Day: November 15, 2025

It’s not too late to break into AI — and it doesn’t really matter where you’re coming from.

That’s what Business Insider learned while speaking to dozens of people working in AI, from recent college graduates to mid-career job switchers to those on the cusp of building their own AI companies.

Their stories took us from India and Singapore to Silicon Valley and Sydney, and demonstrate that there are myriad paths into this booming space.

We broke the routes of entry into four categories — graduating, transitioning, pivoting, and DIYing your way into AI — and asked people to share candid advice, fears, challenges, and takeaways they’ve learned about working with this emerging technology. Below are 16 of their tales to help you chart your own AI career path.

Have your own story to share? Fill in this quick form to share more about your journey with Business Insider readers.

Graduate into AI

Ready to land a job in AI right out of college? We’ve got you covered — we spoke to four people who landed their first AI jobs either while they were still students or immediately after graduation.

Transition into AI

Not every job change has to be a drastic one. We spoke to four people who transitioned into AI roles from jobs in tech or after dipping their toes into finance.

Make the pivot of a lifetime

Then again, some career pivots are the pivot of a lifetime. We spoke to people who gave up music careers, medical careers, and walked away from other industries after years of work, all to get into AI.

Build it yourself

Not inspired by any company out there? Go ahead — build it yourself. We spoke to four people who have founded their own AI companies.

• Alex Schultz, Meta’s CMO, says the AI spending boom is “aggressive, but not crazy.”
• Meta’s AI investments have driven billions in revenue and enhanced its content ranking systems.
• Schultz said the AI wave has prompted productive conversations about energy.

Meteoric levels of investment in AI infrastructure have sparked concerns that Big Tech’s latest boom is veering into bubble territory. So, is Meta, along with the rest of Silicon Valley, overspending on AI?

“Clearly no Meta executive would ever answer that question with a ‘yes,'” Alex Schultz, Meta’s CMO and VP of analytics, said in an interview with Business Insider at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon this week.

Meta plans to spend up to $72 billion this year on AI infrastructure, and has said spending will climb higher next year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this year that he’d rather risk “misspending a couple of hundred billion dollars” than be late to the development of superintelligence. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and privately held AI companies like OpenAI are logging record-breaking capital expenditures on all things AI. That includes chips and data centers, as well as big salaries to attract and retain top AI research and engineering talent.

There are eyewatering sums of money at play, but Schultz said that, compared to historical bubbles, the current trend is not huge as a percentage of the sector’s market capitalization or revenue. Compared to the US railroad bubble of the late 19th century, “it seems aggressive, but not crazy,” said Schultz of the current AI boom.

In an October research note, Goldman Sachs analysts estimated that AI-related investment in the US is under 1% of GDP, compared with the 2% to 5% of GDP reached during earlier technology booms, including the railroad expansion.

Schultz said Meta’s AI investments are already translating into billions of dollars in revenue for the company, as they improve its advertising tools and content ranking algorithms. Meta is expected to ring in around $200 billion in revenue this year and is trading at a market cap of about $1.5 trillion.

Schultz said the biggest AI-powered revolution for Meta has been its more sophisticated content recommendation system. He said this was necessary because the majority of time spent on Facebook and Instagram now is people looking at “unconnected content” — content that isn’t from a friend, or from a page or group you actively follow.

“If we hadn’t made that pivot, how much smaller would we be as a company today?” Schultz said. “We managed a massive disruption without becoming irrelevant, and it is incremental to our business.”

Schultz said the Meta AI app’s newly released Vibes feed — a feed of short-form, purely AI-generated video content — represents “probably a large chunk of the future” for the company and has demonstrated “good retention” of users so far once they use it. (Vibes has been panned by many online as “AI slop.”)

Video-generation models require more computing power than text or image ones, creating huge energy demands that have the potential to strain power grids and water supplies. The popularity of apps like OpenAI’s Sora has sparked questions about whether the entertainment value is worth it for the environmental trade-offs.

“Vibes isn’t that big — it’s not draining lakes or using multiple nuclear power stations,” Schultz said. He added that it’s one of many experiments the company is working on to train and learn from its AI models.

“There’s sort of this Western European Calvinist streak to society that’s like, doing nice things that are fun is not what life’s about,” Schultz said. “And life is about doing nice things that are fun, and we do all the other stuff so that we can do nice things that are fun.”

The AI wave has prompted what Schultz described as productive conversations about the safety of nuclear power stations and the use of desalination plants to produce freshwater from seawater.

“In general, humanity has the ability to have a lot more abundance than it does,” Schultz said.

• Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks says AI helps him stay up to date on the latest science.
• Ricks said OpenAI’s ChatGPT is “too verbal” for those types of queries.
• He wants something that is “more terse” and more reliable with its references.

Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks says he uses AI in every meeting he attends.

“I read a lot of medical journals. I go to conferences where data is presented,” Ricks told Stripe cofounder John Collison during a recent episode of Collison’s “Cheeky Pint” podcast. “I spend time with our scientists to stay curious. Yeah, now I have at least one or two AIs running every minute of every meeting I’m in, and I just am asking science questions.”

Ricks said he doesn’t like OpenAI’s ChatGPT for science-related questions — “It’s too verbal,” he said. Instead, he prefers Anthropic’s Claude and xAI’s Grok. Still, he has to be careful to watch for halcunications, an issue the frontier model companies are still trying to tamp down.

“I find it more terse and the references actually check out more often,” he said. “Sometimes the AIs produce references, and they’re actually not the thing that it said, and that takes too much work to go cross-reference.”

xAI CEO Elon Musk quickly took notice of the praise.

