AI and the Future of Work: Navigating Careers from Intern to the Boardroom When Entry-Level Roles Disappear
The rapid integration of AI technologies is fundamentally reshaping career pathways in tech, especially by automating entry-level and foundational roles historically critical for skill development and upward mobility. This panel brings together industry leaders and workforce strategists to discuss the impact of removing these traditional “bottom rungs” and explores innovative strategies for nurturing talent from early career stages through executive leadership. Panelists will address critical questions around mentoring, reskilling, equitable career progression, and redefining roles to ensure both individuals and organizations can thrive in the AI-driven workplace.
Phil Tee is the EVP & Head of AI Innovations at Zscaler and the former CEO and co-founder of Moogsoft, the pioneer and leading provider of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps). Phil is a serial entrepreneur, inventor, and expert in IT service assurance — a category he was instrumental in shaping through his invention of Netcool (acquired by IBM) nearly 25 years ago. Within 5 years of graduating from Sussex, he co-founded Omnibus Transport Technologies Limited (OTT) to build and market Netcool/Omnibus. Since then, Phil has led numerous companies to successful exits, including RiverSoft (IPO) and Njini (acquired by Riverbed).
More recently at Moogsoft that he co-founded in 2011, he invented the technology that supports over 200 customers worldwide, including SAP, American Airlines, Yahoo!, Verizon, Outsystems, BNYM and HCL Technologies. Moogsoft has 72 patents and more than two dozen peer reviewed publications covering the technology, many of them authored or co-authored by Phil. Phil holds a PhD in Informatics and is also a Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence.
Helen Gu is a leading expert in the field of distributed systems and predictive analytics. She is also Professor at North Carolina State University and leads a research group supported by over $4.2 million research grants from NSF, NSA, ARO, Google, IBM and Credit Suisse. She published more than 80 research papers and has filed 11 patents (10 of them have been issued).
Helen was on sabbatical at Google as a Visiting Scientist in 2015. She also worked at IBM T. J. Watson research center as a Research Staff Member in 2004-2007 working on the IBM stream processing system.
Helen Gu received her PhD in CS from UIUC in 2004 and BS in CS from Peking University in 1999. Her work has been widely reported by presses including NSF research highlights, Communications of ACM, and The Register, and won several best paper awards from prestigious International conferences including 10-year best paper award from prestigious ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing on her innovative work on predictive auto-scaling in cloud.
View Research Papers
