Chelcie Alisha Ricketts-Riha

A lot has to do with watching the women in my life work and grow and learning from them. My grandmother worked as a legal secretary until she was 83 years old and just retired a couple years ago. My aunt is retiring this year as a school speech and language pathologist for the past 35 years. Just lots of examples of women succeeding and really growing within their fields, and the resilience has been really an example for me to continue to grow and strive and understand that even though things get tough or there's hard times, we've always been able to persevere. That's a lot of my personal viewpoint, that we're going to get through everything and we're just going to do our best.

The best advice I received was when I was originally hesitant about going into networking and really putting myself out there at first. A mentor told me, you just do it. Once you do it, you see it's not so bad, and then you try again. No one's ever come back and said they're not happy that they tried. When you're afraid to do something, just dip your toe in and get in and do it. That advice really helped me overcome my fear of networking, and now I find that attending more women-centered events has been more meaningful and fruitful for me in terms of connections.

I would say to anyone who wants to start their own business or is interested in getting into the technical or analytics world to just reach out and maybe meet somebody who has been in this role or this world, or just anybody you can find who's doing what you want to do, and just learn from them. Then take what they give you and use your skills to keep growing. There's always opportunity out there, so if you keep knocking on doors and you keep trying, and you really connect with the right type of people who can get you the right kind of information, I think that's the key to being the most successful in any endeavor. Mentorship is a great way to grow.

I think one of the major challenges right now is the advancement of artificial intelligence. There's so much out there about the topic in general that there's a lot of confusion about what AI can and cannot do, or what it should or should not do, including the governance aspect of it. In our field, it's not going to be necessarily that AI is going to replace people. I think it's more like it's going to show who can't keep up. AI is not going to take your job if you learn how to work with it. AI is a big, scary thing for a lot of people, but it is, at the end of the day, a productivity tool. Just like once upon a time Excel was introduced to people and they had to learn how to use that, and people were like, we can always just use paper and pencil, that was so easy, why are we using a spreadsheet. It's going to be the same type of learning curve over time for everybody to understand, and I think a lot of companies do need to understand the importance of governance in that type of technology as well.