“Cool that David Ricks uses @Grok as his daily AI advisor,” Musk wrote on X.

Ricks is just the latest big-name CEO to reveal his AI diet. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella said he uses Copilot to summarize his Outlook and Teams messages after reaching Microsoft’s Washington headquarters. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he uses AI as a tutor.

Lily has been on a tear this past year, with shares up roughly 31%. The drugmaker has capitalized on sales of its GLP-1 weight-loss drug Zepbound and diabetes treatment Mounjaro.

AI still has a way to go when it comes to helping drug development, Ricks said.

“Probably we need to create the equivalent of what got created with human language, which is a more complete repository of biological knowledge to train against before the machines get a lot better,” he said. “And today, I don’t know, I would estimate we might know 10 to 15% of human biology, so the machine is not going to be good at all until we get way above 50%.”

To even reach that point, Ricks said there would need to be a significant investment in robotics to create the training data needed to teach AI.

“That probably requires robotic 24/7 experiments just to create training data sets and this kind of big lift effort, the kind of thing actually NIH should be doing right now, I would think,” he said. “But that effort’s not ongoing, at least in our country.”

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kathy Curtis, 81, who works part-time in customer service and data entry for a local water company. Curtis, who lives in rural Northern California, said the extra income is necessary for making ends meet each month. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I don’t imagine that you can call what I’ve done a career because I’ve done so many things just to survive.

When I graduated from high school, women couldn’t do everything I wanted to do, so I never became anything. My mindset was more that I’d take what I could get. I should’ve gone to college, but I didn’t because in those days, you were expected to be either a teacher or a nurse.

I started working at a department store at the age of 15. I worked at banks for a while, then moved from position to position based on what was available.

My first husband and I had two children. When I married the second time, we were married for seven years. That took the financial burden off for those seven years, but immediately after my separation, I was working four jobs at a time, seven days a week, just to keep going because I didn’t have help.

I’m still working to keep going at 81.

My last few jobs were all industry-specific

I’ve been a traffic person for a cable company. I’ve prepped houses for painters. If there was something to be done and I could earn money doing it, I never hesitated. I’ve always felt that if I don’t know how to do something, I can learn it, and I’ve been fortunate in achieving success in the things I’ve chosen to learn.

I worked in the office of a furniture store for over 10 years, ending as the salaried customer service manager at $18 per hour in 2008. I left there thinking I would move to Texas. Then there was the real estate crash, buyers lost their jobs, fell out of escrow, and the rest is history. I went back to work part-time until my cancer diagnosis in 2009.

I had breast cancer treatment in 2010, and three years after that, I had a brain tumor. I next had a hip replacement, and I also had blood clots in both lungs and one leg. I was out of commission for a while. Between 2011 and 2013, I searched for a job but was unable to find one.

My health is pretty average now. I get out of breath and tired easily. I don’t usually get sick or get the flu. If I do, I just power through because that’s what we used to do in the olden days.

I now work for a local water company in the office

I’ve been here for 10 years. I started after a large wildfire, which resulted in a loss of a substantial number of homes in the area.

I work Fridays and fill in whenever anybody wants to take off. It’s a customer service and data entry job, and it involves some problem-solving. I started making minimum wage, which in California is $16.50 per hour. I recently got a raise to $18 an hour.

We’re a small community, so it’s a very neat job because it gets me in touch with people. If I didn’t have the job, I would probably be more of a homebody and not do much. It’s almost a social event to go to work, as strange as that sounds.

I’m lucky that I was raised by my grandmother

I learned a whole lot about life from her. I’ve never made a lot of money, but I’ve also never looked, acted, or felt like a poverty case either, even though a great deal of the time, I’ve stayed just barely above poverty.

My Social Security is $1,186 a month, and my work brings me an additional $200 every two weeks. My Social Security benefits cover my house, insurance, and utilities, and my job provides for my food. I can also cover my day-to-day expenses, including groceries and dog food. I feel like I’ve managed to survive pretty well.

My insurance costs me around $2,700 a year because I live in a fire zone. Car insurance is another $80 a month. My water bill runs me about $155 every two months. I manage to keep my gas bill under $70 each month, as my heating is pretty much firewood.

I don’t look at work as a chore

I’m going to work until I can’t, or until the company no longer needs me. I just don’t see myself not working at this point.

I’m content with the amount of work I do and the earnings I receive. I live in a poor county. I would have to commute at least an hour on a mountain road to do any better than what I’m doing. The stress and the expense of the commute wouldn’t be worth it.

I’ve got my adult grandson here with me, and he’s a big help

When my first grandson was a year old, I took him in and raised him. My daughter and my other two grandchildren moved in after I moved out of a big house into a smaller one. My granddaughter started kindergarten here and graduated high school, and she’s now out on her own. I’ve always had somebody else I’ve taken care of.

There was never a time when I was able to save money for the future. It was always a matter of managing to get through until the next day.

It’s been a huge achievement for me to own my own home. I wouldn’t own a home if it weren’t for the fact that, when my father died in 1995, I was left with money, and I immediately put it into buying a home.

I still had to go the private money route, which had a higher interest rate, because I never made enough to qualify for a loan. My son helped me secure a conventional loan for the house.

I try to visit my three great-grandkids periodically, as two of them live nearby. That’s probably the one thing I have that brings me joy.

I think regrets are a waste of energy

When you hit this time in your life, energy is something you’re short on.

I was lucky to learn along the way to let go of things that I couldn’t do anything about. It’s nothing more than attitude, and I would much rather be happy and content than focus on any of the negative.