I was born and bred in Switzerland. I qualified in Geneva, then spent a couple of years in private practice before finding it wasn’t really my cup of tea. I moved to Ralph Lauren and spent close to four years at their EMEA headquarters.
The plan was to go abroad and work for Bulgari in Rome. That was my dream job. That didn’t happen, because I literally ended up on the road from Ralph Lauren in a fragrance and flavour company. I moved to Dubai with them as their EMEA general counsel, and between 2008 and 2012, the economic turmoil in Europe was terrible. I was spending more time with HR closing down plants than I did with the business. So, at some point, I said to my general counsel, ‘Please allow me to go and sit where business still actually thrives’. That’s what triggered the move to Dubai six years ago. I initially had a three-to-five year assignment, but then after one year, my group general counsel asked me to come back to Switzerland.
My husband and I were happy in Dubai and just one year of expatriation is not something that would have made sense in terms of career development either, so I moved to NASDAQ Dubai, then back to private practice to set up my business – high level in-house secondment. Around this time I also seconded for Microsoft, and then the person I was seconding for resigned and put my name forward, and I ended up getting the job.
I think the challenge in the tech industry is that the technology goes at a way faster pace than the regulation. What we see mostly is that governments are struggling to keep up. Sometimes they come up with what they think is fancy regulation but actually it just doesn��t meet the purpose, or it stifles innovation, or it just misses its target. So I think that the beauty of being in such a large organisation like Microsoft is that you’re actually spending this time on the advisory part, and you’re going to sit with governments to help them understand what type of regulation they should put in place, discussing how they should start thinking about those major disruptions that are going to come with the adoption of technology.
I think that what’s starting now – and will take a couple of years – is ethics in artificial intelligence, particularly responsible adoption of artificial intelligence. Because again, as one of the massive, hyper-scale cloud service providers and obviously key generators of artificial intelligence – powered tools, we have a massive responsibility to make sure that we sell that stuff to the right people, that we understand how the technology can be misused, and how it can put people out of jobs. Because all of those questions are driven out of the legal function at Microsoft, we have a huge role to play in terms of making sure that our customers are looked after, because every business is becoming a digital business.
I think that what one needs to understand is that you can’t be arrogant and think that you’ve figured it out. Nobody has, and it will take the brainpower of a lot of different people in a lot of different areas to actually get that right. So, we do rely on a lot of external resources, but we also, I think, try to put our neck out there and put forward solutions where we think that is the best approach to make sure that the technology doesn’t go south. n