I recently had the privilege of interviewing a remarkable tech leader at a local professional network event. She built a decade-plus career in IT operations without a traditional degree—through sheer curiosity and simply refusing to believe the path wasn’t hers to walk.

I had only been in my role about six months when I arrived at the offsite and found two red Solo shot cups at my place setting—one marked with a plus, one with a minus. For a state agency, this was racier than expected.

For a while, my speaking page said I was an AI expert. Or something close to it. The language was carefully hedged — “navigating AI,” “harnessing the future,” that kind of thing — but the positioning was clear: hire me if you need someone to talk to your team about artificial intelligence.

I was not wrong, exactly. But I wasn’t entirely right either.

I want to be honest with you upfront: I didn’t figure this out quickly or gracefully. I figured it out in a faculty meeting that went sideways, after months of work that should have gone better, wondering how something so obviously good for students had become so contentious so fast.