India’s engagement with artificial intelligence has, until recently, been focused on opportunity. Efficiency, automation, digital public infrastructure, and data-driven governance have taken center stage. But beneath the surface of software exports and startup unicorns, a quieter, more existential conversation is starting to emerge: How do we retain our cultural and ethical compass as we build systems that move faster than we can reflect?
Among the voices entering this space is AI Driven Leadership: Leading with Dharma in the Age of AI, a book that does not seek to instruct or predict, but to remind. Written by Kuruva Venkataramana Murthy, it reads less like a manual and more like an intervention — not into the mechanics of technology, but into the soul of leadership itself.
Beyond Tools: A Civilizational Pause
Much of the global AI discourse has been dominated by questions of capability: how smart are these machines? How far can we take them? What can be automated next?
Murthy’s work reframes the question entirely: What kind of leaders are we becoming in the process?
The central concern of AI Driven Leadership: Leading with Dharma in the Age of AI is not artificial intelligence, but artificial authority — a form of power exercised without pause, context, or conscience. Rather than challenging AI’s usefulness, the book questions the erosion of discernment in those who deploy it.
At a time when AI is being trained to make decisions about loans, health, policing, and education, the book prompts a civilizational pause: Are our leaders evolving as fast — ethically and philosophically — as the systems they’re unleashing?
Reintroducing Dharma Without the Mythology
For many in the modern professional world, Dharma has become a lost word — often misread as religious, archaic, or ornamental. Murthy reclaims it with surgical clarity.
In this context, Dharma isn’t about morality in the abstract. It’s a way of holding decisions against deeper, contextual truths — about intention, relationship, service, and consequence.
Rather than offering a replacement for AI governance, the book brings attention to what current governance lacks: the capacity to reflect before acting, to honor the local before the scalable, and to embed memory in systems that otherwise forget.
It’s not a book about algorithms. It’s about the mindset of the human who writes them.
A Leadership Crisis Hidden in Plain Sight
Across sectors, a pattern is emerging: Leaders are making faster decisions, accessing more data, managing larger teams — and feeling increasingly unsure of their direction. This is the condition Murthy describes as the collapse of inner alignment.
AI Driven Leadership: Leading with Dharma in the Age of AI identifies three fault lines that, if left unaddressed, turn leadership into theater:
- Ethical Disconnection: When value statements have no bearing on technological rollout.
- Awareness Deficit: When leaders act faster than they can reflect.
- Emotional Obsolescence: When tools evolve but empathy stagnates.
Rather than diagnosing these as strategic errors, the book frames them as philosophical missteps — a neglect of inner work in favor of external action.
Why the Book Matters (Even If You Don’t Read It)
What makes AI Driven Leadership: Leading with Dharma in the Age of AI significant isn’t just its content, but its stance. It doesn’t sell leadership as a skillset. It doesn’t commodify culture. It doesn’t frame Dharma as India’s exportable version of “ethics.” Instead, it engages honestly with the contradictions of building human-centered systems in a world obsessed with machine efficiency.
It’s a reminder that progress without introspection is not evolution — it’s momentum without meaning.
The book may not top bestseller lists. It may not trend on professional networking platforms. But it will find its place — in study circles, ethics classrooms, design thinking workshops, and reading rooms of people who sense that something in the AI conversation is missing.
Not a Launch — A Leak in the Wall
In the end, AI Driven Leadership: Leading with Dharma in the Age of AI is less of a publication and more of a leak — a quiet seepage of old wisdom into new spaces. It doesn’t fight with slogans or offer silver-bullet solutions. It sits there, persistently, asking whether modern leadership can ever be meaningful without a deeper relationship to memory, context, and responsibility.
For a country like India — where tradition and transformation constantly collide — this kind of literature may prove more enduring than any policy whitepaper or keynote speech.
It reminds us that long before we asked what AI could do for us, our stories already asked: What will you become when you have the power to decide?
