In a world where the loudest voices in business are the ones pursuing disruption, scale, and the next frontier in technology, Asif Jalil Mirza, CEO & Founder, CXAi and NCRI, exists in a different kind of space. He does not lead to noise. He leads with conviction. Having created two companies that operate on the international market, he could establish his reputation not by embracing the existing tendencies within the industry, but by being ever the swimmer against the stream. Where others viewed artificial intelligence to downsize, he viewed it to reclaim dignity. The success was in the quality of the environments people walked into every morning, which was the measure of the success where other people measured it in margins and market share. Forged By Loss, Shaped by Grit The story of Asif does not begin in a corner office. It begins in the quiet, difficult corridors of early responsibility. His formative years carried a weight that most young people never encountered, the passing of his mother to breast cancer. That loss did not break him. It built him. It fast-tracked his maturity, sharpened his sense of accountability, and planted in him a resolve to never take people, or their presence, for granted. Supporting his family while navigating the demands of early adulthood, Mirza worked odd jobs and pushed through hardship without the safety net of privilege. Formal education gave him structure and critical thinking, but he credits lived experience as his most formative classroom. Mentors, family members, and close friends became his faculty. The lessons they delivered, humility, perseverance, and emotional intelligence, did not appear on any syllabus, yet they form the bedrock of every professional decision he has made since. This is not a backstory that Mirza wears for effect. It is a foundation that genuinely explains why, when he eventually entered the corporate world, he saw things differently from everyone around him. The Observation That Started Everything Mirza’s professional journey began in the contact center industry, an industry that, at first glance, appears to be about technology, telephony, and throughput. What he actually found was a human story being told badly. Frontline employees, the very individuals responsible for shaping every customer interaction, were consistently treated as operational costs rather than strategic assets. In a sector where service is literally the product, this struck Mirza as not just inefficient, but fundamentally wrong. “You can’t build sustainable performance while treating the very people delivering it as expendable,” he observed. That realization did not simply inform his thinking. It ignited his entrepreneurial drive. He founded NCRi with a clear mandate: help organizations understand customer experience through a human lens. The company connected operational outcomes to employee engagement, cultural health, and the quality of leadership behavior. It was a framework that forced organizations to look inward before pointing fingers outward. NCRi’s work laid out the philosophical groundwork for what would come next. As technology evolved and artificial intelligence began reshaping entire industries, Mirza saw both an opportunity and a danger. The opportunity lays in AI’s capacity to reduce cognitive load, streamline repetitive tasks, and equip frontline teams with real-time insights. The danger lay in the speed with which companies were willing to replace human judgment and human dignity with algorithmic efficiency. Tech-Powered, Human-Delivered CXAi Inc. was Mirza’s answer to that tension. Built on the philosophy that technology should amplify human potential rather than diminish it, CXAi positioned AI as a partner to people, not a replacement for them. The company’s solutions were designed from the ground up to be ethical, explainable, and purpose-driven, ensuring that innovation enhanced rather than eroded dignity at work. “AI should reduce cognitive load, not human value,” Mirza asserts. This was not a marketing line. It was an operating principle. CXAi’s approach resonated globally at a time when enterprises were grappling with the tension between efficiency and empathy. Organizations seeking sustainable transformation, not just cost-cutting dressed up as modernization, found in CXAi a partner that understood the full picture. The result was a growing global footprint built not on aggressive sales tactics, but on the credibility of outcomes. Mirza’s approach to growth itself reflects his broader philosophy. He did not set out to scale rapidly. He set out to scale responsibly. In his view, growth without cultural alignment is fragile; it eventually cracks under the pressure of its own contradictions. Trust, ethical decision-making, and long-term value creation became the cornerstones of how CXAi expanded its reach and deepened its impact. Dignity as Strategy At the center of everything Mirza builds lies a singular, quietly radical obsession: dignity at work. He carries a deep conviction that the workplace should function as a source of purpose rather than a source of exhaustion. Having witnessed firsthand the emotional toll of environments that prioritize metrics over humanity, he has made it his mission to design systems and cultures that operate differently. He mentions, “People don’t disengage from work. They disengage from environments where they feel invisible.” This insight shapes how CXAi builds its products, how NCRi frames its consulting work, and how Mirza himself leads his teams. He is not interested in solutions that look good on a dashboard but dehumanize the experience of the people behind them. His advocacy for ethical AI is not a philosophical exercise. It is a direct response to the real harm that poorly designed technology can inflict on real people. Beyond his companies, Mirza extends this commitment through thought leadership, mentorship, and active engagement with communities including Women Leaders in Data and AI. He uses his platform not to broadcast his own achievements, but to advocate for inclusive innovation and to open doors for leaders who might otherwise find them closed. When Crisis Becomes Confirmation If any single event stress-tested Mirza’s philosophy at scale, it was the COVID-19 pandemic. As organizations worldwide scrambled to adapt, many discovered too late that their cultures were not built to absorb the shock of sudden disruption. For Mirza, however, the pandemic functioned less as a crisis and

