Career Growth Advice from April Brown, AI Leader | Career Tips for Women in AI

2B Bolder Podcast – Episode 102
Featuring April Brown

Episode Title: #102 Career Insights from April Brown, an Industry Leader in AI and an Art Innovator

Host: Mary Killelea
Guest: April Brown



Mary Killelea (Host): Hi there. My name is Mary Killelea. Welcome to the To Be Bolder podcast, providing career insights for the next generation of women in business and tech. To Be Bolder was created out of my love for technology and marketing, my desire to bring together like-minded women, and my hope to be a great role model and source of inspiration for my two girls and other young women like you, encouraging you guys to show up and to be bolder and to know that anything you guys dream of, it's totally possible. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation.

Hi there. Thanks for tuning in. So, as you know, today's career options are vastly different than what other generations have grown up with. And today's guest demonstrates the incredibly cool, creative direction you can take blending your talents and skills of both technology and art, aligning passions with success. I am so thrilled to have on the show, April Brown.

April's career journey has spanned multiple interrelated disciplines from graphic design to marketing and analytics, and as a trailblazer in AI for marketing and sales. Using her lifelong practice as an artist, she has been focusing on artistic development using AI and consulting for organizations who need help understanding how AI can be leveraged in marketing and sales organizations. She is a Reed College graduate where she's focused on art and physics. April, I love that you joined me today. Thank you for sharing your journey. You have a fascinating career.

April Brown (Guest): Thank you, Mary. I'm really flattered that you asked. I love your vision behind this podcast, and I'm just tickled to be here.

Mary Killelea: Oh, awesome. Okay, so let's dive in. Tell us about your career journey and how it led you to what you're doing today, melding AI and art together.

April Brown: Sure, sure. So they're kind of two sort of parallel paths that I've been taking my whole career, and it's probably more like three careers than it is one, but they're all somewhat related. I've been an artist basically since the year dot. I think some people, that's just sort of who they are, and it certainly was who I was. But when I started my career, and it's still true today, but much, much less so, it was really hard to make a living as an artist, really, really tough, almost impossible. And the idea of being a starving artist in a garret really did not appeal to me at all.

So, I sort of made myself a bargain, which was, okay, do what you can as quickly as you can from a career standpoint to set yourself up so that you can do art all the time. But where you can blend the skills that you have learned from being an artist and getting a lot of education on art, as well as your background in physics and apply that to the problems that need to be solved in, as it turned out, in marketing primarily.

I started out as a graphic designer, which, as you can imagine, that's like the easiest intersection between art and science or art and business. And, you know, it was a good gig. But what I noticed in that role was that for a person who had ideas, and I like to have ideas that are big ones, you really need to have a seat at the table in a business in order to get those ideas even addressed or worked on, even considered. So, I looked around at who were the people that had a seat at the table, specifically in marketing. And at the time, I worked for a direct marketing outfit. And the people who had a seat at the table were the marketers who could say how much money they were going to generate and from whom and how they could reproduce that result. And I thought, well, so I looked at the statistics that were being used. I'm like, well, I get math. I get enough math to participate in this.

How can I then say, all right, I'm going to take this graphic design. I'm going to massage it according to what I know about the audiences that are buying more of our products. And how can I make that into a virtuous loop? And that was cool. And I did that for a while. And then I got more and more interested in the analytics component, which I also noticed that if you really understood how to make an argument, a very rigorous empirical argument for why you wanted to implement an idea, you had a better chance. So, at that time, marketing automation was coming on board and everybody was totally excited about how this was going to revolutionize the marketing and sales world. And, you know, we're going to be maximally relevant as marketers, et cetera. Some of that happened, but there was still a fundamental problem and it got worse and worse or better and better, depending on how you look at it, which is suddenly there was a lot of data to be used and a lot of technology at your fingertips, but a real sort of lack of understanding about how to put those two things together.

So, I worked on that for a while and that was kind of career number two was right in the middle of marketing analytics land. And I ended up working for a startup that was acquired that built a marketing analytics platform. And that was my introduction, let's say about 10, 12 years ago into AI, my first kind of intro. And I was all excited. This was 20 years ago, and I was like, let's build a neural net to understand our B2B customers. It's going to be great. We're going to be so relevant because we're going to know what they care about, what they're interested in, and we're going to serve them up content that they love and then they're going to buy products and it's going to be great. I couldn't get anybody to sign up for that. And we probably didn't have enough computing power at that time anyway to do it.

