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Key Takeaways Lila Ibrahim is Google DeepMind’s first chief AI readiness officer.
Her career began in an Indiana cornfield, not an AI lab.
She entered DeepMind without formal AI training but managed to earn a C-suite AI role.
Lila Ibrahim’s route to the top of Google DeepMind started at the age of 14, when she spent summers detasseling corn in Indiana for “$1-something” an hour. It was a grueling job that left her sweating, scraped up and certain that she wanted another kind of life.
“I grew up in really humble beginnings,” Ibrahim recently told Fortune. Her immigrant parents were building careers in a new country while raising three children, including one with cerebral palsy. It was a loving home, she said, but money was tight, and life was complicated.
Working in the cornfields was “really hard labor,” she recalled. One thing set her apart, though, and would continue to differentiate her for the rest of her career: “I had this strong work ethic,” she said.
Agriculture wasn’t her future, but that relentless work ethic would go on to define her career.
That drive soon carried Ibrahim from the fields into a Purdue University lab, where she worked on fruit-fly DNA while still in high school. She obtained a bachelor’s degree from Purdue, majoring in electrical engineering.
From there came nearly two decades at Intel, spanning roles in Santa Clara, California, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai. By the time she departed in 2010, she was chief of staff to Intel’s CEO, helping oversee an organization of 85,000 people while raising newborn twins.
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