Akash Doshi is a corporate & growth leader currently overseeing digital transformation for Delta Air Lines’ Vacations business. With a career spanning strategy, product, data, and operations, he’s led flagship initiatives driving eight-figure revenue growth and scaled traditional brands into digital-first powerhouses. He’s also the founder of Atlanta Feeds, a nonprofit tackling homelessness. Akash is known for turning complexity into clarity—and for building high-performing teams that favor asymmetric upside over incremental wins. Whether you’re in code, content, or capital, he builds shared vision that gets teams from concept to execution.
Akash Doshi leads with clarity, purpose, and data-driven insight. As digital strategy head at Delta Vacations, he helps teams move from concept to execution with speed and alignment. His frameworks simplify ambiguity, turning bold ideas into measurable action. Across corporate teams and nonprofit spaces, Akash Doshi focuses on what matters most—building strategy that scales with purpose.
LISTEN TO THE FULL PODCAST EPISODE HERE
Beverly Hills Magazine: Akash Doshi, how are you doing?
Akash Doshi: I’m doing well. Thanks for having me.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Let’s dive in. How did you begin your career in digital and corporate leadership?
Akash Doshi: I graduated from Emory about a decade ago, so it feels like a long time, and got my start in the media industry with Warner Media, now known as Warner Bros. Discovery. When I joined, it was going through the AT&T acquisition, and I quickly became familiar with the struggles legacy media was facing. The streaming wars were picking up. People were ditching cable subscriptions for new ways of watching. Short-form video was exploding. A lot of what I worked on there was revenue diversification.
A struggling business model—how do we revamp it for the new age? How do we move beyond the advertising-based model that dominated media for so long? That was my foray into the corporate world. After that, I worked at a startup for a couple of years in a growth role, leading growth and strategy for household-name brands like Athletic Greens, Instacart, DoorDash, and traditional retailers, helping them build their B2C and e-commerce presence. Now, I’m at Delta Air Lines, leading digital strategy and consumer growth for our vacations business.
The 30-second takeaway is that Delta Vacations allows you to bundle Delta-branded airfare with a hotel, rental car, in-destination activities—everything you need for an end-to-end vacation experience for any leisure traveler.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Such diverse industries must shape your leadership style. Can you tell us about that?
Akash Doshi: I’m a big fan of leading on the ground. Some of my closest mentors over the past decade taught me that through action. They weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. That’s a big component of how I work. I like to understand how teams function day-to-day, something that often gets lost in today’s leadership. It’s a good north star for operating and managing high-performing teams.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Absolutely. What does being a generalist mean to you in today’s workplace with such high-performance expectations?
Akash Doshi: Good question. It deserves some historical context. Many folks in corporate follow a cookie-cutter path—you’re a finance major, go into investment banking, do two years, pivot to private equity, or start in marketing and follow a defined cycle. I’ve been fortunate that each role in my career wasn’t just an iteration of the previous one. They were radically different, requiring new skill sets, people, and functionalities.
That’s allowed me to work across e-commerce, growth, digital strategy—terms that might sound like buzzwords but have given me the ability to work closely with diverse teams and understand their operations at a granular level.
Beverly Hills Magazine: That gives “jack-of-all-trades” a whole new meaning. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from working with high performers?
Akash Doshi: A few things. High performers want to be led by someone with a firm understanding of their work. Frustration often arises when they can’t communicate daily challenges to someone who doesn’t get it. Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, recently spoke about revamping their org structure because engineering teams were led by people who hadn’t written production code in years, or marketing teams by those without experience in that space. High performers look for domain experts as leaders. That’s probably the biggest thing in today’s corporate environment.
Beverly Hills Magazine: That lends to loyalty within a company when leadership is trusted and knowledgeable in the field. How do you approach creating alignment across diverse teams?
Akash Doshi: A phrase that’s stuck with me is that people can smell inauthenticity easily. In any industry, you can quickly tell if someone knows their stuff. In media, you’d know within 30 seconds if someone’s been in the space. That’s a gut check: Is this someone I can see myself being led by? Do I trust their decision-making? If they make a gut call, can I buy into it? That’s a good framework for understanding if a leader is worth following.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Absolutely. Building your career in corporate America, what advice would you give young professionals in terms of mindset, leadership, or professional development?
Akash Doshi: That’s a loaded question. For 2025 graduates entering a dynamic environment with shifting macroeconomics, it’s competitive. You’re up against other talented grads. Persistence is key, but it’s easy to think you’re working hard when you’re not. We owe ourselves an honest look in the mirror to check if our self-perception is true. Self-awareness is critical. Also, the elephant in the room: artificial intelligence. Gen Z understands tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot.
But go beyond that. Think about enterprise use cases—how could a magazine like Beverly Hills Magazine use AI for customer segments, reach, or digital content resonance? Whatever industry you’re in, consider how these tools solve specific job-related problems.
Beverly Hills Magazine: How do you break down complex ideas into actionable steps for teams?