So I kept going along with the analytics, analytics, analytics and AI and even AI at that time was all about serving up ads and how you could do programmatic advertising. And if you were an agency, how could you make a lot of money off your ads? And if you were the company, how could you sell a lot of product? And those two objectives actually conflicted a lot. So I kept going, kept going, and finally ended up a couple of years ago at a big company trying to help them bring AI to marketing. And that in some ways from an AI standpoint was the most exciting interlude because it was about using semantic AI, large language models, some very beautiful algorithms that were designed to really understand audiences in a way that I feel like I've wanted to do my whole career and really hasn't been possible in reality until pretty much now.

So that's that was lengthy, but that's the nickel tour of kind of where I started and a little bit where I ended up. Now I did in fact, I was successful at getting myself set up to do art most of the time. And that means that now I get to work a little bit with consulting with AI for marketing where I want to. And that's a I'm profoundly grateful every day.

Mary Killelea: That's a fascinating story. And for so many different reasons, I absolutely love that you you mentally walk through in your head having how important having a seat at the table was. And then how were you going to get into a position that allowed you to do that? I think that is so self-reflective in how we should be looking in our careers as young women or as women and say not only what are my passions, what do I love to do, but where can I take my knowledge and excel and get out of it what I want to get out of it? So that's so well said. Tell me what were you like as a little girl? I mean, did you did you like math because you know, the physics direction and then the art direction? How did you go that route?

April Brown: Actually, I was a reader, a huge big, big, big reader, I read all the time. And I was always curious about how things worked. So, I think in reality, part of the reason why I studied physics was more, more philosophical than it was applied. So it wasn't that I was interested for and at the time, this was all that was really available to go work on defense contract projects. But I was more interested in cosmology, I would say, and particle physics and that sort of thing, which is fairly abstract. And I would argue that a very similar kind of abstraction is needed to understand some of the more peculiar aspects of physics as is needed to produce good art. They're not at all dissimilar. And it's all about abstraction.

So as a little girl, I read a lot, and I read really widely. And that I think set me up for what set me up to be able to study and feel confident. That's the most important thing to feel confident about approaching any body of knowledge with the realization that I could tackle it. And I was probably going to have it get a decent understanding.

Mary Killelea: So you were in AI, you know, trying to convince some of these businesses how important it was and what they could do with the data. How shocked are you at how fast the conversation has pivoted in the last couple years and where we are today?

April Brown: You know, I'm not that shocked. And I'm not that shocked for a couple of reasons. One good reason and one maybe, I don't know, mediocre reason. The good reason is that generative AI is so democratic. It's so easy for anyone to actually use it. There's not a barrier to entry there. Writing a good prompt, well, you know, that's another thing. But just using it, there are no engineers between you and the AI and generative AI. So, it doesn't surprise me that it's popular from that standpoint.

The not so great reason is that I really think a lot of people, a lot of business folks are looking around saying, this is the future. The future is already here. We're going through a revolution on the order of the steam engine. And so, I'm going to talk about it a lot because it makes me look like I'm present and participating in this revolution. And I say that in kind of a mean way because I think there's a really big difference between talking about it a lot and showing that you can talk about AI and the courage to actually implement, to try experiments. To do something bold to use your podcast. There's a big difference between those two things. So I'm not shocked. Some of its buzz and some of it is like really game changing democratization of information for sure.

I was just reflecting this morning, and I was thinking about this conversation with you and realizing that even though generative AI is pretty new, I already in my own life consider it to be an indispensable partner. I would be really bummed if it went away. Really bummed.

Mary Killelea: Yeah, I don't think you're alone in that.

April Brown: Good.

Mary Killelea: So now in your career where you are, you're doing art full time and you're also consulting. What would be an ideal consulting situation in how you can help businesses with AI?

April Brown: Well, I'll tell you the one that I'm the most interested in. There are a number of ways, or a number of interesting projects, but the one that really turns my crank is to disrupt marketing research. Absolutely. Just disrupt it. And I don't mean throw everything out that's being done. I mean if someone said, hey, April, can you come in and help us augment our marketing research practice using AI? I would be there in a heartbeat. It's so ripe. It's so ripe. And I'll tell you, I think you, I mean, you and your audience is going to know this already, but the reality is marketing research is missing kind of a middle layer. There's the boots on the ground focus groups that are super valuable, really important, but they always suffer a little bit because they're so small. It's not a good sample size. And then there's the really sort of big, I would say kind of super sized focus groups that big consulting agencies often do. You don't see what's under the hood necessarily. If you really wanted to, maybe you could read the individual responses, but it's been aggregated and cleaned up and put into a nice strategic mission statement generally. Nothing wrong with that. That's good too.

