Her next job? Defending human judgment in a superfast digital world
At Soul Machines, we were building digital humans, with eyes that tracked your sentiment and micro-expressions tuned to make people comfortable enough to engage. We kept running into the same wall, the uncanny valley. The more lifelike a digital human became, the more it unsettled people. A not-quite-human face read as not-quite-right, and something in them pulled back before they knew why. We were never going to fix that by making the technology better; past a point, a more realistic face was a worse experience. The obstacle was never the technology. It was trust, and trust lived inside the person, not inside the machine. The technology was the easy part. The people were the challenge.
I recognized this quickly because I had already lived the same lesson from the inside. Years earlier, a hard season in my life sent me into therapy. I couldn’t hand myself over to the process until I understood how a mind actually works. That instinct, understand the human machinery before you trust it, is the same one I would later follow into a master’s in psychology. Not as a detour from technology, but because I had come to believe the human element decides the outcome.
That same instinct then shaped every role I took. I built Autodesk’s first virtual assistant and learned that adoption is an emotional event, not a feature. I led growth transformation at Magnit and Litera, work that looks like process and technology on paper but is really about whether people will change. It was one conviction, followed again and again: go to where the technology meets the people because that is where it succeeds or fails.
For most of my career, that conviction read as a specialty. The agentic AI moment ended that. We are handing real judgment to machines faster than people can absorb what that really means. Do they trust it? Do they understand what it’s doing? These are human questions, and they have moved to the center of business.
This is exactly why I chose this seat. I want to be in the room where technology enters the world and make sure the people who will live with it are accounted for before the decision, not after. And here’s the risk I don’t think we’re taking seriously enough: when a machine offers an answer faster and sometimes better than you can form your own, the temptation is to stop forming your own. The real risk of this moment is not that AI outpaces us. It is that we hand over our judgment and only notice once it’s gone. Protecting that judgment, staying able to think for ourselves while the tools accelerate, is the work I am choosing next.
