If you were designing the career path of the world’s first Chief AI Officer, you probably wouldn’t start with a rugby field. Sol Rashidi did. And twenty-five years on, she’ll tell you the two things have more in common than you’d think.

Rashidi pivoted into data from a career as a competitive athlete, representing the US Women’s National Rugby Team and competing in NCAA Water Polo at UC Berkeley before spending more than two decades at the frontier of AI and analytics. She helped IBM launch Watson in 2011, became the world’s first Chief AI Officer in 2016, and has since led over 200 AI deployments across Fortune 100 companies including Sony Music, Merck, Estée Lauder, Royal Caribbean, and Amazon. She is a bestselling author, three-time TEDx speaker with over two million views, a Harvard senior fellow, and the holder of ten patents.

Her background was never the conventional route into a C-suite. That’s why her ideas about who gets to succeed, and how are worth paying close attention to.

From the Field to the Frontier

Rashidi’s athletic career wasn’t just a prelude to her professional life. It was, she argues, a masterclass in the skills that actually determine whether someone thrives in high-pressure, fast-moving environments.

At five foot three, she was shorter than most of her rugby opponents. Rather than seeing this as a disadvantage, she came to recognise it as an asset: a lower centre of gravity, harder to tackle, with a different kind of power on the field. “All of my inefficiencies and deficits in water polo were my strengths in rugby,” she has reflected. The lesson, that what looks like a weakness in one context can be a defining strength in another, has shaped how she approaches talent, team-building, and her own career ever since.

The professionals who succeed in the AI era, Rashidi argues, are often those who arrive from unexpected directions, carrying perspectives that specialists trained in the same narrow track simply don’t have.

Takeaway: Don’t let an unconventional background become an excuse to underestimate yourself. The skills you built elsewhere – adaptability, resilience, cross-domain thinking – are precisely what the next decade of work will demand.

The Case for the Self-Taught

In an industry obsessed with credentials, Rashidi makes a compelling argument for curiosity as the more important currency.

Her own path, from sport to data to AI, without a traditional computer science pedigree is, she contends, a model rather than an anomaly. The technical landscape changes too quickly for formal education alone to keep pace. What sustains a career over 25 years isn’t what you learned in a classroom; it is the habit of continuing to learn once you’ve left it.

Her philosophy for staying relevant is disarmingly simple: “Lead from curiosity, not FOMO.” The fear of missing out drives reactive, surface-level engagement with new technologies. Curiosity drives genuine understanding. There is a significant difference between an employee who has downloaded the latest AI tool because everyone else has, and one who genuinely wants to understand how it works, what it can’t do, and where it might fail.

For organisations rethinking their talent strategies, Rashidi’s argument has clear implications. The employee with an unusual background who has consistently retrained, pivoted, and upskilled is often more adaptable, and more valuable than the one with the perfect CV and a fixed idea of what their role entails.

Takeaway: Audit your learning habits honestly. Are you upskilling because you’re genuinely curious, or because you feel pressured to? The former compounds; the latter stalls. Commit to one new area of genuine curiosity every quarter, and go deep rather than wide.

The Real Threat of AI is Intellectual Atrophy

Rashidi’s most provocative idea is not about what AI can do. It’s about what it’s doing to us.

She coined the concept of Intellectual Atrophy™, the gradual erosion of critical thinking, common sense, and creative problem-solving that occurs when we outsource too much of our cognitive work to machines. “Something critical is withering,” she has written, “the ability to think independently.” She points to the example of commercial aviation, where aviation authorities have identified a troubling pattern of pilots becoming dangerously over-reliant on automation and struggling to respond when those systems fail.

The parallel for the modern workplace is direct. Employees who let AI do their analysis, their drafting, and their decision-making will, over time, lose the very faculties that made them employable in the first place. Rashidi doesn’t frame this as a moral argument against technology. She is, after all, the woman who has spent her career deploying it at scale. She frames it as a strategic one. The companies that will thrive are those that use AI to amplify their workforce’s capabilities, not those that use it to hollow them out.