The most impactful technology of our age hardly tends to make a big splash. It is not coming with a bang or a press conference. It comes silently at the time when a voice assistant can finally speak like it knows you, or when an application is so user-friendly that you can no longer remember the learning curve. Someone, somewhere, had a choice to design it so. In a profession filled with the engineers who always strive to go fast and big, very few who pause and ask the more difficult question: does this feel human? Carlos Lastres has been asking that question about his entire career and building the answers. Winner of an Apple Design Award, MBA, Senior Product Designer, a software engineer, and twice a TEDx speaker, Lastres is working at one of the most challenging intersections of modern technology: the intersect between design and engineering, and the intersect between both and artificial intelligence. With his home in Tokyo, Japan, he applies a viewpoint living three countries, twenty years of cross-cultural experience, and a childhood fascination with how things work inside and out. From San José to Tokyo: A Career Built Across Cultures Carlos Lastres grew up in Costa Rica in what he describes as a mostly analogue childhood, with just enough digital exposure to spark obsession. He was the kid who spent hours drawing, manipulating images in early tools like Paint and Photoshop, and trying to understand what was happening inside the computer. That combination of artistic curiosity and technical hunger became the engine that has driven every chapter of his professional life since. He studied business before pursuing an MBA, a deliberate choice. He did not simply want to build things. He wanted to understand why products succeed, how people decide, and how design creates value across an entire product lifecycle. It was an early signal of the systems-level thinking that would later define his reputation. What followed was seven years in China, an experience he credits with permanently changing his working rhythm. China taught him speed, execution, and the discipline of shipping. It stripped away any romanticism about the creative process and replaced it with something more useful: the understanding that ideas only matter once they are out in the world being tested by real people. Then came Japan. Moving to Tokyo was, by his own account, a second turning point entirely. Starting over in a culture with different rules, different expectations, and a fundamentally different communication style forced him to become sharper, more patient, and more intentional. Japan did not just change where he lived. It changed how he thought. “Starting over in a culture with different rules pushed me to become sharper, more patient, and more intentional,” he reflects. Today, Lastres builds products that sit at the intersection of design, engineering, and AI, with a specific focus on experiences that feel culturally aware and emotionally intelligent. He was also invited to speak at the United Nations Office in Vienna on how AI and gamification can support emotional education and inclusion in developing countries. It is the kind of stage that reflects just how far his thinking has travelled from those early hours in front of a screen in Costa Rica. The Idea: Design Is Not Decoration Lastres began his professional life in software development, moving naturally into design as the discipline of UI/UX was still finding its shape. From the beginning, he was drawn to what he calls the moment where logic meets emotion. “Code makes something work, but design makes sense,” he says. That distinction sounds simple. In practice, it represents a philosophy that most technology companies still struggle to operationalize. Early in his career, Lastres worked on digital platforms and websites, helping companies improve how they communicate and how users move from curiosity to trust to action. Out of that work came a core belief he carries to this day: design is not decoration. Design is a decision-making system. It removes friction, clarifies value, and earns confidence. That philosophy pulled him into AI, voice technology, and digital identity, fields where the gap between powerful and usable remains enormous. He has worked on AI-driven creative and voice products that help people produce content faster without sacrificing quality or personality. The through line in everything he builds is the same: technology should feel natural. Most tools are powerful but unnecessarily complicated. His job, as he sees it, is to reduce that complexity until the interaction feels inevitable. Right now, he is channeling that philosophy into AnimaNext, an AI smart card and wearable including a ring designed specifically for the Japanese market. The product aims to modernize how people connect while respecting the deep cultural significance of meishi, the Japanese business card exchange ritual. AnimaNext has already received international press coverage around its launch, a meaningful early signal in a market where trust is everything, and cultural missteps are unforgiving. Apple, Tedx, and the UN: Building on Global Stages In 2025, Lastres won an Apple Design Award in the Inclusivity category for work connected to Speechify, a product that makes information more accessible by turning text into a natural, expressive voice. Winning an Apple Design Award places a designer in a very short list of practitioners whose work Apple considers exemplary. Winning it in the Inclusivity category says something additional: that the work did not just perform well; it genuinely served people who are often left behind by mainstream technology. He delivered TEDx talks in Hangzhou in 2019 and on Awaji Island in 2025, carrying a message he clearly believes in deeply: creativity is not a talent reserved for a gifted few. It is a skill that grows through repetition, curiosity, and a willingness to learn from failure. He is scheduled to return to the TEDx stage in Tokyo in 2026. His invitation to speak at the United Nations Office in Vienna in 2025 added another dimension to his public profile. It connects his technical work to a broader humanitarian argument. The presentation explored