Michelle has spent her career at the cutting edge of technology – building it, incentivizing its creation, applying it and shaping the regulatory and legal landscape to ensure smooth and beneficial application to our economy and society.
As the CEO and Founder of Obsidian Strategies (“Architects of AI-Driven Strategies”), she helps Fortune companies identify and implement their highest return-on-investment AI opportunities. Previously, she was a senior executive at Amazon and the Vice President of the Machine Learning Solutions Lab at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
At AWS, she led a global team of business consultants and data scientists who worked with clients from a broad range of industries to spot and implement their most fruitful AI/machine learning applications. She also played a key role in addressing policy, regulatory, and ethical risks associated with AI services and applications and was the founding business executive lead for AWS’s responsible AI efforts.
Before Amazon, Michelle had the honor of serving as the presidentially-appointed Under Secretary of Commerce and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, one of the largest intellectual property offices in the world, where she brought AI and data analytics to the agency to enhance operations. As the head of the 200-year-old U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, she led over 10,000 people to implement an agency-wide AI strategy, increasing the quality, speed, and consistency at which patents were issued.
Michelle is an MIT AI Lab-trained computer scientist who enjoys nothing more than contemplating how current and future innovations can be leveraged for economic and societal good.
Michelle is an engaging speaker on AI, innovation, digital transformation, intellectual property and board governance with over 100+ speaking engagements. She spoken (often multiple times) at Southwest, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Conference, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Stanford Directors’ College, and the National Association of Corporate Directors, reInvent, The World Knowledge Forum and more.
She has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, NPR, and the MIT Sloan Management Review. For her expertise, she has testified before Congress about 10 times and received numerous awards for her leadership and professional accomplishments.
AI is powerfully transforming virtually every aspect of our business and personal lives including the way we analyze data, make predictions, generate content, delight our customers, grow revenue and increase operational efficiencies. However, there are challenges to using generative AI for organizations in terms of accuracy, copyright, bias, regulations, and more. Just because something can be achieved by AI doesn’t mean it should. Based upon her unique multi-disciplinary experiences from the top levels of technology, business, law, government and boardroom, Michelle Lee shares with her audience concrete examples of incredibly powerful business applications of AI, some associated risks, how to balance the two to lead organizations to leverage responsible, reliable and trustworthy AI applications and the implications of AI on workforce and labor needs. For this thought-provoking yet practical talk, Michelle Lee draws upon her experiences as a technologist and AI expert who has spent her career building and advising the most innovative AI/data-driven companies like Amazon and Google, her time as a top-ranked governmental official (Under Secretary of Commerce and Director of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office) and her experiences as a lawyer and policy maker to examine the practical implications of Generative AI for organizations. Audiences will come away understanding where to lean-in on AI and Generative AI, where not to, and how to leverage AI for competitive advantage.