If people bought cars only to go from point A to point B, Ferrari wouldn’t exist. If a Rolex was valued for its superior timekeeping, bankers wouldn’t add another to a collection with every promotion. If innovation were just about delivering new features, that friend you know wouldn’t upgrade their iPhone each year.

Products are more than functional objects: they’re vessels of meaning intertwined with our identities and aspirations - even if we don’t think of them that way. Understanding what something does is easy. Understanding what it means is much harder. It is difficult to ‘make something people want’ - but just as important to ‘make people want something’.

This is how I see AI adoption. The gap between what a tool can do and whether someone will actually use it is almost never technical. It’s about what a tool signals - to others, and more importantly, to oneself - about their competence, their role, their future.

I’m a strategist and researcher who helps founders and executives see the human frictions that determine whether a product gets adopted or ignored. Most of my work is with teams navigating product, brand, and go-to-market at critical inflection points: YC-backed AI startups, health tech companies, and enterprise teams building for behavioral change.

Before going independent, I spent four years at Gemic leading strategic ethnographic research to support firms like Google, Pearson, Meta, and BMW. I’ve led in-person fieldwork across markets as well as run large scale, quantitative surveys (n=5k).

Prior to studying philosophy and economics at UBC, I took a gap year to work as a journalist in India and represent the country at the International Philosophy Olympiad.

This site is where I think in public. If something here resonates, I’d love to hear from you.

My name is Arth - Sanskrit for “meaning.”

The opinions, views, and work presented on this website are solely those of Arth Gupta and do not reflect the opinions or views of any current or previous employers, organizations, or affiliates. The content provided on this website is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as professional advice.