Artificial intelligence has been around for quite some time now, but over the course of 2023, the technology has taken various industries by storm.
For Intuit’s Jennifer Booker, when something like the generative AI platform ChatGPT takes off with lightning speed, large corporations have to act quickly, pinpointing how it can be used to push their organization forward before it’s too late to catch up.
“This time last year, Open AI introduced ChatGPT and although generative AI has actually been around for a while, we can see that in just a mere two months, 100 million users downloaded their app and started to use it, which was the fastest-growing adoption at that time,” Booker, Intuit’s vice president of technical program management, said during AFROTECH Conference 2023. “In this world, we have these rapid advancements, and so it’s important for large organizations to be able to navigate this transformation, and it’s a delicate balance.”
She continued: “You’ve got to think about the strategic focus and making sure that you maintain a strategic focus, especially with your entire agency. You need to be able to act with urgency.”
With these new advancements and products unfolding sometimes on a daily basis, especially within the world of technology, Booker believes it is important for brands to adjust with the same level of speed and consistency.
“You need to be able to have an adoption for your customers, but along the way, you need to make sure that you have the rigor in place to be able to actually execute that,” she explained. “What I will say is that at Intuit, we’ve also gone through a transformation. We’ve moved from a tax and accounting platform, where our customers are doing work themselves, to a global financial platform where we’re able to do work on behalf of our customers.”
A part of that change includes the implementation of a technical program manager, her new role.
“This has [become] a very critical part of the organization,” Booker said. “We serve as a bridge for all of our stakeholders, and it’s ensuring that our engineers, product managers, data scientists, or designers are all able to work together to ensure that we’re able to deliver products that our customers want. And so this requires us to be able to wear multiple hats. We need to be able to have deep technical expertise in order to understand the ins and outs of our programs.”
What’s more, she shares the need to have a mindset geared toward execution, which Intuit is now doing by adapting its own generative AI model.
“We’re a four-decades-old company, and we have multiple different technologies that we have to be able to implement at our company,” Booker noted. “We moved from Docs to Windows, we’ve moved from the web to the cloud and then mobile, and then most recently, AI and generative AI, and all of this was made possible by us having a deep technical framework that we follow.”
While the technological aspects continue to evolve at a fast pace, Booker says one thing must remain constant, and that is having a huge belief that everyone has something to bring to the table. It’s just up to everyone to get out of their own way to do so.
“I had somebody tell me a long time ago that you just gotta believe in yourself,” Booker said during AFROTECH. “And understand that you have something valuable to bring to the company. If you happen to be in that discussion at that time, you have something valuable to deliver at that very time.”
She continued: “We are kind of our own worst enemy, right? Because we have voices in our head that are telling us [that], and then when people come in and they confirm what we already think in our head, that prevents us from being able to propel forward and so we just have to think about it like, ‘Yes, I have value, I have expertise, and I have knowledge in this area.”
As Booker says, whether it’s at a small scale through personal development or within a large company, the culture can continue to harness and tap into its power through technology like AI.
