Her Story
About Mechelle
My background started with physics as an undergrad, and I got involved with computers during that time. As a graduate student, I did the MBA program, and this was back in the days when CRT monitors were something brand new. I gravitated towards supply chain and worked in that area for many, many years. I started at a small computer manufacturer, then moved into consulting, and then spent 10 years working for ADT Security Systems on their supply chain for all the sensors and equipment. I worked with design engineers to smooth out the operations process by configuring systems to help them with their work, things like Material Requirements Planning, which we now just call supply chain. More recently, I worked as a business analyst at Johnson & Johnson on some great projects, but my last project ended early at the end of 2024 when they decided to pivot and change directions. They were firing about 10,000 people worldwide, and as a consultant, they terminated my contract early. Since then, I've been mostly upskilling, almost like I'm on a sabbatical. I completed my Agent Force certification, which is a Salesforce certification as an AI specialist, and I'm studying their deterministic agent technology. They're leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the industry in combining code with LLM in a hybrid approach. I also have a small consulting practice, Norton Consulting, though I didn't do a lot last year. One of the most rewarding things I've done was teaching for 6 years at the post-secondary level in New York City, working with neurodiverse people and people transitioning from one career to another due to barriers to employment. They were all either neurodiverse or disabled in different ways, and that was probably one of the most rewarding things I did in my whole life.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Mechelle
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Work is very much a team sport, and it's all about supporting someone else, not just your own work. Women are actually pretty well suited for that because they're now being brought up more with team sports, which are more popular now than when I was growing up. Women need to socialize with the men and go out for drinks and do that networking, because that networking is very important so that it's not just an old boy's network anymore. One of the challenges is to get the males to see you as a colleague both in and outside of work. I can tell from my three daughters and one son who grew up that there's more group activities now, not a lot of dating so much through high school, but a bunch of girls and a bunch of guys getting together and doing stuff together. I think that's a good model for what happens at work, because you work with people that you get along with.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
There's a huge challenge for adoption, number one. Companies are reluctant, especially those who are regulated and have very critical workflow processes that need precision. They're not good candidates for the current state of where we are with artificial intelligence in terms of agents and deterministic processing. What I'm studying is Salesforce's deterministic agent, where it's kind of a hybrid between code and using the LLM where the LLM is best, which is for determining intent of what a user wants. Marrying the two pieces, it's almost like left and right side of the brain kind of thing, something that can be very precise yet doesn't really shut it down to the point where it's now a completely deterministic process. It's really amazing what they're doing. They're leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the industry, and that's why I've chosen to study them. I think Google would be the close second to where they are, but they're just not in a particular niche the way Salesforce is. Innovation today is not coming from places like Nokia Bell Labs with Nobel laureates anymore. Now you've got people like Sam Altman or going back to Steve Jobs putting stuff together in their garage, going out there directly and making the money themselves rather than working for some corporation. It's not a funnel where you have to go through a very narrow hour to get to go to market. It's a broad funnel where people are coming every which way. It's actually not even a funnel at all, it's more like standing in the middle of a field and people are throwing things at you from every direction.
03What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I think that we're put here to lift each other up and not tear each other down. If somebody would want help from me, I would of course give them the help they needed anytime. If somebody did something really good as a manager, I would make sure it's known that they did it. I wouldn't take credit for it. When things go wrong, some people push it off on the person who falls, but the most successful corporations are the ones where there is a culture of it's okay to fail and you're failing and you're learning. The whole team takes the hit, not just the person who made the mistake. That way, the corporation gets a much more broad view of the situation and they can develop better products that are more well-suited to the kind of market that we're in today.
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