But there's this whole layer somewhat served by semantic AI, but I would say semantic AI in conjunction with proprietary data, that most big companies have that allows very small group of people to amplify their queries about their audiences in terms of not just what products they buy, not just what roles they have in within organizations, not sort of the typical either B2C or B2B ad click or download metrics. But what are they talking about with each other? What do they care about very personally? What's their vision? And through that, you can get a sense of what you might offer as an organization that's going to help your audience fulfill their vision. And if you can do that with sufficient nuance, that is a huge brand building opportunity. It's a huge sales opportunity. It's kind of big all the way around. And there's the only thing stopping us from doing this in all enterprises is really the will to do it. The technology is there.

Mary Killelea: What do you tell marketers out there who like you and what you're describing are eager to leverage AI, but they get cautionary resistance from their management, either related to policy or governance or lack of decision making or commitment? Any advice?

April Brown: I do have advice, but I bet well, no one's going to want to hear it. But I'm going to say it anyway, because I definitely have advice here. I think realistically, let's say you're in an organization and your immediate cohort or the people that, you know, the group that you work for and their boss is cautionary. Find another group. Don't waste too much time trying to convince people to think big. They either do and you can see it by the way that they represent innovative ideas, the way that they hire the groups that they form. You can tell they're either doing it or they're not. I have made a mistake so many times of thinking if I just make a persuasive enough argument, if I just try another attack that I could change people's minds, some people's minds were fundamentally not really able to think that way. Move on. Move on to the next group. Find the others. Find the ones that find the weird Barbies and, you know, form your cohort. And there is support out there. You're going to find people, especially in leadership roles, especially women who are hungry to really drive change. Find those people and work for them.

Mary Killelea: That's fantastic advice. Fantastic. I know it's great. So many people know you because of your expertise and AI and the work within organizations that you've done and delivered over the years. Tell us about your background and training in the arts because I don't know if people know how well trained you are.

April Brown: Oh yeah sure. Yeah, so first and foremost I grew up with artists. So, my mother is an artist. My father was an architect. They both were designers when I was little. So, it was already, that's not an insignificant thing right? When it's the backdrop of your life you learn a lot just by osmosis. And then when it was time to go to college, I actually, I lived in Africa for a couple of years and when I came back, I went to art school in Portland, Oregon. And which was great but not quite enough. So, I ended up transferring to Reed and studying there.

Through art school and through Reed I ended up training and studying under some pretty great artists and that was wonderful to do. So, it was an education in a couple of different places. You know the way that Reed teaches art is different than the way that the art school teaches art. One is more applied. One is more theoretical. Both were super valuable. And then the most important thing that only if you know me reasonably well you know is that I do it every day. And I have been since I can remember. So, it's consistent practice. You know it's great to be well educated but it's the consistent practice that really matters.

Mary Killelea: Your art can be seen on your website aprilshelleybrown.com. For those listening how would you describe your art?

April Brown: So there yeah there are a couple of I would describe it in two ways. One is sort of the tool set. So, it's there's a group of black and white drawings. There are groups of paintings and those are all in sort of traditional media. So, painting and drawing. And then there's an AI art section. And I what's interesting to me is that in both, all three actually, of these kinds of art I'm addressing the same things and the results that I get either if I paint them myself or I use Dali to help me, the themes are the same. So, the themes that I work with by and large are things like what is the intersection of mathematics and art and how does language impact that. And I use that sort of thematic methodology and all the prompts that I use. So, I'm not just thinking about art per se. I'm thinking about an abstract idea.

So for example I might say I want to generate an op art piece that reflects a certain vibrational frequency based on a certain equation and I want it to be in a color palette and I specify the color palette that I know to be resonant with that frequency which sounds it sounds a little bit ridiculous, but the results are amazing and there are reasons for that that are built into the nature of the large language model itself. And then in traditional art it's the same thing but a little less mathematics and a little bit more I would say on the spiritual side or the self-reflective side. I am a feminist. I care about the female experience and that comes through in all my work for sure. So, there's a lot more figurative work in the traditional path than there is in the AI path and that will be true until the AI models don't make all women look like Disney princesses.

Mary Killelea: Yeah.

April Brown: Yeah. There's some bias in there. It's a mirror. AI is a mirror.

