My starting pointLet me be clear about where I stand on AI. It is the most incredible tool we have ever built, and it is also the one most capable of leaving people behind. Both are true at once. I have spent my career watching technology threaten people and free them in the same breath, and I will hold both truths honestly. The fear is real. So is the hope. The entire job is making sure hope wins, and that only happens when we use these tools responsibly, deliberately, and in service of the humans who have to live with them. The hard part is the speed: this is moving faster than any shift I have lived through.
AI becomes good or bad based on what we decide: how we build it, who we include, and whether it expands human agency or quietly erases it.
The early internet yearsI was an early pioneer of the commercial internet, back when digital music and entertainment were the first industries the web rewrote. I was part of Napster, the peer-to-peer platform that upended the entire music business and showed the world how fast a digital shift can dismantle an established industry. Before that, at Liquid Audio, algorithmic distribution and behavioral data at scale were the product itself, not a pitch deck. My path also ran through IBM and Pfizer, delivering enterprise technology at global scale. Across all of it, one lesson held: disruption rewards the people who stay close to the humans, not just the technology.
Scaling innovation at CiscoAt Cisco, I built a global innovation function from the ground up: a $1.1B portfolio of work spanning 14 countries (I have personally traveled to more than 64), a 72,000-person workforce, co-innovation centers on five continents, and innovation programs for three Olympic Games. We earned the awards and the case studies. The lesson that stuck was simpler: the programs that worked were the ones that made ordinary employees feel their ideas mattered. The reskilling work I am proudest of reached more than 300,000 people, because of how it treated them.
The work that matters most nowToday the work that matters most to me is education and reskilling, which I believe is the single most important job of this century. As AI rewrites what work is, lifting every worker and learner with it is both a moral and an economic imperative. It is one of the honors of my life to work with the California State University system, the largest public university system in the United States, on its AI Insights strategy: understanding the impact AI has on learning and the workforce of the future, across 22 campuses and 460,000 students.
That commitment to education runs through my work across academia, as Innovator in Residence at Tulane University and as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. It is the same thinking I have carried into rooms for Google, AWS, Bosch, Coca-Cola, and Rotary International, and into advisory work, having advised both Dell, where I helped build a world-class AI consultancy, and Amgen, where I worked on early AI pilots. The tools keep changing. The conviction never does: innovation is never about the technology, it is always about the people.
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