I recently went one-on-one with Pras Velagapudi, CTO of Agility.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
I’ve loved robotics for as long as I can remember. The earliest home videos my parents have are of me building toy robots. I spent over a decade in academia as a student, teacher, and researcher, and I never originally planned to lead anyone. That changed when I wanted to build systems too big for one person. I needed a team, so I learned how to build one, not because I cared about leading, but because I wanted to create great things together. Robotics is unforgiving, so it only works when software, hardware, and operations teams pull in the same direction. As the goals grew, so did the teams, and I’ve learned that my job is to hold the vision and the people together, not to be the one with the answers. What I do changes with scale. With 10 people, you lead how things get done. With 100, you lead who does them. With 10,000, I expect to learn something new again.
Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?
Pras: AI is changing the nature of subject matter expertise. For years, the leaders who rose fastest were those spending the most time mastering a specific tool, platform, or process. Now, strong communication and planning skills will be multiplied, while domain expertise in specific platforms will be commoditized. AI can already write the code, draft the deck, or model the spreadsheet, but what it can’t do is decide what problem is worth solving, communicate that vision clearly, or coordinate a team around it. That’s where the real leverage is shifting.
Good leaders today also need to learn how to learn and build a team that can do the same. We are in a period of rapid technological change, and no one can lean on experience when what’s state-of-the-art is changing every year. As AI and technology take over the most repetitive, lowest-value parts of a job, it opens the door for people to build new skills and move into more strategic work. Leaders who treat that shift as an opportunity for their teams will keep their best people.
Adam: What are the keys to succeeding in the AI era?
Pras: The companies that pull ahead won’t be the ones with the most AI subscriptions: they’ll be the ones whose people actually know how to use the tools they have. We have to train our teams to adopt AI so that they are getting force-multiplied effectively, rather than falling prey to tool sprawl. They should know the pros and cons of AI and its capabilities so that they can augment and automate entire workflows at the right price and focus their energy on higher-value projects. That’s what will make AI a genuine advantage instead of a distraction.
It also means discipline in what you adopt in the first place. Choose a few trusted tools and secure them properly, then integrate them across many data systems, rather than incorporating many individual tools. The AI landscape is still shaking out. Plenty of the tools and companies you rely on today will look different, get acquired, or disappear within a couple of years. Always assume that many companies that exist today may evolve or consolidate in the near future, and plan accordingly. The best approach is to let your innovation follow a clear roadmap rather than chasing hype cycles.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Pras: A good leader is compassionate but decisive. Those two traits are often treated as opposites, but the best leaders do both at once. That same integrity shows up in what they’re willing to do themselves. If you’re not willing to do it, don’t ask your team to. That standard, more than anything else, is what earns real trust. And they need the ability to prioritize and deliver against the needs of the company, not their own organization. It’s easy to optimize for your own team’s comfort or your own department’s metrics, but real leadership means being willing to make decisions that cost your own group something if that’s what the broader mission needs.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Pras: Part of learning to be a leader is building up experience, but learning through others’ experiences is faster than doing it all yourself. Look for mentors and keep yourself open to all forms of feedback. Every mistake you can learn about secondhand is one you don’t have to make yourself, and the leaders who improve fastest are the ones who actively seek out perspectives that challenge their own, not just the feedback that’s easy to hear.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Pras: Building a strong bench of leaders is how you get beyond firefighting and into strategy. If you’re the only person who can make a certain decision, you’ve become a bottleneck. Assess what you are spending your time on right now, and create a plan to grow a team that can handle it without your support. The short-term inefficiency of delegating is what buys you the long-term capacity to think ahead instead of reacting.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Pras: Time is your most valuable resource. Budget accordingly. Money, headcount, and opportunities can all be replaced– time can’t. Treat your calendar with the same rigor you’d treat a budget, and be honest about what’s actually worth spending it on. Commit to a direction, but also commit to what signs you’ll look for that tell you it’s time to reevaluate. Indecision is costly, but so is stubbornness. This matters even more in fast-moving markets, where it’s tempting to chase whatever trend is getting the most attention, but commit to the fundamentals and only pivot when the evidence calls for it. Decide in advance what would tell you that you’re on the wrong path, so you’re not rationalizing sunk costs when that evidence shows up. Be open to learning. Even if you think you know something already, you can learn from others’ context and how they reached their conclusions. The value is in understanding the reasoning and circumstances that got them there.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Pras: Learn how to say yes to everything, and then learn how to say no to everything. You’ll need one to push yourself to take opportunities, and the other to be able to focus on what you need for success. Early in a career, that might look like saying yes to the projects that scare you, the roles you’re not sure you’re ready for, the opportunities that don’t come with a guarantee. Once you have enough on your plate, the discipline shifts to protecting your focus and saying no to good opportunities, so you have room for the great ones.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Pras: At Agility, we’ve built our whole approach around not taking shortcuts. We’re not chasing the feature that plays well on social media; we’re building thoughtfully, with a focus on safety and trust. And that’s not something to hoard for competitive advantage. We work alongside other companies in this space and with industry standards bodies, because getting safety right is bigger than any one company. If our industry earns trust, everyone benefits, including us. Trust isn’t something you can rush or fake, whether it’s in a product or a team. It’s built one deliberate decision at a time, and it meaningfully compounds.
