What does it take to lead through the AI surge? At a recent Athena salon, Lila Tretikov shared hard-won lessons on bias, capital, governance, and imagination.
At our recent Athena Salon, we welcomed technologist and board leader Lila Tretikov for a conversation about the role of strategic imagination in an AI-driven world. The discussion traversed her eclectic career, the power of capital, the risks of bias, and the promise of AI to transform industries and even human potential.
Here are ten main takeaways, illuminated by her own words.
Lila’s guiding philosophy began during her early work on the Human Genome Project, where she built one of the first genomic browsers. That experience shaped her lifelong compass:
“Any technology is dual-use. It’s both a tool and a weapon. The question is: how do we navigate in the positive direction rather than the negative one?”
Her career has spanned finance, telecom, energy, open knowledge, and enterprise AI. The unifying thread is a commitment to steering transformative technologies toward futures worth having. Strategic imagination begins with naming the future we want—and aligning our compass accordingly.
As Coco Brown observed during the conversation, humans are wired to think in straight lines, while technology evolves exponentially. Lila embodies the exponential mindset by moving laterally across industries and consistently asking, What’s the biggest needle I can move?
“Incremental will be yesterday’s snow. Tomorrow, it’s going to be too old. The world is moving so fast that your ideas have to be really, really big.”
For leaders, exponential imagination means rejecting incrementalism. The projects and companies worth backing today must be bold enough to remain relevant tomorrow.
Lila is clear-eyed: finance is where imagination becomes real. Whether inside a corporation or as an investor, where money flows dictates which futures become possible.
She recalled Microsoft’s early bet on OpenAI:
“From the time that we put the billion dollars into OpenAI in 2019, we knew that we were going to be the catalyst. And a catalyst had to be financial. Without that, nothing would have worked.”
For Athena members, this lesson is personal. With trillions in assets moving into women’s hands, we have the opportunity—and responsibility—to direct capital in ways that generate domino effects for good.
Capital allocation and talent selection are never neutral. Bias—often invisible—shapes what and who gets chosen.
Lila drew from her Wikipedia experience:
“Wikipedia just holds a mirror to who we are as humanity. If 80% of contributors are men, that’s whose voices are represented. Capital isn’t just financial; it’s also time and attention. Where we put it matters.”
Her advice: step out of the river. Create time and perspective to question your own decisions, or you risk reinforcing monocultures. Pluralism is not a courtesy; it’s a necessity for imagination.
There’s hype about AI as an agentic system that can pursue goals without human direction. Lila is cautious:
“In theory, yes, you can look at a company’s processes and have AI rework them. But we’re far from that. What we’re doing today is automating what we already know.”
She outlines a progression:
Strategic imagination requires sequencing: focus on wins where supervision is simple and rules are deterministic, while preparing for more complex orchestration later.
Lila is insistent: the danger isn’t just hallucinations, it’s losing the habit of questioning sources.
“When we shipped the first version of Bing, I pounded the table to include footnotes. Conversational answers must be auditable. Otherwise we’re training people not to question the source.”
Her call to leaders: demand traceability in your AI systems. Without footnotes and provenance, fluency becomes a trap. In her words:
“One of the core principles of large language models must be that the sources can be interrogated. We’re not there today.”
Will GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity become interchangeable? Lila thinks so—at least in raw performance.
“In five years, they’ll all be really good. What will matter is how they’re tuned, their personality, and how much memory they have about you.”
Switching costs won’t come from accuracy but from data lock-in. Once a model remembers your context, moving becomes as hard as switching CRMs. Her personal practice? Use different models for different jobs:
“I use OpenAI for general work, Perplexity for search, and Claude for technical tasks.”
As a director at Volvo, Xylem, UBS, and Cognizant, Lila plays a critical role translating frontier tech into boardroom strategy.
“Every company is a tech company now. My role is marrying the capabilities of the future with the business realities of today.”
Boards must grapple with massive transitions: autonomy and electrification in automotive, digital infrastructure in water, cyber risk in banking, software disruption in services. Strategic imagination at the governance level means asking not just, Can this be done? but How does it reshape our strategy, risk, and culture?
Young generations often resist AI, citing its resource intensity. Lila empathizes but reframes:
“As a mathematician, it’s hard to look at these models—they’re extremely inefficient. But the very inefficiency forces us to invent better, more sustainable systems. And compared task for task, AI often saves more energy than it consumes.”
More importantly, AI could unlock breakthroughs in chemistry, materials, and carbon capture:
“These are the tools that will help us manage our planet better. The question is: can we get there soon enough?”
The challenge is a race condition: will we deploy imagination and capital quickly enough for AI’s benefits to outweigh its costs?
Despite the hype, Lila believes we’re in an overexcited phase with limited real return.
“Most projects aren’t yielding ROI because there’s no method. Pilots are everywhere, but diffusion is ad hoc. We need a measured, methodical approach—just like with any other technology.”
The near future will be less about AGI breakthroughs and more about integration and embodiment—getting AI into workflows, robotics, and physical processes. Strategic imagination here means shifting from shiny demos to systematic deployment: measurable baselines, repeatable playbooks, and human-in-the-loop governance.
Lila left us with a call to embrace both responsibility and awe:
“I can’t believe how lucky we are to live in this moment. These tools will help solve cancer, Alzheimer’s, and global warming. But the same tools can also kill us. Our job is to be extremely responsible and to embed the right values in the next generation.”
Strategic imagination is not about predicting the future. It’s about deciding what we want to be true, deploying capital and attention to make it real, and ensuring pluralism and traceability along the way.
For Athena leaders, the invitation is clear:
In an age where even our own minds are “programmable by environment,” the choices we make together will define not just our organizations but our humanity.
© Athena Alliance 2025