Mary Killelea: So, I think you kind of touched on it a little bit when you mentioned the feminism but where would you say your inspiration from art comes from?

April Brown: What a great question. It's multi-layered. First and foremost, I think that making art is the way that I understand the world. It's what I do to try to make sense of the world that I'm in. And as a woman and as a feminist that has a particular lens I guess. And then there are a lot of women artists that have very little voice either alive or dead that I've been influenced by. Everyone from Georgia O'Keefe to Frida Kahlo to Artemisia Genolesky. It was probably not one that most people know but she did some beautiful paintings in the Renaissance. So there's I do make and have made a point of looking at women artists for a long time. So that's certainly an inspiration but it's making sense of the world and making sense of the world I guess as a woman.

Mary Killelea: I always find it fascinating when someone takes their passion and merges it with either technology. I've seen it applied from anthropology or food and technology or art and technology in this case. Do you feel a little bit like a pioneer again? I think you were a pioneer early bringing it into the marketing realm and now you're pioneering it and bringing it to the masses through your website. What is it like to be on that kind of island alone and is there, what's the opportunity for career women who are listening to this?

April Brown: It's such a beautiful question and I'm so glad that you asked because absolutely I feel on an island. I've always felt like I've been on an island and that is part of the deal. If you really are driven by big ideas, by exotic ways of thinking, to put it bluntly, you're going to be on an island. I haven't always been okay with being on the island, but I am okay now. But it's not easy and my advice is well first of all it's okay. Don't let it stop you because the payoff for yourself, if no one else, is fantastic.

But I would also say again find the others. It's a mistake that I think I made pretty early on and it's common I would say to sort of introverted individual contributors. I should have found more others earlier. So you can all be on your own island together. Basically.

Mary Killelea: I know I love that. That makes so much sense to me as introvert myself. So yeah I get that. What do you get asked most often regarding your art career and AI?

April Brown: Is it real art?

Mary Killelea: And you answer?

April Brown: I say yes and I think of it as a tool the same way Photoshop was a tool, the same way that acrylic paint was a tool. If you just kind of go back in history, art has had a whole the camera, lucida, a whole series of tools, technological and otherwise that help an artist move faster, get to where they get to their vision faster and in a more complete way for them. So, it's another tool. It's just an amazingly complex tool and operates at a scale that is impossible for us as individuals to understand.

Mary Killelea: I think you know the tool example is really easy for me to understand as a layman but also when you were talking about the hexacolor numbers or the math that you use in the prompts to create it that specifically is the combination of those prompts are unique to you which makes your art real and unique.

April Brown: For sure yeah, it's and it's um it's my brain. Basically, you know so it's me because I naturally put things together that people don't always put together I'm going to get a unique result and because I have visual training that unique result is going to be powerful visually.

Mary Killelea: And I've seen your art and it's amazing your mind is beautiful.

April Brown: Oh thank you, Mary, thank you very much.

Mary Killelea: What drives you?

April Brown: Oh, I would say more than anything just relentless curiosity. How is this going to work? What's this going to look like? How do I communicate x y or z? Yeah, I'm very inquisitive and I would say I'm very inquisitive. It's also annoying to go on a walk with me because I stop every two steps say hey look at that.

Mary Killelea: Do you ever foresee yourself being a consultant to other artists on how to do this with AI?

April Brown: I haven't thought about it but yeah I would be happy to do that. It would be really interesting to see what kinds of artists would be interested in such a thing and I think yeah it would be very, very interesting. So, for example I'd love for some poets to show up and see how they can explore what does their poetry look like visually and I don't mean in a literal way. I mean in a feeling way. What kinds of forms and color and shape and rhythm is going to reflect that poem for example. So back to sort of the AI really favors AI really favors multidisciplinary people, I think there's real opportunity artistically for many folks that maybe visualization isn't their first love but it adds richness to what their first love is and vice versa. I love language but I'm not a writer. Writing is not my first love but I love seeing visualizations of language. Does that make sense?

Mary Killelea: Yeah, it does. It really does and that is an interesting concept taking a poem and breathing it into life through interpretation of colors and images and shapes etc. Do you do NFT around your art?

April Brown: No, I don't and I will admit that in my mind I've kind of lumped NFTs into other things that I think don't last long but I don't know that I'm right about that. It just isn't something that I have explored, and I think has gotten a little bit of bad press. I'm not against it in other words. I just haven't explored it at all. So if anybody has ideas for me I'm open.

