Pratiksha Patnaik

I attribute my success to my family, my friends, and even my colleagues. I think every single person who I've come across has motivated me and has helped me and supported me in some way. My biggest supporters would be my family, my friends, and my peers at work. Everyone supports me to go after something that I really want to, both in my personal and professional life, so there's a good balance on both sides.

I have received different advice from different sets of people, and I feel like there is not one single piece of advice to give, but I think the one I feel is the best is to never stop being a student. I still, to this date, would never say that I know everything about this thing in and out. There is always something more to learn and discover. If I am a student every single day, that's how I improve myself, and that's how I'll have a more open mind about what more I can learn, how I can contribute, and how I can unlearn the wrong things that I did not know before.

The biggest advice I would like to give is never be afraid to be uncomfortable and take on a new challenge. Sometimes it's very daunting to pick up that new skill, or just see that this is where most of the men are making a lot of progress, but you don't see enough women making more contributions in that area. My advice would be to have mentors in that particular field. The mentors could be men, the mentors could be women, but learn from whoever you can find around you, and just try to take baby steps. With time, it will start to become more comfortable and easy. And then just go after what you want instead of being scared.

The biggest opportunities and challenges are related to the high demand coming in for AI, because a lot of the accelerators and hardware, the TPU chips, have been designed by Google, so we have a lot of customers interested in that. The biggest challenge is how to keep our customers happy, satisfy their demands, and work in a manner where we are able to deliver on all the use cases. We need to balance everything along with capacity and everything. When we have opportunities, we also have challenges coming in with them. The biggest challenge is how to upskill yourself given that everything is changing at a very fast pace, so upskilling on the job while also providing the same quality of service to our customers is the biggest challenge and opportunity for us right now.

In terms of values, I would say stay true to yourself in whatever you are doing. Whether I'm picking up a new skill or doing something for fun in my personal life, I want my authenticity to be there in whatever I'm doing, either in my personal life or in my professional life. If I am being authentic to what I'm doing, then I can show my own creativity in my work. That could be anything personal or professional, so being authentic and showing your own personal creativity in your work is important, especially when everything around us is getting very competitive and looking all the same. Being authentic is what will help you differentiate from other people.