TAMPA – For Jaime Chyat, Friday was Bring Your Aunt to class day.
And if your “Aunt Sandy” happens to be a CEO of a major global tech company and named
by TIME magazine as one of the most influential people in AI, then all the better.
USF’s Executive MBA class welcomed Sandra Rivera, CEO of Altera Corporation, as the
featured speaker for its EMBA Distinguished Speaker Series event on March 7 hosted
by the Muma College of Business.
For an hour, Rivera talked about navigating the era of AI and how AI is disrupting
our world.
“We are absolutely in the early days of AI,” Rivera said. “The AI story has not been
written. There are so many chapters to be written about AI.”
“Most of the future wars will be fought in cyberspace. It’s not going to be boots
on the ground,” she said. “AI can be so good, but it also can be used as a tool to
weaponize people and nation states against each other.”
Despite the potential downsides, Rivera considers herself an AI optimist.
She said AI can’t be constrained, but asked, “How are you going to have a watermark
on what is real?”
And on the future of AI: “We will have sentient AI. It’s not an if, but a when. And
how are we going to get ready while safeguarding humanity?”
Rivera ought to know. In 2023, she was named by TIME Magazine as one of the industry’s most influential people in AI.
At the time, she was general manager of the Data Center and AI Group at Intel. She
led the company’s push to become one of the go-to makers of AI accelerator chips.
In January 2024, Rivera became CEO at Altera. The semiconductor company manufactures
and sells reconfigurable chips, called field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to power
systems across data center, cloud, industrial, and automotive markets.
Founded in 1983, the company was originally a chip manufacturing company. It was acquired
by Intel in 2015 for $16.7 billion. In February 2024, Intel announced it was launching
Altera as a standalone business. A year later, Altera became an independent FPGA company.
Rivera, the daughter of Colombian immigrants, shared the many lessons learned over
two decades at Intel where she held many positions.
She joined Intel in 2000 as a marketing director after the acquisition of Dialogic
Corp. From 2019 to 2021, she was Intel’s chief people officer. She also led Intel’s
Network Platforms Group from 2017 to 2019. She started her career as an engineer at
Westinghouse.
Rivera told the students to be fearless, not reckless.
“I have this mantra. I never lose. I either win or I learn,” she said. “It becomes
less overwhelming or less daunting if you frame it that way. I often tell my kids,
it’s OK to have a pity party, but you can’t set up house there.”