Mary Killelea: Great. Tell me what to be bolder means to you.

April Brown: Oh I loved thinking about this one. Yeah well, I think some of it comes from staying curious. I really do. I think it's the courage to be inquisitive and to share my thoughts even when I'm pretty sure most people aren't interested. It's not an easy thing to do you know to kind of keep up the pace sometimes it's not easy. So it's that kind of courage to stay true to that that core part of myself.

It means leading with compassion and I and when I say lead I think I mean all engagements I start with compassion and in this world today it's so divisive. I think being bold being compassionate is being bold.

Mary Killelea: I love it.

April Brown: Yeah and bring other people with you along for the ride. You know that's one thing particularly with this podcast women have got to lift each other up. It's not going to happen otherwise.

Mary Killelea: I wholeheartedly believe that as well. Do you have any good resources to get smart on AI or AI and art that we could share with the listeners? Either you know talk about them and then I can include them in the show notes or I might be putting you on the spot here.

April Brown: Man, it's a mixed bag. So, a lot of people AI art for example a lot of people are just doing kind of I don't know mediocre anime type stuff. Not even good anime. So, I don't want to point anyone in those directions because it's just not that interesting frankly. However that said MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there's one artist who's doing large scale installations featuring AI generated imagery of great beauty. I would direct people there for sure to start.

More than anything and I could probably find some materials that I have read in the past to point you get you some links because more than anything I think it's important to understand as much as you can about how AI works and developing a mindset that is that works with AI as opposed to learning a specific set of steps to do for example. So let me see what I can dig up because there are a couple of things, and then there's Andrew Nuh who does just an outstanding class on AI for everyone which I think is a Coursera offering. I highly recommend that one. I think most people have taken it who have gotten interested in AI but if you haven't you should definitely take it.

Mary Killelea: Yeah definitely send that my way and I will include it in the show notes for sure.

April Brown: Super cool.

Mary Killelea: What would you tell your 20 year old self?

April Brown: Well I would tell her a couple of things. One start learning how to break big ideas into smaller ones and make them even smaller than you think is necessary before you pitch them, before you try to execute on them. Make everything really bite sized snack sized. Distinguish between like the people that you work with. There are people who are really invested personally in pursuing innovation and like we already talked about you know who they are you can tell who they are. Hang around with those people and don't waste any time on the rest.

Gender bias is real, and it doesn't matter how smart you are how good your ideas are. It's a real thing and you can't get around it so at least understand that it's real and move from there and a lot of other things would be a lot clearer. And then the world is going to change in unpredictable ways. You're not going to be able to foresee the details but keep going with learning and knowing how to think and how to see and how to listen and that'll and you'll be fine.

Mary Killelea: What do you think of the future? What excites you most when you think of the future?

April Brown: I'm so stoked about AI. It's such an indispensable partner as I said already but I'm looking forward to the things like what are the strategies that are going to come out of AI to help mitigate climate change? How is AI because as it grows and grows and the language model gets bigger and bigger and encompasses more diverse points of view. Are we going to all be able to come together a little bit more because we have a unified source of information? And that's not even all the health care and all the great advances that are being made from a medical standpoint already using AI. And then there are things like oh you know maybe in my lifetime I'm going to get some answers to some of the really thorny questions that I didn't think we would ever be able to answer like you know the origins of the cosmos and the nature of consciousness and that kind of stuff. It could happen. So I'm excited by AI. I guess that's the short really excited by it.

Mary Killelea: I love it and I love your energy and it's been a gift talking to you. I have some just quick rapid fire questions I'm going to ask you because I like to leave with the audience knowing a little bit more about you personally. So beach or mountains?

April Brown: Beach.

Mary Killelea: Coffee or tea?

April Brown: Tea.

Mary Killelea: Summer or winter?

April Brown: Summer.

Mary Killelea: Pasta or pizza?

April Brown: Pasta.

Mary Killelea: Dogs or cats?

April Brown: Dogs.

Mary Killelea: That's it! It has been such a great show. Oh my god. Thank you for being here and sharing your story.

April Brown: Thank you for inviting me and thank you more than anything Mary for having this podcast. You are a visionary yourself and this is really important thing to do and I'm so glad you're doing it.

Mary Killelea: Thanks for listening to the episode today. It was really fun chatting with my guests. If you liked our show please like it and share it with your friends. If you want to learn what we're up to please go check out our website at 2bbolder.com. That's the number two little b bolder.com.