Akash Doshi: I don’t own this idea—it’s a popular mental model: first principles thinking. In digital, product management, corporate strategy, or M&A, you deal with complex problems. Stakeholders may not have your technical understanding. Break the problem into its simplest parts and communicate that. It’s easier to get buy-in. For AI use cases, marketing, revenue, or finance teams may not speak the same language. Creating a common vernacular has been a successful strategy for me.
Beverly Hills Magazine: What framework do you rely on to prioritize projects or goals with a full plate?
Akash Doshi: Prioritization has a stepsibling: sequencing. Prioritization is what we’d ideally want with no resource constraints—unlimited people, budget, staffing. What’s the order of operations? Then, sequencing brings us to reality: this is our staffing, budget, constraints. How do we fit prioritization into that? Another strategy is the fail-fast model—optimize for fast decisions, not perfect ones.
It sounds contrarian, but it allows quicker iteration. Paralysis by analysis wastes time and first-mover advantage. We don’t know what’s perfect until we get to good first, gather feedback, and validate. It’s like putting a product to market, getting customer input, and pivoting if needed.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Action is better than no action, and you learn as you go, like in entrepreneurship. Can you share a time you helped a team navigate ambiguity, and what strategy did you use to gain clarity quickly?
Akash Doshi: It ties to making complex ideas accessible. We all want our work to matter to others. Even at a dinner party, explaining what you do to friends in an approachable way is key. In media, if we talked about return on ad spend or display, it might sound like jargon. First principles help make ambiguity concrete. I also use analogies and metaphors.
For example, many teams want to build AI but lack resources like OpenAI. AWS Bedrock is like a tool shed for a carpenter who knows how to build a bench but lacks wood, nails, or a saw. It provides the materials to build and deploy AI. That analogy helps explain complex solutions to companies asking how to build AI without expertise.
Beverly Hills Magazine: How has your view of data changed, especially with AI, throughout your career?
Akash Doshi: We don’t need all the data; we need the right data. At Delta Vacations and Delta Air Lines, I work on data engineering and strategy with massive datasets. The challenge is making them valuable, true for any large enterprise. We get qualitative and quantitative customer feedback—how do we stitch it together? The biggest lesson over the past two to three years is identifying the right data and your North Star metric. With functionally infinite data, if you had to keep one metric to know if your business is heading in the right direction, what is it? Like an MVP in product development, what’s the minimum data that tells you how your business is performing?
Beverly Hills Magazine: That reminds me of beta testing product launches to gather feedback and iterate. Where is consumer technology heading, and how would you suggest others create winning digital products?
Akash Doshi: Look at the venture capital scene. In the early 2010s, consumer tech was hot—Reddit, social media like Facebook, Instagram rising, TikTok as Musical.ly. Now, in the 2020s, venture capital has shifted to B2B SaaS for better unit economics and less churn. Businesses are less likely to ditch tech stacks due to retraining costs. Consumer tech continues but lacks the venture backing of 10–15 years ago.
However, AI democratizes it. Non-coders can now build digital products with tools like Repl.it, Amazon’s CodeGuru, or ChatGPT. You can say, “Build a tic-tac-toe game or a shirt store,” and start coding immediately. This empowers people to bootstrap from their apartments or basements, building incredible products without institutional backing.
Beverly Hills Magazine: That creativity and freedom are limitless—may the best product win. Let’s talk about the media industry, the intersection of legacy and digital media, changes in audience behavior, and tech-first streamers like Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and Netflix competing with legacy players. What are your thoughts?
Akash Doshi: Legacy media relied on massive content libraries too long and didn’t realize audiences have short attention spans. We love classics like Friends or How I Met Your Mother for nostalgia, but people want new content. HBO Max, now just Max, Peacock, Disney Plus, and Hulu—partly owned by Disney and Warner Bros.—are shifting. Hulu’s moving toward the Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV category, focusing on high-quality content over quantity. They release a few successful hits, like My Friends and Neighbors on Apple TV, understanding what resonates.
Their distribution is unmatched. Building a streaming product was new for legacy media, but for Apple and Amazon, it’s easy compared to past technical builds. They leverage existing distribution. Amazon bundles Prime streaming with subscriptions, making it sticky—I need Prime for orders, so I keep the streaming. They prioritize customer experience, catering to diverse markets with content in local languages, which sets them apart.
Beverly Hills Magazine: I agree. Amazon and Netflix focus on customer experience which is key to success. When I started in media, people said it was saturated, but I operate from a limitless abundance mindset—there’s enough for everyone. You can forge your own path with a unique signature. Even with legacy streamers and giants, new innovators can rise and rival them, whether you believe it or not.
Akash Doshi: If you don’t cannibalize your own business, someone else will. Wealth creation isn’t finite; new ideas and execution drive it.
Beverly Hills Magazine: How do you connect creatives, engineers, and analysts with different skill sets under one goal?
Akash Doshi: It started when I was 22, but even earlier, growing up in Georgia’s Atlanta suburbs with diverse, talented people—athletes, digital product builders, audience growers. They had their realm of genius. I learned I was good at stitching them together. They spoke different vernaculars, came from different worlds, but shared a thread—maybe the high-performer thread. Someone excelling in sports and someone building a magazine audience understand what it takes to be great. Modern digital-native teams have creatives, content builders, and engineers. The thread varies, but it exists. As a leader, find what connects them—how they see things similarly or differently—to create cohesion from seemingly unrelated parts.
