Hardi Gokani

It's hard to nail down one person, because many different people in my life have influenced my success. I would say three people mainly: my parents and my partner. I come from an entrepreneur background. My dad was, and is, a business person back home in India, and so I've seen our family start from nothing, and with the rigor and diligence, get to a point where we were a comfortable middle-class, middle-income family. A lot of the credit goes to my dad. Once I moved to the States, it was my husband who has been there, supported me, and picked up the flag at home, which has made time for me to grow professionally and academically as well.

One of the best pieces of advice I received was, if you ever come across a problem, don't go to your leader with just the problem. Go with at least a couple of solutions, and indicate which one you would recommend. Think beyond the problem.

I would say be open and curious to learning. The technology I started my career with is completely different than what I do right now, and so if you're entering a tech industry, you have to be open to learning, and you have to be curious. Do not say, this is a technology I specialize in. What's not going to change is a business problem. What's going to change is the technology. So always keep your eyes out on learning new things, and focusing on how you can use that to actually solve a problem, because business problems are always going to be there.

I see two main challenges. One is that everyone is rushing to implement AI and ML. I get where the industry's moving, but what really makes me nervous is it seems companies are starting to use AI and ML when it's not even needed. We don't really realize that not every problem needs a sophisticated technology. You can solve problems just by making some process tweaks in some cases. And don't get me wrong, I'm bullish on AI and ML, but you have to really be thorough and diligent in evaluating where you actually need to use the technology. My second concern is the ROI. Yes, everyone's rushing to use AI and ML, but a recent McKinsey research that I was reading says that 80% of AI and ML initiatives fail to show value and ROI. What I think is going to happen in the next year or two is, yes, we're all rushing to invest in AI and ML, but we're going to start getting questions about what the ROI is. It's expensive to use this technology, and so if we start using this technology without a well-flushed-out use case and business impact, we're not going to be able to show the ROI at an enterprise level, not at a team level, not at a group business unit level, but really at the enterprise level. What value are you driving by using this technology? These are the two things that really pop into my head, and I keep thinking about this quite a bit.