There is no shortage of AI content out there, but finding what is actually worth your time is another story. Here are the certifications I keep recommending to other professionals who want to build real AI fluency without a technical background.
Her Story
About Katherine
Katherine DiBenedetto is a Senior Customer Success Manager for the Enterprise team at BrightEdge Technologies, where she has worked for 7 years. With 13 years of experience in enterprise SEO, AI search visibility, Answer Engine Optimization, and Generative Engine Optimization, she helps clients gain organic visibility on the web using large data sets to inspire data-driven decision-making on website optimization. She works with global clients across Europe and Asia, and has been instrumental in managing the HPE account for 7 years, helping them win BrightEdge's Edgy Award for excellence in global search performance. Katherine holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing with a minor in Digital Imaging Art from Providence College (2013) and has obtained various certifications in AI platforms through Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, and LinkedIn Learning. Katherine is currently expanding her leadership footprint into the evolving world of AI-native search strategy, with her sights set on a Director-level role where she can shape how brands show up in the next generation of search. She also dreams of one day building something of her own alongside her sister
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Katherine
01What do you attribute your success to?
I keep hearing that it takes a village, and I truly believe that. Where you are in life, you usually have a lot of people along the way to be thankful for. For me, that starts with my family. They have always been wonderful at pushing me and helping me be brave, and I think bravery is at the core of my success.
As a woman in the workplace, advocating for yourself is not always easy. There are moments where you have to stand up and say, I am the right person for this, even when it feels uncomfortable or uncertain. I have had to do that more times than I can count, whether it was raising my hand for a new challenge, speaking up in a room full of people, or simply refusing to make myself smaller. That courage did not come from nowhere. It came from having people in my corner who believed in me before I fully believed in myself.
So when I think about what I attribute my success to, it really comes back to my family and the village they helped me build, and the bravery they helped me find in myself.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I ever received is actually something I recently heard from a very successful entrepreneur on a podcast: find your talent, not your passion. And when I reflect on my career, I realize I have been lucky enough to have both. I have been genuinely passionate about the work I do helping brands show up and stand out in the digital world.
But as I start to envision my next chapter, this advice takes on new meaning for me. I am developing a talent for building AI workflows that complement human work, freeing teams from administrative tasks so they can focus on what only humans can do, the creativity, the storytelling, the humanity of brand marketing. That is where I feel most energized right now, and I think that is exactly what finding your talent looks like in practice.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
If I could go back and give my younger self one piece of advice, it would be to seek out mentorship earlier and not let the discomfort of asking hold you back.
When I was starting out, I had people I looked up to but I did not always have the courage to reach out and simply say, I admire what you have built, can I learn from you? That kind of ask feels vulnerable, especially early in your career. But the truth is, most people who have achieved something meaningful are genuinely willing to share how they got there. You just have to be willing to ask.
So my advice to any young woman entering this industry is do not wait until you feel ready or worthy enough to reach out to someone you admire. Ask them how they did it, what they wished they had known, and what it took to get where they are. That conversation could change the entire trajectory of your career, and it starts with one ask.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity in my field right now are actually the same thing: AI search.
For years, the goal was to get your brand to the top of a Google results page. That playbook is being rewritten in real time. Today, brands have to think about how they show up in AI-generated answers, how an LLM decides to recommend them, and how they stay visible in a world where users may never click a link at all. That is what we call Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization, and it is genuinely new territory that most marketing teams are still scrambling to figure out.
What excites me most is that the companies getting ahead of this are not just the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones with people who understand both the technology and the human behavior behind it. That overlap is where I have planted my flag, and it is one of the most energizing places to be in marketing right now.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
At the core of everything I do, professionally and personally, is a commitment to genuine connection. I believe the best work happens when people feel seen, trusted, and invested in, whether that is a client I have partnered with for years, a teammate I am helping grow, or my own family at home.
I also place enormous value on growth. I am never really satisfied standing still, and I think that restlessness has served me well. It is what has pushed me to stay curious in an industry that changes faster than almost any other, to pursue certifications, to explore AI, and to keep asking what is next.
