It was mostly dismissed at the time, because Alexa and Siri were what people thought of, but when ChatGPT got released I was in a great position and was able to quickly ship. Now I lead that capability for one of our relatively large subsidiaries.
For me, what lead me here was mostly a fascination with the decreasing marginal cost of knowledge work. There is something about building these types of products that is just very fun and feels like cheating, I love it.
When I was a year in to my career I sat down with one of our senior execs and asked if I should get an MBA, and he said “don’t waste your time, you are already in a university and we will teach you everything you need to know”. And that has been true.
Make no mistake, it is definitely a disadvantage but I got lucky.