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.
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Christopher Moretti has been an executive leader with Evernorth Health Services (formerly Cigna) since October, 2015 and is currently responsible for all infrastructure engineering Leading the Global Engineering & Infrastructure Services. In this role, Chris provides executive leadership over the teams that deliver Cigna’s voice & data networks, security engineering, contact center, database, compute, storage, information management, mainframe, cloud & devops.
Previous to Cigna, Chris spent 14 years at General Electric and its subsidiaries in various executive leadership roles supporting its insurance, consumer and commercial banking businesses. While at GE, Chris attended and graduated many of their prestigious management training classes including AIMC and EIMP. Most recently, Christopher was Managing Director of Global Networks for J.P. Morgan Chase & Company based in midtown Manhattan.
Chris started his career in IT performing many different hands on technical roles in client/server, network and security for various sized firms in the greater New York market including a period where he consulted for Greenwich Technology Partners.
Chris earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Connecticut and currently resides in Shelton, CT with his wife and 3 sons.
Dr. Wee is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of DevAI, an early-stage, VC-backed startup building network intelligence agents for the IT industry. Dr. Wee is a technology and business executive who held senior executive positions at Google, Cisco Systems, and Hewlett Packard. Dr. Wee was Vice President of Cross-Product Experiences at Google, where her team contributed to the iOS and Android mobile applications of Google’s products. Prior to this, Dr. Wee had a 10-year career at Cisco Systems where she held numerous executive positions, including Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer of Cisco DevNet and Vice President & Chief Technology and Experience Officer of Cisco’s Collaboration Business. Dr. Wee founded and led Cisco’s developer program, DevNet, and created a DevNet Partner Specialization integrated with Cisco’s partner program and DevNet Professional Certifications integrated with Cisco’s Learning and Certification business, which she also led. Previously, Dr. Wee had a 15-year career at Hewlett Packard, where she held a number of technical and leadership roles, including Vice President and General Manager of the HP Experience Software Business, Lab Director of the Mobile and Media Systems Lab at HP Labs, and Research Scientist in HP Labs.
Dr. Wee is an IEEE Fellow for her contributions in multimedia technologies and has received numerous awards, including Technology Review’s Top 100 Young Innovators award in 2002, INCIT’s Technical Excellence award in 2007, ComputerWorld’s Top 40 Innovators under 40 in 2007, Women in Technology’s Hall of Fame award in 2010, the Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women list in 2012, the Red Dot Design Award in 2015, Outstanding 50 Asian Americans in Business Award in 2019, and the YWCA Silicon Valley Tribute to Women Award in 2020.
Dr. Wee received her S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and she serves on the Visiting Committee of the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department.
