A Year of Building, Learning, and Laughing My Way Through AI at Ford

This year at Ford stretched me, humbled me, and—thanks to AI—occasionally saved me from myself.

Ford is the largest organization I’ve ever worked in. Leading at enterprise scale requires patience, clarity, and a sense of humor. Preferably all at once. Some days I brought all three. Other days, I brought coffee ☕ and a prayer 🙏🏼.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, AI slid into my leadership toolkit like, “Hey girl… let me help you with that.”

Relearning How to Lead at Enterprise Scale

Let me be honest: I thought I understood “big company life.” I did not.

Here’s what I did learn:

• Alignment meetings about alignment meetings are real
• Decisions take time because the blast radius is enormous
• And nobody moves forward unless the RACI is crisp, laminated, and blessed by three levels of leadership (sprinkled with holy water, optional)

But I also learned something about myself: I’m actually pretty good at bringing order to chaos.

So I leaned into it:

• Introduced structured 1:1 cadences
• Reinforced clear technical narratives
• Refined how we communicate upward
• Built predictable rhythms that helped my teams feel less like they were firefighting and more like they were engineering

Did everything always go perfectly? Absolutely not.
But structure kept us sane — and gave everyone fewer reasons to panic-message me at night. Phew!

AI Became My Copilot — And Occasionally My Therapist️

Early in the year, my AI usage was cute. “Draft this email.” “Rewrite that paragraph.” “Summarize this 87-message Teams thread so I don’t cry.”

But then I noticed something: AI didn’t just make things faster — it revealed where I wasn’t being clear.

Every time the output came back a mess, I realized my prompt also came from a messy place.

🤖 AI: “Here is the confusing thing you asked for.”
👩🏼‍💻 Me: “Wow… rude but fair.”

There was even a moment when AI explained my own idea back to me more clearly than I’d explained it. That one stung… but in a good way.

AI as a Leadership Force Multiplier

Once we settled into our relationship, AI helped me:

• Turn vague ideas into polished org-wide frameworks
• Clean up docs I didn’t have the emotional energy to rewrite
• Coach leaders with more precision
• Translate engineering chaos into executive clarity

And yes, it proudly helped me craft many of the “I’m trying to be diplomatic but firm” messages you all know I love.

Driving AI Adoption in a Legacy Enterprise

Introducing AI in a 100+ year-old company is basically asking everyone to switch from a comfortable couch to a standing desk. There will be resistance.

Some folks were excited. 🥳
Some folks were terrified. 😨
Some folks thought AI was secretly judging their code. 🫩

So we created guardrails: literacy standards, prompts, do/don’t examples — and we made it safe to experiment.

The shift was slow at first. Then one day, leaders started telling me how they were using AI to work smarter. That’s when I exhaled.

Building Inside Ford’s Ecosystem

Working across Subscription Services, Dealer Experience, Rewards, and more taught me one thing:

Ford is BIG. Like, “map-quest-me-to-my-own-meeting” big. The systems touch millions of customers. The dependencies are everywhere. And every architectural decision echoes for years.

• Leaders who stepped up
• Engineers who embraced chaos with resilience
• Partners who learned to communicate clearly even when the stakes were high

We built. We learned. Sometimes we tripped. But we always kept moving. With a sense of humor… most days.

Favorite Wins (a.k.a. Things That Kept Me From Losing My Mind)

• Helping engineering leaders level up and own their decisions
• Creating templates and automation that turned “Ugh, another doc?” into “Oh wow, that was fast.”
• Improving executive storytelling so our work didn’t get lost in the enterprise noise
• Introducing Technical Requirements documents to help unblock revenue-critical initiatives earlier
• Getting to write some code even if AI did the heavy lifting

Each win unlocked something bigger — speed, clarity, efficiency, or sanity.

What I Want to Lean Into in 2026

✨ Automation as Leverage
Bring AI deeper into our engineering workflows—from metrics to reviews to operational decision-making.

✨ Narrative Clarity at Scale
Uplevel leadership speed by tightening the way we tell stories about technical decisions, tradeoffs, and impact.

✨ Documentation That Writes Itself
Use AI-assisted systems to make documentation a living, breathing asset instead of a lagging afterthought.

✨ Decisions That Are Easier to Make (and Easier to See)
Improve engineering visibility, reduce ambiguity, and sharpen decision quality across teams.

✨ Bold Experiments, Smart Guardrails
Explore RAG, orchestration tools, and automated insight pipelines—responsibly and intentionally.

I’m still finding my rhythm. I’m still learning every day. And I’m still reminding myself that vulnerability is part of the journey too.

Here’s to building, leading, laughing, and learning — with AI riding shotgun.