Kristie J. Rowley, BambooHR's Senior Manager of AI/ML Engineering, discusses her unconventional path from rural Idaho to leading AI Operations at the Draper company, and offers advice for young women navigating the fast-moving, unpredictable world of applied AI.
From Shelley, Idaho, to AI Leadership: A Conversation With BambooHR's Kristie Rowley
Draper, Utah — July 21, 2026
Kristie J. Rowley, PhD, has spent the past 18 months building out AI capability at BambooHR (Draper, Utah), the HR software company where she now serves as Senior Manager of AI/ML Engineering. Before BambooHR, she helped establish the AI Labs team at Domo, following a research career shaped, by her own account, through a series of opportunities she neither planned nor expected.
Rowley sat down with SheTech-TechBuzz media interns Kennedy Mason (in person) and Renesmee Saulter (via Zoom) to discuss her path into AI, the pace of change in the industry, and what she tells young women weighing a future in tech.
An Unexpected Path Into AI
Rowley grew up in Shelley, Idaho, a small town where, as a young person thinking about her future, it seemed there were only two professional paths: medicine or law. She initially planned to pursue law and was accepted to law school more than once, but ultimately chose not to enroll, following instead what she described as a natural interest in statistics and research.
That interest eventually led her to Vanderbilt University, where she pursued an interdisciplinary PhD that blended research, policy, and advanced statistical methods. Although "data science" wasn't yet a recognized field, Rowley said the work closely resembled what is now known as data science.
"I never was sitting at home going, 'I think I want to be a data scientist,'" Rowley said, noting that such jobs largely did not exist when she was younger. "Those were things that came to me as I went along my career."
After completing her doctorate, Rowley followed the expected academic path into a professorship. She was later recruited by Domo (American Fork, Utah), where she helped build the company's AI Labs team. She was drawn to Domo, in part, by the opportunity to work alongside Catherine Wong (current COO and CPO at Entrata), whom Rowley cited as a personal source of inspiration. She joined BambooHR about 18 months ago as the company's AI investment was beginning to scale.
Building AI Into the Business, Not Just the Product
Rowley's team operates separately from the product engineering organization, focusing primarily on enabling AI across internal business operations while partnering with product teams where appropriate. She said BambooHR began investing in AI roughly five years ago, predating the current wave of generative AI tools, and has since expanded its dedicated AI teams and encouraged AI adoption across the company.
Rowley described the shift in how stakeholders react to AI demonstrations over just the past two years. Where a demo once drew amazement, she said, the same capability today is often met with an expectation that it should already be fully built. "One of the things AI has done is accelerate everyone's expectations," she said, adding that responsible deployment still requires guardrails, human oversight, and time.
Weighing the Tradeoffs
Asked about the ethical and environmental costs of AI, Rowley said she doesn't believe the technology should be viewed in absolutes. Like other major technological advances that have happened throughout history, AI has the potential to create meaningful benefits alongside real costs. The challenge, she said, is recognizing those tradeoffs early and making deliberate choices about where—and how—the technology should be used. She noted that history suggests technological change often reshapes work in unexpected ways. Some tasks become automated, new kinds of work emerge, and the overall impact is rarely obvious while the transition is underway.
On resource use, Rowley said AI's energy demands are real but not unprecedented, comparing them to the resource intensity of earlier computing transitions. She argued that society faces genuine tradeoff decisions, including whether AI use for recreation carries the same justification as AI use for productivity.
She was direct about the risk of over-reliance on AI tools. "To let it do your thinking for you is dangerous," Rowley said, citing research suggesting that dependence on AI for cognitive tasks can erode users' own reasoning skills over time. She also noted that AI systems inherit the values and biases of the people who build them, making bias awareness and human feedback loops essential to responsible deployment.
Rowley drew a firm line, however, around risk-taking involving people's livelihoods or personal data. "People's livelihoods are not the place to experiment," she said, describing that as one boundary she is unwilling to cross even amid a broader culture of fast iteration and failure.
What She Wants From AI's Future
Looking ahead, Rowley said her goal for AI at BambooHR is more individualized software experiences, tools that adapt to a person's preferences, working style, or accessibility needs rather than presenting the same interface to everyone. She pointed to neurodivergence accommodation as one underexplored application of that kind of personalization.
She described data quality as the primary lever for improving AI models, alongside continuous human feedback on whether AI-generated outcomes are actually useful to the people using them.
Advice for Young Women in Tech
Rowley's advice to young women considering a career in AI or technology centered on curiosity and comfort with failure. "Go try it. Be curious. Don't be afraid of things. Don't be afraid of failing," she said, recalling that she has often been one of the only women, or girls, in technical settings, such as advanced math classes in school.
She encouraged young women to seek out mentors and peers who challenge their thinking and to build relationships with people whose backgrounds differ from their own. She argued that a narrow range of perspectives among AI builders produces biased, less trustworthy systems, and that exposure to different people and experiences is directly relevant to building better technology.
Asked whether she faced added obstacles as a woman in the field, Rowley said she often could not isolate specific instances of differential treatment but acknowledged the likelihood that it occurred. She credited both women and men as mentors and advocates over the course of her career, and pointed to SheTech as one of her favorite programs on the WTC calendar; her team presented at this year's event.
