Sophia Velastegui

Senior Vice President & Chief Product Officer, Aptiv

Search every verified Sophia Velastegui interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Sophia Velastegui, Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Aptiv, delivered a TEDx talk in Palo Alto on November 5, 2024, titled "AI will shape the future—participate or risk being left out." In the talk, she argued that artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming industries, economies, and daily life, and that individuals, businesses, and policymakers need to understand and engage with AI to avoid falling behind. Velastegui stated that "AI will shape the future and it's important that all of us participate or be left out." She described her own career shift from hardware engineering at Apple to AI work at Microsoft, where she served as Chief AI Officer, and noted that she became interested in AI after observing that apps with embedded AI had the greatest impact on users. Velastegui emphasized the importance of diverse representation in AI development, saying that "AI is made out of data as well as it's being trained and developed by developers with their perspective and they're only a small subset of the 8 billion people that make up the world." She gave an example from her time at Google and Nest, where a thermostat's AI system initially defined comfortable temperature based on California's climate but had to be updated after global launch to account for regional differences, such as in the UK. She encouraged people to spend 15 minutes a day experimenting with AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, and stated that "foundational AI is being created — AI will shape the future so please participate or risk being left out."