What does a meaningful life look like in the age of AI?
In this thoughtful conversation for 50 Lunches, host Ken sits down with Prasanth Subramanian — engineer, leader, social activist, and founder of Rely Tech Serve — to explore that question in depth.
The discussion ranges from career reinvention and purpose to the changing nature of work, leadership, and technology. Along the way, Prasanth shares a simple philosophy that has quietly guided his path:
Be genuine. Do the right thing. Connect people.
About 50 Lunches
50 Lunches is Ken’s experiment in career transition and curiosity. Instead of sending CVs, he is having 50 honest lunch conversations with people he admires — about meaning, work, and what actually matters.
The project documents his own journey after senior roles across Google, startups, and scale-ups, and opens up candid conversations on how people design their lives and careers.
Prasanth’s Non-Linear Journey: Engineering, Activism, Leadership, and Sales
Prasanth’s story is not a straight line. It moves through:
- Engineering — building systems, learning how technology works from the inside.
- Leadership — stepping into roles that require shaping teams, culture, and direction.
- Social activism — organising, speaking up, and trying to make systems fairer for more people.
- A surprising turn into sales and customer success — discovering that “selling” can be an honest form of helping when it is grounded in trust and impact, not pressure.
Across each phase, he keeps returning to the same internal compass: be genuine, do the right thing, and connect people who can help each other. That philosophy eventually becomes the foundation for Rely Tech Serve, where he helps organisations use AI and technology in ways that are practical, ethical, and human-centred.
What Does a Meaningful Life Look Like in the Age of AI?
Ken and Prasanth explore one of the big questions of our time: how do you build a meaningful life and career when AI can do more and more of what you used to be rewarded for knowing?
Several themes emerge from the conversation:
- Meaning comes from contribution, not just skills. Tools change. Frameworks change. But the desire to contribute to something bigger than yourself remains constant.
- Being human is an advantage. Empathy, judgement, humour, and values matter even more when machines can generate content and code at scale.
- Agency beats certainty. You will never have a full plan. But you can choose the next honest step: the next conversation, the next experiment, the next person to help.
Curiosity, Questions, and Why Knowing Less Might Matter More
One of the most interesting threads is about curiosity. As AI systems make it easier to generate answers, the premium shifts from having information to asking better questions.
In the episode, Ken and Prasanth discuss how:
- Curiosity becomes a core skill — not as a vague trait, but as a practice: genuinely wanting to understand people, systems, and constraints.
- Good questions shape better outcomes — in leadership conversations, client work, coaching, and problem-solving.
- AI amplifies people who know what to ask — because tools like large language models turn thoughtful prompts into concrete artefacts: strategies, drafts, prototypes, and experiments.
In other words, the value is shifting from “I know the answer” to “I know how to explore this with you so we can find the right answer together”.
Can Helping People Be Both Your Purpose and Your Profession?
Another powerful question running through the conversation is:
Can helping people be both your purpose and your profession?
For Prasanth, the answer is increasingly yes — but only if you are honest about:
- Who you can really help (the clients, communities, and teams where your experience matters).
- How you want to help (coaching, consulting, building, connecting, or sometimes simply listening).
- What you will not compromise on (values, integrity, and the kinds of work you do not want to enable).
This is where his activist background shows up in a subtle way: the work is not just about optimising metrics; it is about making systems more humane and more equitable, even in small ways.
Turning the Mirror Back on Ken
Towards the end of the episode, Prasanth flips the script and starts asking Ken the questions:
- What are your own strengths and blind spots?
- What are you really searching for through 50 Lunches?
- How might your next chapter combine coaching, leadership, and building communities?
It is a vulnerable moment that shows why 50 Lunches works: it is not a polished interview series, but a genuine experiment in two people trying to figure things out together.
What This Conversation Means for Leaders and Teams
For leaders navigating AI, transformation, and talent strategy, a few practical takeaways stand out:
- Invest in people’s ability to ask good questions, not just in their ability to memorise frameworks.
- Make space for non-linear careers. Some of your most valuable colleagues will have backgrounds that look “messy” on paper.
- Talk openly about meaning, not just performance. People do their best work when they understand how it connects to what they value.
- Use AI to remove friction, not humanity. Let machines handle repetitive tasks so humans can spend more time in conversation, judgement, and relationship-building.
How Rely Tech Serve Can Help
If this conversation resonates with you, there is a good chance your organisation is asking similar questions:
- How do we use AI to make work better, not just faster and cheaper?
- How do we support people through career transitions as roles evolve?
- How do we design technology, processes, and teams that align with our values?
Rely Tech Serve works with leadership teams, product teams, and people operations to:
- Design AI strategies that respect human judgement and values.
- Introduce automation that removes friction while preserving trust.
- Support digital transformation that is grounded in people, not just platforms.
If you would like to explore what that could look like for your organisation, get in touch or explore our services.
Watch the Full Conversation
You can watch the full episode of this 50 Lunches conversation with Prasanth here:
And if you are curious about Ken’s broader experiment in career transition, visit fiftylunches.com to see more conversations about work, choice, and what matters next.