From Reels to WhatsApp and AI: The Meta India Sandhya Devanathan leaves behind

As Sandhya Devanathan exits Meta after a decade, her tenure at the company charts its evolution from social media and digital advertising to business messaging, creators and, increasingly, AI.

When Sandhya Devanathan took charge of Meta India in January 2023, she inherited one of the company’s most important (and complicated) markets.

India was already home to hundreds of millions of users across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, but converting that enormous scale into comparable commercial value remained a work in progress. Meta was also emerging from a difficult period globally, having announced mass layoffs months earlier, while Big Tech platforms faced growing regulatory scrutiny in India.

More than three years later, Devanathan is leaving a rather different Meta behind.

The Vice President and Head of India and Southeast Asia announced on Friday that she was moving on after more than a decade with the company, describing the decision as “bittersweet”. She said she would take a short break before announcing her next chapter.

Her India tenure coincided with Meta increasingly knitting together three businesses that had once appeared relatively distinct: advertising on Facebook and Instagram, the creator economy around Reels, and commerce and customer engagement through WhatsApp.

Perhaps the clearest shift was around business messaging.

Devanathan repeatedly identified WhatsApp as a potential second growth engine for Meta India beyond conventional advertising. By 2024, around 60% of WhatsApp users in India were interacting with a business every week, according to the company. Meta introduced and expanded products including WhatsApp Flows, payments and Click-to-WhatsApp advertising as it attempted to turn behaviour already occurring organically on the platform into a formal commercial ecosystem.

The early numbers supported that bet. Devanathan said in September 2024 that Click-to-WhatsApp revenue in India had doubled over the preceding year, while payment volumes had doubled over six months. Thousands of businesses had begun adopting WhatsApp Flows.

At the same time, Reels became increasingly central to Meta's pitch to both consumers and advertisers.

India emerged as a leading market globally for Instagram Reels watch-time, while Meta began building programmes such as Made on Reels to bring creators more directly into brand campaigns. Devanathan consistently positioned short-form video not simply as an engagement product but as part of the company's advertising and commerce machinery.

The third leg increasingly became AI.

What began with AI improving recommendations, advertising optimisation and discovery across Meta's platforms expanded into generative AI products for consumers and businesses. India became one of Meta's major markets for Meta AI, while the company also worked with Indian MSMEs on AI adoption and began testing AI-led tools for businesses on WhatsApp.

That shift has since become considerably more physical. In June 2026, Meta announced an agreement with Reliance Industries for its first AI-enabled data centre in India, a 168 MW facility in Jamnagar that Meta will lease, with scope to scale further. Devanathan, at the time, described the data-centre project as something that had been “sometime in the making” for the India team.

The commercial business grew alongside these bets. Meta India's gross advertising revenue rose 29% year-on-year to Rs 29,392 crore in FY25, while revenue from operations increased 25% to Rs 3,792.9 crore and net profit rose 28.3% to Rs 647.5 crore. These are company-wide outcomes rather than a personal scorecard for any one executive, but they provide some measure of the business environment during Devanathan's tenure.

Her remit itself eventually widened. In May 2025, Meta handed Devanathan responsibility for Southeast Asia alongside India. A month later, Arun Srinivas was appointed Managing Director and Head of Meta India, reporting to her, as she moved into the broader regional role.

It was something of a return to where her Meta journey began.

Before Meta, Devanathan spent close to a decade at Citi and six years at Standard Chartered across banking and payments. She joined Meta in Singapore in 2016, subsequently helping build its Singapore and Vietnam businesses and e-commerce operations in Southeast Asia before taking charge of gaming for Asia-Pacific in 2020.

She returned to India to lead the business at the beginning of 2023, after 17 years abroad.

If the Meta she joined was still overwhelmingly understood through Facebook and digital advertising, the company she leaves in 2026 is making a considerably broader wager: that conversations can become commerce, creators can become media channels and AI can sit underneath almost every part of that machinery.

Devanathan did not create all of those shifts. But her tenure in India was spent trying to translate them into one of Meta's largest and most strategically important markets.

And increasingly, making India more than simply Meta's biggest audience.