Avani Solanki Prabhakar

Avani Solanki Prabhakar is a human resources executive known for her expertise in the future of work, talent strategy, and workforce planning. With more than 20 years in the HR profession, Prabhakar translates complex organizational challenges into actionable, human-centric strategies. Before joining Atlassian, she held leadership roles at Fuji Xerox Australia and British Airways, where she led HR transformation initiatives across multiple regions. Her early career included positions at Genpact and GE Capital, providing a foundation in talent strategy and workforce planning.

Prabhakar joined Atlassian as head of HR for the Asia Pacific region and advanced to the role of chief people officer. Her tenure at Atlassian includes leadership positions such as SVP, global head of talent and HR, vice president, and senior director – head of HR Asia Pacific and global M&A lead. In these roles, she contributed to scaling talent strategy and supporting global growth. As chief people officer, Prabhakar oversaw global human resources strategies, employee programs, and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, leading teams focused on HR business partnerships, employment relations, talent, M&A, and DEI to align HR goals with Atlassian’s business strategies.

Prabhakar currently serves as chief people and AI enablement officer at Atlassian, a role that integrates the People function with Atlassian Customer Engineering. This organization drives operations across engineering, data science, research insights, customer tech support, and strategic initiatives. Prabhakar is a key architect of Atlassian’s Team Anywhere philosophy, a global model for asynchronous work across time zones.

Identifying as an introvert, Prabhakar advocates for inclusive work environments that empower all personality types. She supports systems that encourage thoughtful contributions and promote asynchronous and distributed work practices. Her TED Talk, "How Distributed Work Can Unlock Your Potential," explores how flexibility and asynchronous collaboration in distributed workplaces can unlock diverse global talent, level the playing field for introverts, and increase productivity without harming company culture.

Prabhakar ranks in the top 1 percent of all LinkedIn creators globally and the top 3 percent for the HR industry. She has discussed topics such as measuring AI’s value and the importance of context with Forbes. An advocate for women in technology and STEM, Prabhakar uses her platform to highlight women’s achievements at all levels of the industry and promote an inclusive corporate environment.