Meet the AI4ALL Team: Amy Chou, Corporate Partnerships Manager
We’re so pleased to introduce you to Amy Chou, our new Corporate Partnerships Manager. In this role she will cultivate and develop key relationships with funders, donors, and sponsors. She’ll also launch and manage AI4ALL’s corporate engagement program, which will provide a structure to build, nurture, and maintain partnerships with some of the top companies and leaders in and around AI, including NVIDIA, Autodesk, and others.
Prior to joining AI4ALL, Amy worked at Clever, a company that aims to improve education through access to learning technology. While there she was the Customer Solutions Manager, which involved leading and managing the customer support team to build positive user relationships and the Enterprise Application Success Manager, where she built and strengthened corporate relationships with Clever’s web-based learning application partners. She’s also a founding board member of Camp Common Ground, a leadership camp focused on disrupting racial and economic segregation in the Bay Area by building a diverse, integrated, and loving youth community.
Alongside her relationship management and project management background, her passion for diversity & inclusion initiatives, and her strategic thinking make her a valuable part of the AI4ALL team. Learn more about Amy, her motivation for joining AI4ALL, and what she likes to do with her free time below.
What motivated you to join AI4ALL?
I joined AI4ALL because I was really excited by its mission to increase diversity in AI. To me it does feel like a moral imperative because AI will impact all of our lives in deep and meaningful ways.
I’m really happy to be working at an organization where diversity and inclusion is the core of my job. I’ve been involved with Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) and diversity committees at my previous companies, but it’s really hard to drive initiatives forward when you have a day job and that’s your priority.
What are some of the bigger issues in this space regarding getting underrepresented people into AI?
There are so many, but I think one of the more fundamental challenges is the access to high quality and rigorous education for all people. AI is a math-heavy discipline so if people of color and young girls are not getting the same opportunities to pursue high-level math, then that’s a barrier to entering AI.
Since coming to AI4ALL, I have gained an understanding for why it’s so important to highlight the interdisciplinary possibilities of AI.
I think AI would attract more diverse people if more people understood that AI isn’t just something that nerdy guys do in a basement — it is a powerful tool that can solve pressing real-world problems.
Who were your role models growing up? Do you have any role models now?
Growing up, my brother was my role model. I wanted to be like him because he was extremely kind to me and consistently came up with creative new games to play. As best as I could, I followed him everywhere. We watched all the same tv shows, played the same computer games, and went to the same schools until college where our paths diverged. He followed your standard computer science path, went to MIT, then Microsoft, and now he’s at Google, whereas I pursued a less straightforward career path. To this day, he remains a role model to me and such a great big brother. Both him and his wife were incredibly supportive of my transition to tech and helped me prep for my first interview at a tech company by teaching me about APIs.
Now, I learn so much from everybody around me that there’s not one specific person that I want to be like. I admire so much in everyone around me — from my partner, to the people I’ve managed, to the inspirational leaders I’ve met. My world is so much bigger now, and I am blessed to interact with so many incredible people who I can learn from.
What’s your favorite thing to do in Oakland?
I love walking around and looking at the many murals in Oakland. My favorite one is “We Are The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For” [by Jessica Sabogal] and it’s faces of different youths. To me, it really embodies the idea that you don’t have to wait for someone to come save you, or change your life, or make this world a better place. We are the ones who are going to do that. That message really inspires me.
I also play a lot of Ultimate frisbee. I’ve been playing with the same Ultimate frisbee team for 10 years now. We compete in tournaments, but we don’t take things too seriously — it’s really about the friendships that we’ve made.
About Amy
Amy Chou is the Corporate Partnerships Manager at AI4ALL. She is excited to bring her project management and customer success experience to increase diversity and inclusion in AI. Immediately prior to joining AI4ALL, Amy was the Customer Solutions Manager at Clever, an edtech startup that aims to make it easier to bring technology into K-12 classrooms. At Clever, she led a growing support team that consistently delivered on key metrics. She has also spent nearly a decade leading due diligence projects on M&A deals at Aon, a global financial services firm.
Amy holds a B.A. in Sociology, a B.S. in Business Administration, and an M.B.A., all from the University of California — Berkeley. During the MBA program, she co-created a full-time MBA course on Large-Scale Social Change, and was a founding member of the Race Inclusion Initiative, whose findings led to the creation of a 10-week seminar, Dialogues on Race.
Amy is a NYC native and currently resides in Oakland, where she can be found checking out books from the public library or throwing a Frisbee on a grassy field. She is a founding board member of Camp Common Ground, a Bay Area leadership camp committed to building community between racially and economically diverse students.