And honestly, integrity matters deeply to me. I want to be someone who shows up the same way in every room, whether I am presenting to a global enterprise client, mentoring someone earlier in their career, or sitting around the dinner table with my family. Consistency of character is something I hold myself to and something I look for in the people and organizations I choose to surround myself with.
Her Content Hub
Articles by Katherine
The Busy Professional's Guide to AI Certifications
AI is evolving fast. Here are the certifications and communities that have helped me keep up without starting from scratch.
I have been in enterprise digital marketing for over 13 years, and I have never seen a technology shift happen this fast. AI is not coming, it is already here, and it is changing the way we work faster than most of us can keep up with.
For me, the turning point was not a conference keynote or a LinkedIn trend report. It was a quieter realization: I was spending a significant chunk of my week on repetitive administrative tasks that, if I am being real, did not require my expertise. Scheduling, summarizing, formatting, following up. I started to wonder what would happen if AI could take some of that off my plate and give me back the time to focus on the work that actually needs a human behind it.
That curiosity sent me down a path I did not expect: I became genuinely obsessed with learning how AI works, not just using it as a shortcut, but understanding it well enough to build with it and eventually lead with it. And certifications became one of the most practical ways I found to do that.
There are more certificates out there than I can count, and I have completed quite a few at this point. But these are the ones I keep coming back to when someone asks me where to start.
Certifications Worth Your Time
- Claude 101
- This is where I started, and I cannot recommend it enough as a first step. It is free, accessible, and gives you a solid foundation for understanding how to work with Claude as an AI tool. If you have been using AI casually but want to understand it more deeply, this is a great place to begin.
- Claude AI Fluency: Framework and Foundations and Claude AI Capabilities and Limitations
- I took both of these after completing Claude 101 and they genuinely changed how I interact with AI day to day. Understanding the framework behind how Claude thinks, and where its limitations are, made me a significantly more effective user. Both are free.
- Google AI Essentials
- This one costs $49 and is hosted on Coursera, and it is worth every penny. It broadened my perspective beyond a single tool and gave me a more comprehensive understanding of AI across the industry. If you are looking to invest in one paid certificate, start here.
- LinkedIn Learning: AI Literacy for Business Leaders and What is Generative AI?
- Both of these are free through LinkedIn Learning and are perfect for professionals who want to understand AI in a business context without getting lost in technical jargon. I found the business leaders course especially useful for thinking about how to communicate AI's value to stakeholders and leadership teams.
The through line across all of these is that they are designed for people like us, professionals who are already busy, already working, and just trying to stay ahead of a field that refuses to slow down. None of them require a technical background. All of them gave me something I could apply immediately.
I have included links to all of these in the headers so you can jump straight in!
One more thing Worth Your Time
Find a Community
One more thing worth mentioning: find a community centered around AI and join it. Whether that is through your employer, a local network, or for me personally, Women Applying AI, surrounding yourself with AI curious people changes the game. You will have real conversations about how AI is actually being used, not just the hype, and you will find it so much easier to keep tabs on how fast this industry is evolving. No certificate can replicate that.
AI is moving fast. The best thing any of us can do is stay curious, keep learning, and find our people. I am still figuring it out, but these are the steps that have made the biggest difference for me so far.
A reflective exploration of intentional living for ambitious women, examining how to honor multiple ambitions—career growth, family, home, and entrepreneurial dreams—without treating them as conflicting priorities, and finding presence in each season of life.
Buying a Home, Building a Career, and Dreaming of a Business: On Doing It All Without Losing Yourself
Finding presence in a full life: why intentionality matters more than productivity.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from feeling like no matter how much you do, you are never fully present anywhere. You are in a meeting thinking about dinner. You are at dinner thinking about the email you did not send. You are lying awake thinking about all of it.
I know that exhaustion well. I am a working mother, a Senior Customer Success Manager managing a book of global enterprise clients, a new homeowner, a woman actively building toward the next chapter of her career, and someone who has never fully let go of the dream of one day building something of her own alongside her sister. On paper, that looks like a full life. And it is. But there were stretches where full felt a lot more like overwhelmed.
