Personal Interview with Noha Rizk, Director of Marketing for Meta AI

Noha has long been an inspiration, both for myself and most who know her. Incredibly frank, driven and intelligent, Noha is an embodiment of the word ‘adaptable’, as is abundantly evident from her diverse resume. I first worked with Noha at Starwood Hotels, where she was my entry into the world of digital marketing close to two decades ago. Since then it’s been fascinating to watch Noha navigate the corporate world, entrepreneurship and Academia with the same passion and fervor she applies to everything in her life. Given my current obsession with AI, you can imagine how happy I was when she agreed to a personal interview!

[JJ] You’ve had quite a rich and varied career, from banking to hotels, consulting and big tech. What have been your most memorable jobs or projects, and why?

[Noha] I have too many but I think three specifically come to mind:

• Launching Citi’s retail banking operations in emerging markets and leading the launch of their online & mobile banking services as the first ever bank to do so in the region (a very long time ago). The reason this comes to mind is…this job took everything – all my energy, all my life. I learned A TON. I had to learn to hustle, budget, negotiate, understand legal and customer landscapes, learn how to make money in a tough competitive environment, find lawyers, check on their work, build cross-functional relationships across time zones and continents and work with large teams (long long long before Zoom – it was on the phone). It set me on a path to grow up very very fast and learn what it takes to start a successful business. I got very lucky.
• Working on the brand refresh from scratch during my Starwood days. Refreshing legacy brands and learning how to hyper differentiate them and work on building a brand from every element of the core customer journey and experience – the project was just incredibly fun and complex to be able to be both explicit enough about the brand definitions but broad enough that it can flex with markets was the balance we had to learn to strike. And at that time, I learned how to advocate for my stakeholders needs which weren’t always aligned with other regions.
• Launching my own business: learning how to survive and thrive without the large engine that exists around you in a big company and the vast resources that come with it was a different skill set that served me well in general and I was fortunate to be able to harness it throughout my career (I started multiple businesses young). It also taught me how to believe in myself and do things on my own if I have to – and figure out a way to bring others along my vision.

[JJ] You spent 5-6 years with Starwood Hotels – what led you to hospitality and what were the best (and not so great) bits about the industry?

[Noha] I LOVED working in the hotel business. On my first day, I had to learn how to put together a regional budget plan, and I didn’t even know how hotels ran or made their money. So my first day was spent with a hotel’s revenue manager learning about our systems, our acronyms and our inefficiencies just stood out.

I think that’s the beauty of, being an outsider to a new industry – the inefficiencies really stand out as you ask a lot of foundational questions. But after a while, I found the best bits of the hospitality industry are the “development” bits. Pitching for a new hotel, finding the next cool property, working on why it does or doesn’t make sense in a market and its path to profitability. Also the zero to one opening of a hotel is incredibly hard but highly rewarding part of my experience at Starwood.

The parts I didn’t love, was how older properties and their owners forgot the core mission – which is to give someone a home away from home. There is nothing more sacred than caring for someone and giving them shelter and a lot of hotels end up feeling like a soulless operating machine. Hotels have an incredibly unique edge over most other services…they get to have their customer LIVE with them. The lack of ability to harness that data to improve the guest experience bar some exclusive brands is just mind boggling in terms of missed opportunity.

[JJ] What does your current role at Meta entail and what does your day-to-day look like?

[Noha] I currently lead marketing for Meta AI – sort of the CMO of this sub-brand of the company. I lead all aspects of marketing, from branding, to digital, to events. I get to read a lot of interesting research, meet with some of the brightest minds and expand my understanding of what’s possible!

It’s an incredibly fun space to be in – to lead marketing for a tech research heavy group. We of course also work with AI for some of our products and services and Infrastructure teams who are extremely innovating and some of the best infra people in the world.

[JJ] AI has been around in different forms for a few decades, but the recent explosion in interest in Generative AI has also cast a lot of (often polarizing) light on the space. As someone actually close to the action and development, what’s your take on the future, and how AI is likely to help or hinder human aspirations and society?

[Noha] Like anything else, AI can both be helpful or harmful. It is up to us to decide how we want to use it. Humans are absolutely in charge. And like all new tech, I’m not sure there is full grasp of potential consequences. I think predicting the future is just too hard, the best we can do is remain vigilant over what we think are the most immediate harms and work together at mitigating those.

Societal interest is a good thing, because it opens up these conversations. The more perspectives usually the better the outcomes. At Meta we are committed to open science. Open science allows us all to get better and ensures there is room for diverse perspectives and constant innovation.

[JJ] Could you tell us a bit more about Meta’s most exciting efforts and ambitions in the AI space?

[Noha] Meta uses AI to improve its feed and ranking experiences for our day to day usage of our platforms. But more importantly, we have recently launched system cards that help mitigate biases in speech, we have launched Segment Anything which helps advance state of the art in computer vision, and we constantly innovate on translation models.

Just a few days ago we launched a project that helps generate text from images and vice versa. We work on moving and manipulating objects with AI for robotics and we work on AI for climate science.

There is simply too much that happens in our labs!**

[JJ] What can the travel and hospitality industry learn from tech…and is there something we do well in travel that big tech can learn from?

[Noha] I think travel really needs to crack the “personalization” nut – that’s one thing they can learn from tech.

Getting big box service from a chain hotel that even lacks consistency across properties and being operations centric rather than customer centric is something that hotels and the travel industry can definitely improve by learning from tech…being customer obsessed not in how you serve coffee or how you fold the towels…but in every single aspect of the customer journey. Utilizing the jobs to be done framework in how you design the customer experience is paramount.

Big tech can learn about building loyalty from the travel industry.

[JJ] Keeping in mind the speed of change coming our way, what personal advice would you give young hoteliers (and other professionals beginning their careers now) so they can be successful in the long term?

[Noha] Don’t wait for your next job to do your best work. Don’t accept status quo. And don’t be afraid to push for what you think is right. Pushing and being told no is better than not trying.

[JJ] If you were to sum up your personal view on the future in one word, what would it be?

[Noha] Interesting!

[JJ] ‘Interesting’ is a word I’d agree with wholeheartedly…it feels like we’re on the cusp of a seismic shift in tech and how we use it…and it’s up to each and every one of us to make the best of it. With the speed of change and progress, there’s never a boring day or week at the moment…and I for one am loving it! Thanks again to Noha for the personal interview – I’m keen to see where you (and Meta AI) take us next!

**We also had big news announced as this interview was published: Meta announced it is open-sourcing its large language model LLaMA 2, making it free for commercial and research use and competing with OpenAI’s GPT-4, which powers tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing. The move was announced at Microsoft’s Inspire event and supported by Azure and Windows. LLaMA 2 was trained on 40 percent more data than LLaMA 1 and outperforms other LLMs in reasoning, coding, proficiency, and knowledge tests. Meta said the open-sourced LLaMA 2 will be available through Microsoft’s Azure platform and other providers. Meta also said it wants to improve safety and transparency by red-teaming LLaMA 2, disclosing how it is evaluated and tweaked, and ensuring it is available for AI-powered apps that work without relying on cloud services.