Beverly Hills Magazine: At the end of the day, we’re all human, having this human experience. Empathy, especially from a Christian perspective as children of God, fosters a playful, loving, family-like environment, even in high-stress settings. It helps us relate, resolve conflicts, and collaborate effectively.
Akash Doshi: You said it more eloquently, but there’s a shared human bond tying us together. I love how you tied it to the human experience. There’s a common bond, no matter who you are, that’s the biggest takeaway.
Beverly Hills Magazine: For you, throughout your life, how do you balance your challenging, high-stress corporate career with your personal life? Do you have a spiritual outlet? Do you pray, meditate, read, exercise? What’s it for you? Because we’re all high achievers. We want to be successful, use our gifts and talents, achieve our dreams. But we also have to care for our well-being and mental health. How do you do that?
Akash Doshi: You may not like this answer, and I tend to be a bit contrarian. I’m not afraid to walk into a room and say what people don’t want to hear, but it’s probably true. Nobody wants to hear it, but I’ll say it because we need to be on the same page. I don’t have much work-life balance right now. The reason is that work-life balance resonates with folks who may not be fulfilled in their day-to-day job. Maybe “fulfilled” isn’t the right word, but maybe it’s not what they’re passionate about. Their job might be a means to earn a salary, pay for things they love, or take care of their family, which is their purpose—and hats off to them, more power to them. Where I am in life right now, I get a lot of fulfillment from the work I do.
Beverly Hills Magazine: I love that. I’m with you. I love what I do, and I feel like I don’t work a day in my life, even though I have a never-ending to-do list and a workload unbelievable to most people. I’m with you 100%. But as a Christian, I believe even God rested on the seventh day. So, I take Saturday, unplug, don’t even look at my computer, and my six days are far more productive. I feel I bring so much more of my spiritual being into what I’m creating and producing from that one day of spiritual rest and reset—connecting with God, nature, family, whatever. I highly recommend it. So, tell me, what do you want your legacy to be in business and beyond?
Akash Doshi: I’ve been thinking a lot about this, tying it back to understanding your purpose. I’ve been reflecting on impact—what mark do you want to leave on the world? A scary truth, likely true for me too unless I do something great, is that many of us will live and die without being remembered. For many, that’s not an issue; their goal isn’t a lasting legacy. But I’ve been thinking about what it takes to build something humans will remember. I don’t know if it exists. We live in a world with short attention spans, so much hitting us from every angle.
If being remembered is my focus, maybe that’s not a good North Star. It goes back to validating what I’m chasing in life. For legacy, I’m approaching it from how I can create an impact, even just for folks in my everyday life—my parents, family, colleagues. If I can do something memorable in that moment, create positive change, bring a smile to their face, I’ve won that day.
Beverly Hills Magazine: We mentioned the butterfly effect yesterday. Your very existence is purposeful. We must keep sight of that and know how we interact with others, the influence we have, even in small spheres, can have a profound effect for generations. A simple smile can change someone’s life trajectory. You’re incredible, a powerhouse of information, high-performing ethics, and insights. Before we wrap up, give us one key takeaway you want every listener and reader to remember from today.
Akash Doshi: If I had to pick one thing, it would be: don’t wait to do what you love. We all try to wait for that perfect moment. For me, it was travel—taking a week each year to explore a new country, get out of my headspace, refresh my body and mind. I was waiting for friends or schedules to line up. Then I realized I’d never get through my bucket list if I waited for the world to be in perfect harmony. Whatever it is—work, starting a business, spending time with family—don’t wait.
Beverly Hills Magazine: I agree. For me, praying to God to lead me into what He designed and created me to do was pivotal. That’s when I saw supernatural shifts into creative outlets always within me that I needed to unleash. It’s powerful. How can people get in touch with you and stay connected?
Akash Doshi: LinkedIn is the best way to reach me. I also have a personal website, DoshiCorp.com, where you can find more about what I’m working on and current initiatives. Last, I started a nonprofit last year in Atlanta to assist folks experiencing homelessness. Whether you’re from Georgia or elsewhere, I’d love for people to get involved.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Even Jesus said charity is the highest virtue. It’s been such an honor. God bless you, and thank you for an inspiring conversation about leadership, purpose, and driving impact in both business and life. Your insights on digital transformation and connecting diverse teams are truly motivating, and we’re excited to follow your journey.
Akash Doshi: Thank you, Jacqueline, for this engaging discussion. It’s been a privilege to share my perspective and connect on these ideas. I’m grateful for the opportunity and look forward to staying in touch.
Conclusion:
Akash Doshi proves clarity is the foundation of real progress. From corporate strategy to community service, he builds structures that empower change. His impact spans both boardrooms and city streets. As he continues connecting diverse thinkers and driving bold ideas forward, Akash remains a trusted guide for leaders seeking thoughtful, scalable solutions.