Why we should all embrace AI

Why did you leave HSF?

For any avoidance of doubt, I left when I decided the legal profession wasn’t for me. If I were to stay in the profession, it absolutely would have been at HSF Kramer. I left to move to New York and study at Columbia University. I obtained a master’s degree in international development so that I could make a career pivot into international aid and humanitarian work.

What was your role at Google?

I had two roles at Google over my five years there. The first in revenue partnerships working with the world’s largest media companies (think News Corporation and The New York Times) to grow revenue through programmatic ads powered by Google. That was my very first introduction to tech, and I had a lot to learn. I was very fortunate in that Google was probably the best tech training ground I could have hoped for.

My second role was in product partnerships at a time when voice AI was emerging as a new technology and a new way for humans to interact with computers. Google had the Google Assistant while Amazon had Alexa and Apple had Siri. My role involved helping Google product managers build on-ramps for traditional publishers and brands onto voice AI - i.e. helping companies like Starbucks, Fandango, L’Oreal and Viacom build voice AI apps.

Was that your introduction to AI applications and potential? How did you come to work/practise in the field of AI?

Yes. This switch of roles within Google from revenue partnerships to product partnerships was how I transitioned into AI. It helped that I was already at Google, in a partnerships role where I had proven myself, and I had demonstrated an ability to learn and add value in a new domain (ad tech).

Can you say more about Adobe’s GenAI partnerships? You say that you helped companies build and integrate AI capabilities: what does this involve, and can you give any examples of what you have done?

I was at Adobe for two years, building first-of-its-kind partnerships in generative AI. Generative AI is where AI can take a natural language prompt and generate text, image, video, code or other output. Adobe has Firefly, its suite of image, video and music generation models.
The scope of my role was very broad and diverse - I’ll share a couple of highlights:

• building AI capabilities: strategic content acquisition for model training purposes. Adobe only trains on content it has licensed, and I worked on licensing deals with strategic IP holders like movie studios and major music labels to train our models.
• integrating AI capabilities: bringing in third-party (non-Adobe) models into Adobe flagship products like Photoshop and Premiere Pro. Adobe users needed model choice and so we brought in other models like Flux and Ideogram to give them that.

What is your new role?

I’ve just started a new role at Stripe, a leading financial infrastructure company that processed over US$1.4 trillion in total payments volume last year and is the platform of choice for over half of the Fortune 100 companies and close to 80% of the Forbes AI 50. I’m leading Stripe’s strategic AI partnerships, with a focus on agentic commerce and other experimental product bets. Increasingly, transactions will happen on AI surfaces like ChatGPT or Claude.ai and AI will start to transact on our behalf. These use cases will need payment rails, trust and verification, and other infrastructure, and Stripe provides those, somewhat ‘out-of-the-box’, through APIs that developers can take and build on top of. My job is to craft and deliver on the partnership strategy that will ensure Stripe plays a central role powering the AI economy while safeguarding user trust and regulatory compliance.