Amy Hayes

I attribute my success to all of the wonderful people around me. I've been so blessed to have amazing friends, an amazing family, and amazing support from my higher-ups, my bosses, people who have believed in me, even when a lot of times I didn't believe in myself. You know, I thought, who am I? I'm worthless, right? But people saw value in me, and they continue to see value, even when sometimes I might lose sight of that, and that helps me keep going and keep trying to live up to their vision of me. What has helped me the most in my current career is actually just going on YouTube and learning things on my own. I kind of self-taught myself a lot of what I know in Excel, self-taught myself a lot of what I know in Python, using YouTube. I would have a certain problem I needed to figure out, and I would watch a topic on that on YouTube and learn how to do what I needed to do, and that has kind of solidified me, at least on our team, as one of our prominent Excel Python users.

The best career advice I could give would be to make sure that sometimes you can get stuck in trying to do something really well, and you go above and beyond, but you're actually possibly even going outside of the scope. You can do the best thing ever, but if no one needs it, then it doesn't matter. The second thing I would say is, don't wait to learn things internally. I think it's important to seek that knowledge yourself, whether it's for your career or whatever. What I was talking about earlier with going on YouTube and just trying to learn a new skill, because learning those new skills can help you become a differentiator in your company, where maybe others aren't acquiring those new skills, and maybe there's a skill that is a gap within your company. No one else has that skill, so then now you are the go-to person with that skill.

I would advise young women entering my industry not to wait for learning opportunities to come from within their organization. Instead, I encourage proactively seeking knowledge and skills independently. Taking ownership of your learning can help you stand out and become a true differentiator within your company.

I think one of the biggest challenges is AI. We have a 9 gigawatt data center going up in Utah, and when you think about how do you decarbonize things, 9 gigawatts is more energy than the entire state of Utah. So if we're already struggling to decarbonize what we already have, how do we fit these AI data centers into it? I think the only way it happens is if it is from the start of the project, it has to be in mind, like, how are we going to power these things without impacting communities, raising their electricity prices, raising their water prices. I think there needs to be regulation. There hasn't been regulation, and that's a huge issue, right? This is a nascent technology, and if we don't regulate it in some way, we let it just explode in whatever direction, that's incredibly dangerous. With that 9 gigawatt data center, why is there not a cap on how large a data center can be? Why can someone come in and put a massive data center that's going to use more energy than the whole state just in Utah, and there's no rules to say, like, oh, okay, well, maybe that's a little too big? It's a huge challenge, and frankly, I don't know how we're gonna solve it, and I think it truly just needs federal regulation. It's 40,000 acres, it's hard to even imagine how big that is. They're building it next to a small town, who obviously they're probably gonna see their electricity rates go up, and that's just not right.

For me, the most important thing, regardless of my personal prestige or anything like that, way more important than that is making sure that we continue to help take care of climate change and mitigate it as much as we can. That is my ultimate goal, and everything I do is to try and enhance that. I'm passionate about the Pride community, and I am our Pride America's Employee Resource Group Treasurer, so I'm quite active in the Pride space, especially now that it's Pride Month, getting ready for all the Pride festivities and making sure that people across the company can get a chance to engage in Pride and have some fun with it.