Sara Brackett

My education background is actually in chemistry, and I still work for a chemical company, but I've moved into the digitalization space over the last 3 years. I went to grad school and graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a PhD in chemistry. I actually took an internship the year before I graduated with BASF in their PhD Leadership Development Program internship, and out of that internship, got an offer to join their full-time PhD Leadership Development Program. I finished in 2019 at Notre Dame and started in the fall of 2019 at BASF. The Leadership Development Program is a program that allows you to rotate into different businesses and job functions every 8 months, so I was really able to start in chemistry, but then move over into product management, and then eventually strategy. From that strategy position, I went into a full-time position in BASF which was where I did a little bit more digitalization and data, and that was my role prior to the current one I'm in. I've been in my current role for about a year and a half. The leadership development program gave me that freedom to morph from straight chemist to this business, digitalization, customer success type role that I sit in now. My role is project management for launching AI features within our businesses, and every day is very different. I field and talk to people in the business, understanding what their needs are - I always call it their wish list - and then I talk to our technical teams about what is possible, communicating back and forth to identify features and then roll those features out. Through this role, we've launched 5 different features now to support businesses, and we're getting feedback that it's helping about 40% of time savings with the sales teams that are using them.