes.

**B2BNN:** In February 2026, she authored “The Leadership Gap That Kills AI Adoption,” examining why organizational leadership, not technology, often determines AI success or failure.

Three Mistakes Framework

Rajan’s February 2026 Business Insider essay detailed three critical mistakes:

1. **Outsourcing strategic thinking to AI:** While AI can process massive amounts of data, humans must maintain ownership of strategic decisions that require understanding context, stakeholder dynamics, and competitive landscape.

2. **Over-reliance on AI without verification:** AI may sound confident, but it’s not always correct. Organizations must build verification mechanisms into their workflows.

3. **Failing to develop AI literacy across the organization:** Successful AI adoption requires workforce enablement, not just technology deployment.

“Strategic thinking has always meant cutting through complexity to find clarity,” she wrote in the Freshworks blog. “Today’s challenge? We’re drowning in data but starving for insight. Despite having more research capabilities than ever, most strategic decisions aren’t getting demonstrably better. If anything, many are becoming more derivative, more generic. The real bottleneck isn’t access to information—it’s knowing what to do with it.”

Future Focus

According to B2BNN, Rajan is currently conducting academic research on leadership competencies in enterprise AI adoption. This research likely builds on her dual perspective from both advising companies (at PwC) and implementing AI strategy internally (at Freshworks).

Her ResearchGate profile shows she holds a Doctor of Business Administration degree, and she has been cited in academic literature, indicating scholarly contributions beyond her corporate work.

Rajan’s influence extends beyond her corporate and publishing work. According to LinkedIn testimonials, she served as an ambassador with the FWD.us Boston chapter, where she excelled as project team manager for a highly skilled tech group working to generate innovative ideas tackling social issues.

One notable project: She and her team developed a crowd-sourced heat map for social advocacy that connects Boston constituents to their legislators and educates them on their representatives’ stances. The app was designed as a heat map showing where there is support on issues and stories of those affected.

“She showcased this platform in a competition with prominent judges such as Lisa D. Conn of FWD.us, Seth Rogin of Mashable, and Dana Griffin of Attention USA,” according to a LinkedIn recommendation. “She continues to spread the word of our mission and engage new members into becoming a part of our movement.”

In January 2026, she hosted an “interactive session exploring how company metrics are evolving in the age of AI and what that means for operators making strategic decisions today,” according to Gatsby Events’ listing for Operators Guild.

Philosophy Behind Her Work

Rajan’s approach to AI can be distilled into a few core principles that appear consistently across her writing:

**1. AI as Amplifier, Not Replacement:** “The smartest strategic thinkers I know don’t hand over the wheel,” she wrote in the Freshworks blog. “They treat AI like a really good research assistant: fast, broad, with moments of impressive insight—but not in charge.”

**2. Focus on Outcomes, Not Activity:** She emphasizes that AI should be measured by business outcomes — resolution time, cost reduction, revenue lift — not just deployment metrics.

**3. Organizational Readiness Over Technology:** Her work consistently emphasizes that successful AI adoption depends less on choosing the most advanced model and more on preparing the organization — its data, processes, and people — to support AI over time.

**4. Multi-Tool Strategy:** Rather than searching for a single “best” AI tool, she advocates for understanding the strengths of different tools and deploying them strategically. “There’s no single ‘best’ AI tool,” she wrote in Inc. magazine.

Positioning in the AI Field

Rajan occupies a distinctive position in the AI field: she’s neither a pure technologist nor a detached academic observer. Instead, she operates at the crucial intersection of strategy, implementation, and organizational change.

Her work addresses the gap between AI’s technical capabilities and organizations’ ability to deploy it effectively. While much AI discourse focuses on model capabilities or ethical concerns, Rajan’s focus is relentlessly practical: How do organizations actually integrate AI into operations? What leadership competencies enable success? Which organizational structures support sustainable adoption?

This positioning — informed by consulting experience with dozens of Fortune 500 companies and hands-on strategy work at a leading SaaS firm — makes her insights particularly valuable for executives navigating AI transformation.

2026 and Beyond

As AI adoption accelerates in 2026, Rajan’s framework for thinking about AI as a strategic amplifier rather than a replacement is gaining traction. Her research on leadership competencies in enterprise AI adoption promises to add academic rigor to insights drawn from years of practical experience.

At Freshworks, she’s helping shape strategy as the company scales its AI offerings toward a $100 million revenue target, positioning AI agents and intelligent automation as core differentiators in a competitive market.

Her thought leadership — published in outlets from Inc. to Business Insider — continues to influence how organizations think about the human side of AI adoption.

In an industry often dominated by discussions of technical capabilities and ethical concerns, Rajan offers something different: a practical, strategy-first approach to AI that treats technology as a means to better human decision-making rather than a substitute for it.

“When we start outsourcing the thinking, we lose twice,” she wrote. It’s a warning that resonates far beyond the technology sector, speaking to fundamental questions about human agency, strategic thinking, and organizational capability in an age of increasingly powerful AI tools.

For organizations grappling with how to move beyond AI pilots to sustainable transformation, Rajan’s framework offers a roadmap: amplify human thinking, maintain strategic ownership, build organizational capability, and measure outcomes that matter.

It’s a message that has made her one of the most influential voices in enterprise AI adoption — and a claim to fame built not on hype, but on helping organizations navigate the messy, complex reality of making AI actually work.

This story was aggregated by AI from several news reports and edited by American Kahani’s News Desk.