Google DeepMind’s Chief AI Officer Got the Job With No AI Training. Here’s What Set Her Apart.

Lila Ibrahim’s route to the top of Google DeepMind started at the age of 14, when she spent summers detasseling corn in Indiana for “$1-something” an hour. It was a grueling job that left her sweating, scraped up and certain that she wanted another kind of life. 

“I grew up in really humble beginnings,” Ibrahim recently told Fortune. Her immigrant parents were building careers in a new country while raising three children, including one with cerebral palsy. It was a loving home, she said, but money was tight, and life was complicated.

Working in the cornfields was “really hard labor,” she recalled. One thing set her apart, though, and would continue to differentiate her for the rest of her career: “I had this strong work ethic,” she said. 

Agriculture wasn’t her future, but that relentless work ethic would go on to define her career. 

That drive soon carried Ibrahim from the fields into a Purdue University lab, where she worked on fruit-fly DNA while still in high school. She obtained a bachelor’s degree from Purdue, majoring in electrical engineering. 

From there came nearly two decades at Intel, spanning roles in Santa Clara, California, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai. By the time she departed in 2010, she was chief of staff to Intel’s CEO, helping oversee an organization of 85,000 people while raising newborn twins.

She later served as chief operating officer and president of the educational platform Coursera, before joining Google’s AI research lab, DeepMind, as its first chief operating officer in 2018. 

Becoming DeepMind’s first chief AI readiness officer

When Ibrahim joined DeepMind, she lacked experience in AI or research. Despite her unique profile, she was promoted to become the company’s first chief AI readiness officer this year. The role focuses on preparing institutions and society for AI’s effects.

Ibrahim is used to being a “first” everything. “I had to get really comfortable very early on in my life that I was just an outsider,” she said. 

Ibrahim’s instincts as a leader came from watching two immigrants, her parents, build a life from scratch, each carrying different forms of bravery.

Her Lebanese father lost both parents as a young child before eventually making his way to the United States. He became an engineer and worked on early heart pacemakers and car-safe technology.

Ibrahim’s Palestinian mother had ambitions that stretched beyond the limits of the life expected of her at home. Ibrahim describes her as “too ambitious” to stay put for long. In the Midwest, she became one of the few mothers Ibrahim knew with a career that took her on regular business trips.

Looking back, Ibrahim sees those choices as the foundation of her own worldview. “When I look back now, they shaped so much of who I am today,” she said. “Despite having dark hair, English as a second language and growing up in the Midwest of the United States, I was taught that opportunity is everywhere, and you are not defined by anything other than your own curiosity.”