By Michelle Nie, Summer 2024 Fellow
Joining the Talos Fellowship was one of the best career decisions I’ve made. The readings and guest speakers are top-notch, and I find the subjects challenging and thought-provoking. Best of all, I’ve gotten placed with the Open Markets Institute, which tackles the concentration of power in AI, and that has introduced me to the fascinating world of competition policy and antitrust regulation. In my current role as a Tech Policy Fellow, I’ve gotten to support cutting-edge research in competition and AI, help build a coalition of civil society organizations, strategize and plan events, and I’ll even be writing some articles of my own.
Reflecting back on my journey up to this point, it wasn’t exactly a straightforward career path. I’ve now made two major career transitions, worked for for-profit and nonprofit organizations, and even moved abroad. I’m sharing my journey today to show anyone who is curious about taking the leap that with the right framing and a bit of self-study, anyone can use their past skills and experiences to make the pivot to AI governance.
Starting out in tech: my early steps at Salesforce
I started my career in technology, spent years trying to distance myself from the tech industry, and now I’m finding myself back into it. Well, sort of.
When I was a student at UC Berkeley, my path felt so laid out in front of me. I would graduate with my undergraduate business degree, work for a tech company to gain some fundamental skills, quit and work in social impact, then get an MBA. I had always wanted to work in service of bettering our society, and this was a tried-and-true path that I’d seen in many of my role models coming out of Berkeley.
I started my career at Salesforce, where I worked in treasury management and then financial analysis. I admired the company and how it was run: I was inspired by Marc Benioff and his leadership, and how he used his role as CEO of a multinational company to stand up for LGBTQ rights, gender equality, and abortion rights. However, I questioned whether my skills were most effectively used at a for-profit company that above all cared about its bottom line. And at the time, Salesforce was in the middle of one of its many acquisition spending sprees, and I questioned whether the practice of aggressively buying up potential competitors was harmful to innovation. After all, it didn’t seem like the company was innovating as much or as quickly as I’d expected given its enormous resources.
I ultimately decided to quit, but looking back, this was a fundamentally impactful role because it taught me how to work effectively with teams – albeit two extremely different teams – and how to get things done within a large and often complex organization. In my current role, these skills are extremely important because of the transatlantic team we work with and the often-complex processes required to get approvals for different steps on projects.
Pivoting to social impact consulting
Transitioning into education-sector consulting catapulted me into a period of rapid professional growth, ultimately leading to some of the most fulfilling and challenging moments of my career.
As per the plan, I quit after a couple of years to work in social impact. When I was considering quitting, I called up an old mentor of mine who worked for various education nonprofits, and he was working at an education venture studio and consulting firm called Entangled. While getting some valuable career advice, I started to become fascinated by the work his company did, and I decided to apply. The process went well, and I started as an associate consultant in a field that was completely alien to me. Within a couple weeks, I absorbed books, articles, podcasts, and videos about all things adult education and workforce development. I learned about design thinking and how we could apply its methods in research projects. I learned how to type faster than I’ve ever typed in my life and to create slides in minutes. My skills in financial analysis – particularly my spreadsheet skills – proved useful as my colleagues assigned me to create and budgets and analyze data for projects. I felt valued and that I was actually making good use of my time, and I got along well with my colleagues.
I stayed in education-sector consulting for several years, both for companies and as a freelancer. I actually had stuck to my plan and applied for business school a few years after graduating, but after getting accepted to some top programs, I decided the timing wasn’t right – and maybe business school wasn’t really right for me. I decided I was in a good place with my career and didn’t want to jeopardize that.
I loved consulting – the tight timelines, the structure of working within a project plan, working alongside brilliant team members. Most of all, I loved the variety of projects and tasks I’d work on. At any given moment I could be working on two to four projects and use skills ranging from marketing and communication to research and analysis to stakeholder management and event planning. The most accomplished I’ve felt in my professional career was when I helped launch an $85 million grant program for the State of Colorado (which was also my first foray into policy – more on that later). I played the role of an interim program leader, which I had no business doing, and learned more than I ever have in my life every single day on that project.
Looking back, the skills that have helped me the most in my current career are stakeholder mapping and engagement, project planning, and being a proactive self-starter. Being able to organize my own timelines and keep my team on track in my current role has been crucial to making progress on different projects. And understanding how to research different stakeholders and map overlapping interests has been useful in coalition building and event planning.
Rethinking impact: learning about AI governance
Despite my love for consulting, I wondered if I could make more impact elsewhere – and an unexpected move abroad helped open new possibilities.
