Leveraging AI at Scale: Three Foundational Elements Every Organizational Leader Should Be Considering
Speakers

As Head of Data & AI, Ya is responsible for AI product and technology at LinkedIn - from research to production. She leads a global team of ~1,000 data scientists and AI engineers whose work is at the core of delivering economic opportunities to LinkedIn’s members and customers. In addition to her work at LinkedIn, Ya has co-authored a book, entitled “Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments,” and has made to Fortune’s 40 under 40 in tech. She has delivered countless speeches, including a commencement speech to Stanford’s Class of 2019 in Mathematics, Statistics, and Mathematical & Computational Science. Prior to LinkedIn, she worked at Microsoft and received a PhD in Statistical Machine Learning from Stanford University.

Melody Meckfessel is the CTO and Founder of an AI startup. Previously, she was CTO of Jasper.ai, building multi-agent systems and a context layer for enterprise marketing. She also co-founded and served as CEO of Observable, a collaborative data visualization platform. Melody spent over a decade at Google as VP of Engineering, leading core infrastructure, search, and DevOps teams that impacted millions of developers worldwide.
SUMMARY
LinkedIn has been using AI for more than a decade. In that time, it has seen the use of ML and AI accelerate and evolve in ways that challenge every organization, but especially a professional network that has reached 1B members and 67M companies. Generative AI has only heightened the interest in wanting to infuse AI into product experiences that must scale, which is why engineering leaders should be thinking about the foundations needed to help their companies reach a new level of impact with AI. Ya Xu (VP of Engineering, Head of Data and AI @ LinkedIn) and Melody Meckfessel (CTO @ Jasper) discuss the three foundational elements every leader should consider - Platforms, Expertise and Culture.
