Anya Qureshi

The biggest opportunity right now is learning how to adopt and wield artificial intelligence with strategy specifically. For consultants that are strategy consultants, it's about how you actually implement automated tools like Gemini, Claude, Anthropic, and OpenAI into the work that you do. We're just now starting to understand how cognition can also be supported by these types of tools, and in terms of data transformations, learning how to adopt different automated platforms is going to be one of the biggest opportunities of the century. I've been building and working with this for the past 3 years. The second opportunity is utilizing workflow automation platforms to accelerate the work that we do in healthcare. Learning how to work with autonomous design and autonomous agents tooling is one of the biggest opportunities for any strategist or data engineer in the next 10 years. How to wield the tools that are already out there is going to be one of the biggest opportunities. As for challenges, the biggest one I've encountered so far in my career is making sure that your voice is always heard. The way that you convey your knowledge is often verbally and via self-advocacy, and making sure your voice is heard when it needs to be is really hard, especially when you're working in male-dominated spaces. Another challenge has been trying to balance your life, making sure that you're doing what you need to do to be healthy, both mentally and physically, while trying to keep up with things that are demanding. A third challenge for me has been trying to give grace to myself when I need to. Entering new environments is hard, and trying to balance lots of things as a new consultant and new engineer, because my career has switched a fair amount of time, has been difficult. But the primary hardest thing has been trying to be an advocate.

My primary value is making sure that any engineer, any designer, any consultant should have one thing as a pattern, and that should be empathy. As a consultant or engineer, you're helping someone solve problems that they encounter on a daily basis. For example, when I was helping build an AI platform for artificial intelligence for patient diagnostics, that really was to help patients get diagnosed in a way that was more accurate for them, that was being missed previously. It's about helping patients that are sick get care that they need. Trying to have empathy for things that people are experiencing on a daily basis, whether it be from an energy perspective, healthcare perspective, or even internally trying to help automate certain workflows to make engineers' lives easier - trying to remain empathetic in any area that you're in is one of my values. I'm also trying to be inclusive. I know this is a women's group, which I think is really cool. In my first job out of college, I was the only woman on the site, which was definitely interesting. Trying to remain respectful and inclusive and making sure that you have a team that reflects the diversity at the place that you're in is really powerful, even for your own perspective. So inclusivity, empathy, care, and thoroughness are my main values. I think those are the main three, actually: empathy, inclusivity, and resilience are important to me.