Adriele Yamaguchi

I attribute my success to something that started being built inside of me from being very young. My mom is a single mom of 3 - she was married and had two kids, and then her husband passed away suddenly when she was young and she had two kids, one was 6 and the other was 4. I don't know how she did it, honestly. It was the 80s, she was alone with two kids, and she made her way up. She's actually my role model. Then 10 or 13 years later, she met my dad and they really wanted to have another kid. She was already older, and in the 90s that age for having a baby was just insanity. She decided to have another baby and I came to the world. Basically, she was raising me alone again with kids. She's definitely the role model that I have to never give up. She raised me by herself in better financial condition - I grew up in the best schools and was able to go to all the classes I wanted. She always told me 'go' and never said 'don't do it.' In my life, there was never a time that I was like 'oh, I really wanted to travel to Italy, but that's so difficult, I won't try it.' I will try, because my mom never said no, never said don't do it, never said don't go that way. She always said go that way, and if it doesn't work out the way you want it, come back. I was raised in a very small city in the Amazon area of Brazil, so it was distant from everywhere. Everywhere I wanted to go was difficult and expensive. I always told my mom I want to go to college somewhere else, in Sao Paulo or in the South or even abroad, and she never said don't go. She always said do your research, tell me how much it's gonna cost, and we'll try to fit it. I never felt scared back then because I knew that I had my mom, I had my siblings, that if something went wrong, I could just go back home and figure it out. My grandma is even more powerful - she came all the way from Japan after World War II with one kid, pregnant with my mom. Her and my grandpa were chosen by the government of Brazil to populate a piece of land in the Amazon that Brazil didn't want to lose to Bolivia. They left everything they knew in Japan, the language, the land they had, just to try to build a better future for their family in Brazil. They didn't speak a word of Portuguese, didn't know anything about the Amazon forest where they were gonna live, and they just came to Brazil and raised their family, started a business, and were very successful. The way that I was taught by them to see life and see that the world doesn't necessarily have any boundaries - that really shaped me to the woman that I am and to the things that I want to conquer.

I would tell them, don't give up. If someone tells you no, ask why, why not? Just go and fill the spaces, because if we are not filling the spaces, another guy will. This doesn't have to be about a battle between men and women, but it just needs to be 'I am capable enough' - just trust your gut, trust yourself. You can do more than you can ever imagine. There's a very famous book that basically says if a woman and a man both see the same job opportunity, even if the woman is more than qualified, she will find the smallest details to be apprehensive about it and be like 'oh, I'm not sure if I'm able to do this.' On the other hand, men, even if they don't have like 25% of the requirements, they will be like 'oh, I am suitable for this.' So it's not about faking it till you make it, but just understand that sometimes you're gonna learn how to do things while you're doing the things. If you think this is the opportunity for you, just go, and give the energy that it's fine not to know everything about it, but I'm more than willing to learn how to do it. I think this is what the market is looking for, and I think this is something that sometimes we, as women, we are a little bit scared of doing.

AI is definitely the next big transformation we're facing because it's really changing the way that we think and the way we do our everyday stuff. Businesses right now are scared, and they're either taking the fast way out, which is not necessarily what the user wants, or they're not doing anything. We as designers have to find the sweet spot where technology can help the user achieve something. It goes beyond just embedding ChatGPT or Claude into our software - it really needs to be about how can the user use it. How many times have we been to a website and they had the little AI icon saying 'this is AI-powered,' and when you try to use it, it's actually dumber than if you did it yourself? That's not the kind of solution I want to bring to the customer. I want to bring something that is just like ChatGPT for me - I don't have to think about stuff, I just think about how I'm gonna ask ChatGPT and then it brings solutions. With AI, people are scared and businesses are thinking this is like the moon race - they have to do it otherwise someone else will do it, and they're not thinking about the value they're gonna bring to the humans on the other side of the screen.