Patricia Wuillaume

I'm very determined, and I think I'm resilient. There have been a lot of ups and downs that I just said, okay, this is just one bump in the road, you know what I mean? I don't let setbacks stop me. I keep pushing forward and stay focused on my goals, even when things get difficult.

When I was changing careers to tech, I had a mentor who was very supportive and told me to just believe in myself and throw myself out there and do the work. That was really inspiring to me and helped me make that transformative swap to a new field. I also think about what David Bowie used to say about going into the water where you can only slightly touch the floor - that's the best place to be. It's not comfortable, but it's challenging you and makes you grow. So I try to always be in a place where I'm not very comfortable because I'm pushing myself.

Don't be afraid to just go ahead and do it - throw yourself out there. Right now the market is a little tough, but if it's hard to get in, do some volunteer work. There are a lot of good organizations out there. My husband did volunteer work for an organization that connected homeless kids to families that wanted to foster kids, and it was really interesting work. There's always something you can do in this area that can give you experience and actually help someone in the process. So I would say to persevere and try to do some volunteer work while you study the industry. I think that would be good.

AI is definitely the biggest area of opportunity right now. It's going so fast. I was lucky to start working on this 5 or 6 years ago, actually before ChatGPT or any of those LLMs. I was already working on chatbots, but it was all based on decision trees and guided flows where we knew what to say if the user asked one question or another. When AI and these big LLMs started to show up, we completely changed the experience to be based on an LLM. That changes everything because now it's probabilistic, not deterministic anymore, and we have to account for that. We also have to create guardrails for the whole experience because, since we are a healthcare company, it's very important that we are trustworthy. We can't just have AI respond and maybe give a response that is not accurate. We have to guide users to say there are certain kinds of questions we don't answer, like questions related to care specifically. Those should be answered by a physician. But anything related to the insurance part, appointments, pharmacy, scheduling drug delivery - anything around the care, we can help with everything. It's very important that we make sure the user is not using the AI under our name to give them health advice.

I think being consistent is very important, and taking some risks. Don't be afraid to look a little dumb sometimes when you're new in an area, because that's the only way to learn. You have to let go of the ego part in order to explore new things and not feel embarrassed by them. That's a good way to go forward in life in general, not only at work. Being curious is important too. And obviously being a good person - being collaborative and sharing your knowledge with others. When you're in that position of uncertainty or being uncomfortable, you have to train yourself to be okay with it and look forward to it, not try to avoid it. You have to reframe those feelings.