What shifted for me was not a productivity hack or a morning routine I read about online. It was a decision. A quiet, deliberate decision to stop treating intentionality as something I would get to eventually, and start treating it as something I owed myself right now.
Knowing what matters most in each season
Intentional living, for me, does not mean having it all figured out. It means knowing what matters most in each season and being honest about what you are trading off to get there.
Right now, I am investing heavily in my career growth, exploring AI leadership, and pursuing certifications and programs that are stretching me in ways that feel both uncomfortable and deeply right. I am also investing in my home, not just the building but the feeling of it. Right now I am in the middle of selling one home and buying another, and there is something both exhausting and deeply symbolic about that process. Letting go of one chapter, choosing the next one, and trusting that the roots you put down will hold.
And I am holding space, even if it is small right now, for the version of me that wants to build something entrepreneurial one day.
None of those things are in conflict with each other. But for a long time I told myself they were.
Those ambitions do not divide us
I think a lot of women do this. We treat our ambitions like a pie with only so many slices, as if wanting a thriving career means we cannot also want a present home life, or as if dreaming of a business means we are not fully committed to the job we are in. The truth I keep coming back to is that those ambitions do not divide us. They define us.
The most intentional thing I have done recently is give myself permission to want all of it, not all at once, not perfectly, but genuinely and without apology.
The tension you feel is not a sign that something is wrong
If you are a mother building a career, dreaming of something more, and trying to stay present through all of it, I want you to know that the tension you feel is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that you are paying attention. And paying attention, even when it is hard, is exactly where intentional living begins.
You do not have to choose between the life you are building and the life you are dreaming of. You just have to decide, again and again, to show up for both.
A Senior Customer Success Manager shares how leveraging AI workflows transformed her career by automating administrative tasks, freeing her to focus on meaningful client relationships and strategic thinking that only humans can provide.
How I Learned to Let AI Handle the Administrative Work So I Could Focus on the Human Work
How AI workflows freed me from administrative busywork to focus on the relationships and strategic thinking that actually matter.
There is a version of my job that looks like this: pulling reports, formatting decks, drafting follow-up emails, organizing data, and scheduling the next check-in before the current one has even ended. For years, that version of my job quietly ate the best hours of my day.
I am a Senior Customer Success Manager at BrightEdge Technologies, where I have spent the last seven years helping some of the world's largest global brands figure out how to show up and stay visible in an increasingly complex digital landscape. My clients are sophisticated, their needs are urgent, and the relationships I have built with them are genuinely meaningful to me. But for a long time, the administrative weight of managing 40-plus enterprise accounts was sitting on top of those relationships like a ceiling.
Then I started building AI workflows, and everything changed.
What I mean by AI
I want to be clear about what that means, because I think the term AI gets thrown around in ways that feel either terrifying or oversold. What I am talking about is practical. I started identifying the tasks in my day that were repetitive, time-consuming, and honestly did not require my judgment or my humanity, and I handed them to AI.
- Summarizing call notes.
- Drafting first versions of client communications.
- Pulling together performance data into a digestible format before a renewal conversation.
- Building the skeleton of a presentation so I could walk in and focus on the story rather than the slide deck.
The human work
What happened on the other side of that was the part nobody tells you about. When you stop spending your best energy on the administrative layer of your work, you suddenly have so much more of yourself to give to the parts that actually matter: the strategy conversations where a client needs someone to think alongside them, the moments in meetings where you notice something is off and ask the question nobody else thought to ask, the relationships that turn a renewal into a five-year partnership because the client feels genuinely seen.
That is the human work. And it was always there, waiting for me to have room for it.
I am now building toward a career where AI workflow design is not just something I do to make my own job easier. It is something I want to help entire teams do. Because I believe the future of marketing is not AI replacing people-it is AI handling the tasks that were never the best use of people in the first place, so that the humans in the room can focus on creativity, connection, and the kind of thinking that no algorithm can replicate.
If you are a woman in business who has ever felt like the administrative layer of your work is crowding out the work you actually love, I want you to know there is a way through it. You do not have to be a technologist to start. You just have to be willing to ask: what in my day does not actually need me?
Start there. The human work will be waiting on the other side.
Join Influential Women and start making an impact. Register now.