Lauren Maffeo is a true lifelong learner. She earned her BA from The Catholic University of America, where she was a CUA Oxford Honors Scholar at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. She also earned her MSc from The London School of Economics and Political Science.
In 2018, Maffeo was an associate principal analyst at Gartner, where she covered the impact of emerging tech like AI and blockchain on small business owners. She realized that as technology developed, her skillset needed to keep pace, so she began her learning journey at MIT Sloan Executive Education. She studied topics such as machine learning, Natural Language Processing, robotics, the ethics of AI, and building an AI roadmap.
“When it comes to AI, it doesn’t get better or more prestigious than MIT and it was an executive-level education that I could complete while working full time. Also, I chose MIT for the fact that real MIT professors are teaching the executive courses”
Maffeo’s learning and development budget from her company covered the cost of the course, Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy, which she took in 2018. In her opinion, this was more manageable than taking time off of work to pursue a full-time two-year MBA. “MIT Sloan Executive Education is a more realistic way of increasing your skills in a particular area without making a huge sacrifice in your professional or personal life,” Maffeo shares.
“For anyone considering Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy, if you’re in a position at work to learn about AI technologies and integrating them into enterprises, this is an ideal program for you,” Maffeo says, “I was a research analyst who needed to understand the business use cases for AI as well as how to integrate AI at large organizations. Anyone in a similar position will get hands-on knowledge. Most academic programs are theoretical, but at MIT I was able to learn about the technologies and understand the possibilities within organizations.”
In the summer of 2020, Maffeo began work at Steampunk, a human-centered design firm serving the federal government, where she wanted to work directly on technical teams performing research that would benefit products’ users and works with engineers to build solutions for their problems. Taking the AI course through MIT Executive Education helped solidify that decision. “We need our clients to understand that AI is just data and data quality is the first step. Very often this means starting from scratch before you invest in NLP to solve various business challenges while helping clients understand what is possible,” Maffeo explains.
Maffeo currently leads initiatives around data governance, which inspired her to write her book, Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up, when she realized the volume of data is increasing but the maturity of the organizations in terms of governing their data was stagnating.
“I learned through working with AI that If your data quality is poor, there is very little you can do with it,” Maffeo says. "I've carried this knowledge with me throughout my career, and MIT Sloan Executive Education was the tipping point when I decided that I'd devote my career to easing this problem."
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