Her Human Amplification Index™ is a direct response to this risk: a framework that measures not just what AI is producing, but whether the humans working alongside it are becoming sharper or more dependent.

Takeaway: Ask yourself: is your daily use of AI tools making you better at your job, or just faster at it? There is a difference. Build in deliberate practice – make a decision before you ask AI, draft before you prompt – to keep your judgment sharp.

Breaking the Glass Ceiling in Tech

This International Women’s Day, Rashidi’s story carries particular resonance.

She entered a field that, in the early 2000s, had few women in senior roles. Becoming the world’s first Chief AI Officer meant not just doing the job, but defining what the job was. It meant, as she has put it plainly, being willing to “exchange popularity for progress.” Her role, she has said, was “to push boundaries and people” Not to be liked, but to be effective.

That willingness to be uncomfortable, to accept that the path forward isn’t always the path of least resistance, runs through everything Rashidi talks about. She earned recognition as one of Forbes’ AI Visionaries of the 21st Century, was named among the top 50 women in tech, and is one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices by building something that hadn’t existed before.

Her advice for women navigating similar terrain is direct: “You need a backbone and not a wishbone to survive in this industry.” But she pairs that toughness with something more nuanced – the belief that EQ (emotional intelligence), BQ (business intelligence), and SQ (social intelligence) matter more than IQ. The ability to read rooms, build coalitions, and bring people with you is not a soft skill. In a field as complex and contested as AI, it may be the hardest skill of all.

Takeaway: Stop waiting for the role to be created before you step into it. The most valuable positions of the next decade don’t have job descriptions yet. Identify the problem your organisation needs solving, and start solving it. Visibility follows contribution.

Five Things Sol Rashidi Wants You to Do Differently

1. Protect your thinking. Use AI as a tool, not a crutch. Form your own view first, then use AI to challenge or refine it. Delegation of thought is the one form of delegation you can’t afford.

2. Hire for curiosity, not just credentials. The self-taught employee who has upskilled across domains may be your most resilient hire. Ask candidates not just what they know, but how they learn.

3. Make learning a non-negotiable. Rashidi has described genuine technologists as lifelong learners. Whatever your field, build structured time for learning into your week – not optional, not reactive, but planned.

4. Measure human amplification, not just AI output. When your organisation deploys AI, ask whether your team is becoming more capable alongside it. If the answer is no, the deployment is incomplete.

5. Build your backbone early. Progress and popularity are not always compatible. The decision to prioritise what matters over what’s comfortable is one that compounds – in career trajectory, in reputation, and in self-respect.

Rashidi’s career is not the story of someone who followed the path. It is the story of someone who built one, in a field that was itself being built, and brought others along in the process. In a moment when AI is reshaping what it means to work, learn, and lead, that kind of trajectory isn’t just inspiring. It’s instructive.

The future, she would argue, belongs to those willing to stay curious, stay uncomfortable, and keep thinking for themselves.

Sol Rashidi is the bestselling author of Your AI Survival Guide: Scraped Knees, Bruised Elbows, and Lessons Learned from Real-World AI Deployments (Wiley, 2024). You can follow her work at solrashidi.com and on her Substack, The Sol of AI.

About the author

Matt Symonds is Chief Editor of BlueSky Thinking, and host of BlueSky Media Connect, bringing together b-schools and universities to meet editors from FT, BBC, Bloomberg, WSJ, The Economist, NYTimes and other global / regional media.

He is the S of QS, co-founding QS Quacquarelli Symonds, publishers of the QS World University Rankings. Matt I also co-Founder and Director of Fortuna Admissions, a coaching dream team of former business school and university admissions professionals from top-tier institutions, including Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, LBS, Chicago Booth, Columbia, Northwestern Kellogg, Berkeley Haas.

Matt co-host the CentreCourt MBA & Masters Festivals with John A. Byrne and Poets & Quants. Author of the international bestseller, “Getting the MBA Admissions Edge” sponsored by Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Bain, BCG, he writes about Higher Education and management for BBC, Times of India and formerly Forbes, The Economist and Bloomberg.

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