At an AI conference in Poland, a live translator after translating several talks told Abhinav, “AI is not even my subject, but yours was the only session where I really understood what it can do. As a speaker, you cared if I learned something & used it”. That line defines Abhinav Chetan’s work.

As the founder of Digital for Nonprofits (D4NP) and Digicated.ai, Abhinav’s mission is simple – make complex technology usable and build systems on top of it to drive business growth and social impact. Ask him about his guiding principle, and he answers with a single word: ‘leverage’. He often recalls Archimedes’ quote – ‘Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum strong enough and I will move the world’. For Abhinav, Generative AI is that lever, but it only works when the fulcrum is bolstered by measurement and method.

Abhinav’s journey started at Delhi University with a background in electronics and a love for writing. He joined Google in 2008 when digital marketing was still in its nascent stages. Surrounded by IIT and IIM graduates, he quickly realized that curiosity and consistency mattered more than credentials.

“If I showed-up every day and kept learning, expertise would follow. At Google, everything was measured - campaign performance, client outcomes, and even internal projects. That taught me to audit where you are, align on a shared goal, and then advance. That idea now guides almost every engagement my brands run”, says Abhinav.

‘Leverage’ – The Guiding Philosophy

Over time, Abhinav kept returning to a purpose-driven question: how could this structured leverage be applied to organizations that lack the resources of global brands? After working for 12 years across various teams and geographies at Google, he took a leap of faith to answer that question by launching two ventures – Digital for Nonprofits (D4NP) and Digicated.ai. D4NP works with nonprofits, enabling them to access technology grants, digital marketing, and GenAI to achieve self-reliance. Digicated.ai partners with forward-thinking brands and focuses on accelerating GenAI maturity to drive business growth. While both brands are built on the principle of leverage, D4NP focuses on social impact and Digicated.ai is centered on business outcomes.

When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, Abhinav and his team immediately began experimenting. They saw that the tasks

which used to take hours collapsed into minutes, which is when he realized that this wasn’t just a clever tool but a new way of working. Initially, the experimentation focused on internal workflows. Once the team saw consistent gains, the work moved outward. “You can adopt a tool in an afternoon. But real maturity comes when the way you work changes permanently. This journey from experimenting to educating within my teams to applying the same approach to brands and nonprofits has shaped how both D4NP and Digicated.ai now work”, says Abhinav.

My decade-long yoga practice and study taught me the value of alignment. Whether it’s your body or an organization, when aligned well, it will create energy and outcomes more naturally

Well-defined SOPs & KPIs

Across D4NP and Digicated.ai, the operating model is deliberate and consistent. Every conversation starts with assessment. Through audits, surveys, and interviews, his team maps where an organization stands on digital or GenAI maturity. Adoption comes next, where training, workflows, and assistants are embedded into tasks. This is followed by advisory, which keeps systems updated as tools and platforms evolve. At D4NP, Abhinav realized that most nonprofits don’t lack intent but instead access and systems. His team has enabled organizations to unlock over $10 million in technology grants and accelerate digital presence, aided by GenAI, that helps them do more with limited resources. With Digicated.ai, his key insight was that integrating GenAI into the DNA of an organi -zation has an outsized impact on their growth journey.

For example, a disaster management nonprofit based in Ahmedabad, who partners with D4NP, expanded its outreach from two channels to nine. Their monthly newsletter readership grew fourfold, and online event participation increased threefold. Similarly, Digicated.ai helped a fast-growing startup in the student accommodation space enable over 50 employees to integrate GenAI into daily workflows, reducing task time by 30-40 percent. Abhinav is particularly proud of the human shift behind the numbers. “Once you experience that kind of leverage, you rarely go back to your old way of working”, he says.


Journey So Far, and Beyond

Behind these systems, there’s an educator who has trained over 10,000 professionals in digital marketing, taught at India’s top business schools like MICA and ISB, and led GenAI enablement for more than 2,500 participants across CXOs, startup teams, and nonprofit leaders. He also received the Business World 40 under 40 recognition for his work in marketing. “My aim is not to impress a room. It is to make a new skill or tool feel accessible so people aren’t afraid to try new things. The cycle of ‘learn, unlearn, relearn, and repeat’ has become essential in a world where things change within weeks”, adds Abhinav.

Looking ahead, Abhinav’s focus is on making GenAI maturity a mainstream conversation. His team is working on a GenAI Maturity Report for brands, designed to map their readiness and enable them to accelerate adoption. In parallel, they have already started Generative Engine Optimization programs to aid discoverability for brands in the age of large language models and Gen AI. The direction is clear – use GenAI as a lever, build systems as the fulcrum, with people at the centre. In conclusion, he says, “Technology is a tool. It is a lever which is meant to augment you, not replace you and GenAI is one such powerful tool to achieve unprecedented leverage at scale”.