Growing up in Seattle, I was exposed to tech at a pretty young age. Most of my friends' parents worked for Microsoft. I spent a lot of my free time working on little coding projects, and even started my own business developing Video game mods in high school. Movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey captured my imagination, and gave me a sense that AI was going to be an important part of the future, even if it seemed distant at the time. But I really wanted to get involved. In my Senior year of High School, I took an AI summer course at Stanford.

I am leading a super talented group of Engineers building all Kenshoo products. Our Engineering organization is organized in independent full-stack development teams that continuously deliver business value to our clients. Women make up nearly 50% of our R&D team leaders--which I am told is unusual--and this inclusive-by-design approach delivers continuous innovation in the form of unique, intuitive products and capabilities. My personal role is to maintain an engineering culture to define, change and adapt our processes and to look for the right technology to build or buy so that we can be both efficient and innovative in meeting the growing business needs of our clients. At Kenshoo we have been handling data for more than a decade. Our mission is to empower people to make informed decisions and engage audiences with digital media.

During my first job after college, I worked at a startup in the customer service department. I talked to customers, figured out what was concerning them and tried to stop them from canceling their service. Quickly, I learned that I wanted to solve the customer problems I was hearing about daily. That desire led to me working more closely with engineering teams. Eventually, that path took me into my current career in technology.

As a VP of Product Marketing, I lead a team that focuses on different product marketing activities at M-Files: product positioning, value proposition and customer communications. My team also employs subject-matter experts for different processes and industries. They work closely with product development, marketing and customer success teams to ensure that we address the specific customer needs for various industries and their respective regulations. We use and follow almost all marketing technologies from ABM to Sales Automation to analytics. Marketing organizations typically use M-Files for collaboration, data governance, digital asset management, content management, talent management, customer intelligence and workflow.

My role spans positioning, competitive analysis, lead generation, customer engagement, and brand awareness for the GetResponse Enterprise platform. GetResponse has a growing, global team primarily based in Poland with offices in Brazil, Russia, Malaysia, Germany and in Boston, MA where I'm based. Today, the company has a team of more than 300 highly-skilled employees to create an innovative Marketing Automation platform known for great design, simplicity, and unmatched user experience. Throughout the industry, Marketing Automation tools have evolved a lot over the past few years. In fact, a recent Marketing survey conducted by GetResponse and Demand Metric shows that automation can yield 3X performance gains, yet fewer than 20 percent of marketers report full automation for any part of the funnel.

On 24th May the Fieldfisher Silicon Valley team attended the Churchill Club's Top Tech Trends event in Santa Clara, CA where 5 leading VC's made their predictions for the next 5 years. The question posed was "What new tech trends will emerge with the potential for explosive growth in 5 years?", and is one posed annually to 5 leading Silicon Valley venture capitalists at the Churchill Club's Top Tech Trends debate. On pitching their trends for the future the 500 strong audience were then given the chance to vote and express their view. So, what is the future going to look like and did we just witness the introduction of a tech trend which everyone will know about within 5 years? That the trend is'non-obvious' today; and The panellists voted and critically appraised each other's predictions and then the vote was handed over to the audience.

If you're one of the 38 million American travelers this Memorial Day weekend, or enjoying one of the 800 hot dogs consumed per second during this holiday, then take a step back, relax and enjoy the week's top technology news! The question of human sustainability and sufficient resources on our planet has served as the basis for many science fiction movies. But unlike Hollywood's'Interstellar' film, our answer might be right here on Earth. AI is showing potential to completely revolutionize farming, and with it keep humanity's food supply coming. What if we could go past what we know as binary computing?