Pharah Jean Philippe

I attribute my success to people. I like to tell people I'm an occupational extrovert - I'm actually an introvert who can sit in my house and build all day, but when I talk to people, I learn more, I do more. We connect, and when we connect, we leverage each other's skills and build something together. For example, I recently partnered with a fellow AI consultant and we hosted an AI Brunch and Connect in Harlem, where we taught women interested in AI and now we're building a community for them. It's not just transactional for me - I believe in genuine, authentic connection and uplifting as we climb. That's what Mary McLeod Bethune says: uplift as we climb. So as I go up, we pull everyone up. You need people for that. You need community for that.

The best advice I ever received came from a female boss who was a Chief Learning Officer. She told me: as a leader, you're not leading, you're meeting people where they are. When she told me that, it shifted my whole perspective, because we always come and meet people with our own perspective and what we expect from them and what we think they should do. Meanwhile, they're not ready there, their mindset's not there. So you meet them where they are, and then you help them build from there. I took that into my toolkit and I meet everyone where they're at. It's been the best advice I've ever had in my life.

Do it scared. When you're changing career paths or slowing down, thinking of retiring but wanting something for yourself, holding on to your intellectual property is key. It gets frightening because you don't know what the other side holds for you - do it anyway. Do it scared. I hate to be generalistic, but men can take 20% or 30% of their knowledge and say they can do it, but women have to know 110% of everything before we feel ready. Just take a little and do what you can with it, and learn as you go. If you don't fail, you don't learn. Don't be afraid to run up on stumbling blocks, because you're going to learn how to navigate your way around it and be more successful for the next time. If I knew that in my 20s, what chances would I have taken that I am taking now? That's the benefit of age.

AI is blowing up right now, and I feel it's a democratizer. If women can get in on this - and there are more men than women in it right now, especially in the technical pieces, not just creating visuals or writing stories, but technically running AI, using it for business, consulting and advising - the trends toward AI consulting, AI adoption, and AI governance are hot right now that we can definitely leverage and take off with. I'm not worried about AI replacing us when used in the proper context. I think we should grab the bull by the horns, learn it, and leverage it. We need to step into the governance space and say this is not correct, we need guardrails around this. We did it with social media almost too late, so we need to start now. We can't be scared of it, we just have to get out there and do what we have to do.

Being authentic and genuine is most important to me. I feel that in business, there's not a lot of that left. The human connection is really important to me, and that's why I believe in human-centered AI as well, because we are using tools that can completely replace us if we're not careful. I tell people we're the original AI - the tools can't do anything without us. We have to be genuine. When I use a digital image of myself, I say there's a digital image of me, but it's me. When I write stuff, I'm very ethical in how I say or do things. My writing - if you've read my LinkedIn - I write from my heart. It's not 'come buy this' or generic marketing. It's me telling my story, because I believe that story resonates with other people, and that's how you find and build your community and your people.