Pavithra Gopisetty

I attribute my success to having the right mentors throughout my career who have impacted how I think about problem-solving and influence in organizations. My mentor from Google, who is now at Meta, would discuss the challenges companies go through and the frameworks for thinking about them, which really influenced my approach. My husband is also a very important mentor to me - we're both in engineering leadership roles, and he works for Meta, so we discuss what scaling looks like in the world of AI and what hiring looks like at a meta level, helping us identify what our strategy as leaders should be in this dynamic world. Beyond mentorship, I think my educational background was crucial. My MBA from Northwestern Kellogg School of Business was one of the inflection points in my career where I started to believe that while technology is great and you need the acumen to code and design systems at scale, you also need the lens to connect where that work goes and how it enables businesses to make money. That perspective was key to my pivot into C-level and executive roles. Also, coming from being an immigrant and a woman of color, I was inclined to always be open to learn more and fit the mold of what is required in corporate strategy while bringing my own flavor of leadership. This helped me learn skills like holistic communication - laying out multiple options with their trade-offs and complexity - and making decisions at scale, which are required to succeed in corporate roles. Observing and learning these things starting at a very young age gave me the chops to navigate the influential ladder in corporations.

I start by acknowledging that there's no one-size-fits-all in terms of advice, but I'm a strong believer that what sets successful individuals apart from the norm is being able to project the future and project what's coming around the corner. I'm not talking about just noticing trends, but really being able to see what the inflection points are in the industry or in the technology field. For any young woman trying to enter the industry, I would advise them to start by thinking at a very meta level. In any decisions or discussions that they're part of, they should be able to connect the dots to that meta level and ask the right questions that give them the answers to connect those dots. When we keep doing this over and over in different projects that we're part of, we end up having a very unique perspective on the bigger market-level shifts that we're seeing. This helps us elevate ourselves from the small problems we're solving all the way to the bigger goals that the company has, and quickly you'll be able to be absorbed into those levels of conversations.

The biggest challenges and opportunities in AI today lie in scaling teams and hiring the right talent while strategically positioning organizations to anticipate and capitalize on major industry inflection points.

The values most important to me are continuous learning, clear and effective communication, strategic thinking, and maintaining visibility and credibility in professional environments.