However, after a few years of this type of work, although I enjoyed the work and the teams I worked with, I found myself questioning my future career path. I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted to be a leader in consulting – I didn’t think I had the right skills or temperament to be in that high-stakes of a role. I also found myself questioning whether education was the right issue area for me to work on. I had stumbled upon 80,000 Hours’ guides and saw that the most pressing global problems were way bigger than what I was working on: nuclear war, risks from advanced AI, and global pandemics. I wondered if I could dream bigger in terms of the impact I could have in the world. I had followed my San Francisco roommate’s journey in quitting Google to work full-time in AI safety. And this was 2022, so I was shocked by how powerful ChatGPT was and was nervous about the impact it could have on the world.
At the same time, unrelatedly, I found myself moving to Paris to follow my partner. Being in Paris seemed to unlock a whole world – I’d always admired Europe from a lifestyle standpoint, but I started to learn more about the EU and how things worked on the other side of the pond. I decided to follow this curiosity and enroll in a Master in Public Affairs program at Sciences Po. I knew I wanted to do something in policy, and hopefully something related to the EU, but I wasn’t sure which domain yet.
Crossing the pond: exploring EU policy at Sciences Po
My studies at Sciences Po sparked a passion for AI policy, and the Talos Fellowship enabled me to overcome doubts about my background and enter the field.
At Sciences Po, I enrolled in many different types of classes – our core economics classes we were mandated to take, AI and tech policy classes, and political science classes. The AI classes were the most impactful to me. I realized that AI was developing much more quickly than anyone had thought, and while there was proposed legislation in the EU, there was a lot of work to do to properly implement the law, develop complementary policies, and work with industry and stakeholder groups. I knew then that I wanted to work in AI policy, but I had no idea how. I wasn’t even sure if I could be useful without a technical background. I had a lot of useful consulting and finance experience, but would it be useful to these experts I found so intimidating?
In the midst of all of these questions, I found the Talos Fellowship. A mentor had introduced me to it, and it seemed to check all the boxes for me. I liked that there was a placement aspect of the program to help me get my foot in the door in the AI policy world. I decided to go ahead and apply. I framed myself as someone who had a lot of fundamental skills and could learn quickly, who wanted to work on policy within the EU, and who was dedicated to mitigating the risks of frontier AI. I luckily got accepted, and the rest is history!
Entering AI policy: the Talos Fellowship journey
Despite the challenges of transitioning to a new field, my previous skills in project management, communications, and teamwork have proven invaluable, affirming that AI governance is the right path for me.
As mentioned, I’ve had a very enlightening time in the Talos Fellowship so far, and I’ve really enjoyed my time at OMI so far. However, transitioning to AI policy research hasn’t been entirely easy. I’m expected to read and write a lot more rapidly than I’m used to, and I had to upskill pretty fast on topics related to competition. But I’m enjoying the challenge, and I’m also enjoying putting my skills gained from previous experiences to work.
My project planning and prioritization skills have helped me balance multiple projects, from writing grant applications on behalf of OMI to creating an internal newsletter on AI news to writing article pitches for various publications. My marketing and communications skills have helped me effectively explain and “sell” what the OMI does to different audiences. And my experience working in teams have helped me navigate the organization and figure out who I can go to for what.
I’m still in the midst of the fellowship, and I’m not sure what comes next. But I know I’ve gotten clarity that AI governance is the field for me, and that I’ll continue to learn and grow and contribute to the field as best as I can.
Advice for aspiring AI policy professionals
Simply put: read and write – and try to create opportunities relevant to the field wherever you can.
If anyone’s wondering, my advice for anyone looking to transition to AI governance is to start reading and writing as much on topics related to AI as possible – and don’t be shy about sharing. This is extremely important because many job opportunities ask for writing samples, and many jobs are very writing-heavy. So start a blog, post on LinkedIn, email back and forth with a friend – there are so many ways to flex the muscle of writing about AI. While I was in grad school, I wrote almost every single essay on the topic of AI. One of these essays was not even for a tech-focused class but for a class called “Democracy in Crises” – and my final essay for the class, which focused on how AI is harmful to democracy today, was accepted to an AAAI symposium. That led me to present at Stanford, meet scholars and industry representatives working on all sorts of issues in AI, and further develop my network.
I’m inspired by the good work people are doing in AI governance, and I’m excited to be joining this community of brilliant and thoughtful people. It is such a new field, and new roles are constantly being added in all sorts of organizations and topics, so anyone can start now and become an expert rather quickly. I hope this post inspires people to forget about their imposter syndrome and go for their dream career in AI governance!
About the author
Michelle was a Summer 2024 Talos Fellow, having recently completed a Master’s in Public Affairs at Sciences Po. This summer, Michelle will be joining the Supervised Program for Alignment Research (SPAR) on a project focused on sovereign compute governance. Her prior experiences including corporate financial analysis for a technology company in San Francisco, social impact consulting for consultancies in the education & workforce development sectors, and client success at an edtech company.
Blog image: An artist’s illustration of artificial intelligence (AI). This image explores how AI can be for sustainability efforts. It was created by Dada Projects as part of the Visualising AI project launched by Google DeepMind. From Unsplash
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