Jennifer Kerns already has plans to travel to Mexico, California, and Cape Cod. After more than 30 years in the tech industry, Kerns, 60, finally hung up her hat in March. Most recently, she worked at GitHub, a Microsoft subsidiary, as a program manager and before that, she was a contractor at Microsoft for 25 years.
Kerns was already making plans to retire, but the reasons to step away from her role began to pile up in the months leading up to her decision. Nearly her entire leadership chain departed over the course of a couple years. Her youngest child was about to age out of her family’s insurance plan. And then there was AI, which became the “sole focus” of the company, she said.
“That was really it for me,” she told Fortune. “I don’t buy into AI. I think it’s a bubble that’s going to burst.”
Kerns considers herself a creative, but narratives surrounding AI’s possible negative impact on the arts isn’t her only reason for not buying into AI. It’s that she simply didn’t want to deal with it at this stage in her career.
“It’s not that I don’t think I can learn to use AI or [have a] fear of displacement,” she said. Plainly, “It offends me.”
