From Entrepreneur to AI Architect: Transforming the Future of Education

Simran Suri has spent more than a decade as an entrepreneur building products across the consumer, education, and health care sectors, guided by a deep interest in technology and experience as a meditation practitioner. She is the founder of Kanegi, a startup in Mumbai, India, that creates immersive wellbeing solutions, including virtual reality (VR) therapy, meditation pods, and emotional literacy programs for health care and education organizations. For Suri, innovation is not simply about building new products—it is also about designing systems that meaningfully improve how people learn, heal, and grow.

Her connection to health care began early. Raised in a small town surrounded by physicians and business owners in her family, Suri developed an understanding of both the clinical and systematic realities of the industry. This dual exposure shaped her long-term perspective on health care. As emerging technologies gained momentum, her curiosity naturally drew her toward the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), VR, augmented reality, and medicine.

“I wanted to understand AI from a strategic and institutional perspective,” Suri explains. “I recognized the importance of understanding the technical, regulatory, and ethical layers of AI.” Enrolling in the Leading AI Innovation in Health Care certificate program at Harvard Medical School gave her the opportunity to explore dimensions of AI that she had not previously encountered.

Suri entered the program eager to understand how AI functions in health care not just as a tool, but also as an infrastructure. While her background in business and systems thinking supported her work as a startup founder and innovator, she wanted to shift her mindset from building isolated technologies to designing long-term AI architecture.

Making Global Connections Beyond the Classroom

One of the most powerful aspects of the program for Suri was the global peer network. Conversations with fellow participants began prior to the official start of the program, allowing relationships to form before the group gathered in Boston. She found herself resonating with professionals from a wide range of countries and disciplines, which sparked an ongoing dialogue that extended well beyond the classroom. Today, Suri collaborates with several of these peers on new ventures and maintains an active community where they inspire one another as AI and technology innovators.

“We’ve continued exchanging ideas around AI deployment in universities, which is what my current work is focused on,” she says. “Everyone is eager to move beyond discussion into implementation, which is something I’ve never experienced in other programs.”

Suri also formed strong connections with faculty, engaging in open discussions with program co-director Roger Daglius Dias, MD, PhD, MBA, about new ideas and program feedback. The in-person immersion on campus proved especially impactful. Attending sessions at MESH Core generated new conversations and pushed her thinking further than ever before. 

The keynote discussion by Professor Amitabh Chandra, director of Health Policy Research at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, was particularly transformative. Suri reflected on his observation that health care often suffers from “analysis paralysis,” where innovators wait for perfect datasets rather than acting on the information already available. 

The takeaway, she notes, was clear: meaningful innovation requires discipline and experimentation within existing data constraints. “Responsible AI is not about perfection,” Suri says. “It’s about iterative learning with transparency and guardrails.”

Using AI to Improve Patient Care

For her group project, Suri and her team developed Rx Fusion, a platform aimed at improving medication reconciliation and reducing clinical errors through AI-assisted integration of fragmented patient data. Their goal was to bridge gaps between disparate systems and reduce preventable errors, two persistent challenges in hospital environments. 

The team explored how AI could intelligently aggregate, reconcile, and flag inconsistencies while maintaining essential clinical oversight. “It was a strong example of how AI can augment decision-making rather than replace it,” she explains.

Working through a real-world problem revealed the significant market demand for solutions like Rx Fusion, while also deepening Suri’s understanding of compliance and regulatory considerations in high-stakes health care environments. The experience sharpened her knowledge of AI governance, adoption frameworks, and ethical deployment — insights she continues to apply today, particularly in India, where AI adoption is accelerating rapidly.

Turning Insights into Impact

Since completing the program, Suri has continued to apply its lessons while nurturing the international relationships that she has built. She became a founding member of Answerr, an institutional AI infrastructure initiative designed to prepare educators, institutions, and students for an AI-driven future. Her work centers around partnerships with universities and venture capital firms to help teach others that AI is not a threat to institutions, but rather a trust-enabling layer that strengthens them. 

Most recently, Suri co-authored a research paper on trusted AI infrastructure for education, which was selected for inclusion in the Government of India’s national AI casebook.

Reflecting on the experience, Suri describes the program as a turning point in her professional journey. It renewed her confidence and visibility, helping to propel her career forward as both a business leader and an entrepreneur.

“This program became a restart for me,” she says. “It pushed me to stand on my own feet and put me in the spotlight in ways that other programs simply couldn’t."

Written by: Lian Galley