AI tools are helping small business owners manage their businesses, so they can stay focused on the aspects of their business they love to do. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Alyssa Henry, an executive at some of the most impactful companies from Microsoft to Amazon. Most recently she was the CEO of Square. She led Square’s team as they were very early adopters of a consumer-facing product that used GPT-2 and have continued to incorporate AI into their offerings. On today’s episode, they talk about the whitespace within e-commerce for AI and lessons from the prior generation of infrastructure.

Alyssa recently retired from being longtime CEO of Square, within Block. Before that she was a vice president of AWS running, amongst other things, the storage products, or the digital storage bucket for the world. And before AWS, she ran order management software at Amazon Retail and started her tech career at Microsoft. She remains on the boards of Intel, Confluent and was previously on the board of Unity. 

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Show Notes: 

(0:00) Alyssa’s experience and career trajectory

(2:30) Transition from engineer to manager

(4:09) AI implementation at Square

(7:46) Small business AI applications 

(12:14) Latent demand for content generation

(15:04) The origin story of Square’s GPT-2 products

(16:54) Consolidating ecommerce workflows

(18:46) How will AI change cloud services

(23:07) Hyperscaler foundation models and the AI land grab

(25:16) Enterprise demand for open source models

(28:08) Startups in the AI semiconductor space

(31:02) Scale up architectures vs scaling out

(34:32) What’s next for Alyssa

(36:08) What Elad and Sarah are excited about in 2024