JoulestoWatts Business Solutions Pvt Ltd has named Priya Mohan as its new Chief Operating Officer. For Mohan, this was not a routine career move. She has described the decision as one she thought through carefully, driven by a genuine desire to take on a role that is both challenging and meaningful in equal measure.
Before stepping into this position, Mohan spent seven years working in the venture capital industry, first with Venture Highway and later with General Catalyst India. Those years gave her a front-row seat to how companies across sectors were approaching artificial intelligence and more importantly, where they were going wrong.
During her time in venture capital, Mohan observed a pattern that repeated itself across many of the companies she encountered. Founders were able to build compelling narratives around AI and attract investor funding on the strength of those plans. But when it came to actually putting those ideas into practice, most of them struggled. The gap between the plan and the reality was wide, and it showed up consistently.
Her conclusion was that the technology itself was rarely the root cause. The deeper issues were a lack of contextual understanding of the business environment, weak execution discipline, and an absence of clear accountability for results. These are fundamentally operational and organisational problems, not technical ones and they are exactly the kind of problems a strong COO is positioned to solve.
At JoulestoWatts, Mohan will work closely with founder Priti Sawant with a specific focus on helping Global Capability Centres, commonly known as GCCs, move past the planning stage and genuinely embed AI into how they operate. The company currently works with more than 300 such centres, making the scale of this challenge and this opportunity quite significant.
GCCs have become an increasingly important part of India’s technology and services economy. The sector currently hosts over 1,700 captive centres across the country, employs close to 1.9 million people, and generates around $65 billion in exports annually. That number is expected to nearly double in the coming years, reflecting just how central India has become to the global operations of multinational companies.
What is also changing is the nature of the work being done within these centres. Multinational corporations are no longer looking at their India operations purely as a way to reduce costs. They are now actively building real artificial intelligence and engineering capabilities here, which represents a fundamental shift in how GCCs are being used and valued.
Mohan’s view is that JoulestoWatts is particularly well-suited to serve this evolving GCC landscape. As the sector moves from being a cost centre to becoming a genuine hub for AI and technology capability building, the need for companies that can bridge the gap between intent and execution becomes more critical.
With her background in observing how AI adoption fails at the organisational level, and now with the operational mandate to fix exactly that problem inside hundreds of GCCs, Mohan brings a perspective that is both informed and practically grounded. Her appointment reflects JoulestoWatts’ intention to deepen its impact in a sector that is growing fast and changing in meaningful ways.
