Google DeepMind’s Lila Ibrahim had no formal background in AI or research when she became the company’s first-ever chief operating officer in 2018. Her résumé did, however, include detasseling corn in Indiana as a 14-year-old for “$1-something” an hour—a punishing summer job that left her sweaty, cut up, and sure she wanted a different future.
“I grew up in really humble beginnings,” Ibrahim exclusively told Fortune, while adding that her parents were both immigrants, juggling careers in a new country with raising three children, including one with cerebral palsy. “It was happy but challenging in many ways financially.”
“So I worked in the cornfields of Indiana, literally pulling off tassels, coming home, cuts and sores and sweating. It was really hard labor,” she recalled, adding that she quickly ruled out a career in agriculture. “But I had this strong work ethic.”
That work ethic saw her swap the Indiana cornfields for a Purdue lab, where she worked on fruit fly DNA as a research assistant while still studying in high school. It then carried her through two decades of climbing Intel’s ranks, with stints in Santa Clara, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Before she left Intel in 2010, she was the chief of staff in charge of 85,000 people, and had just had twins.
