You’ve seen them quite often around the Pathfinder-verse, heard them speak at events or virtual meetings, maybe even dialogued with them in a forum thread—they’re our Most Valuable Pathfinders! They are the spark keeping the Pathfinder Community ablaze, so it was about time we took a beat to really get to know each one of our MVPs better and share their unique stories with you!

So without further ado, let’s get to know...
 

Carolina Lockyer

The Basics

• Years of Automation Experience: 7 years
• Current Company: Nike
• Official Title: Director of Product Development Automation Workflow

But this is how Carolina would actually describe what she does: My formal answer to people is that I’m in charge of the strategic direction of Nike’s automation and workflow programs, and am accountable for the performance and growth of those programs. But what I do, in a nutshell, is to enhance human efficiencies. I look at how I can leverage emerging low-code and no-code technologies, such as what Automation Anywhere provides, to allow our customers and employees to focus on things that really matter. My goal is to overall be more efficient, more productive, and make people happier. If people are happier, they will work better!

• Biggest Professional Achievement to date: The fact that she’s in her current role, period, exclamation mark! She’s an accountant by trade who began to take notice of gross inefficiencies in all the accounting daily work from reconciliations to processing journals. She realized there were other ways to work better and smarter, and leverage technology to do that. She had the tenacity to change careers and upskill in order to really excel in something completely new to her—that in itself is a huge accomplishment!

Five Fun Facts

• Her birthday is April 14
• She’d love the ability to speak all languages
• The last book that she couldn’t put down was Creativity, Inc. by Ed Campbell
• Her biggest adventure was leaving her home in Colombia to pursue an education and career in Australia (without knowing a lick of English, too!)
• The next place she’d like to travel is back to Japan for a second time

Expertise / Specializations

Carolina is a believer in continuous improvement and possesses an insatiable growth mindset. In her leadership role, she’d like to gain more clarity on how to strategically manage objectives and formulate a big picture multi-year strategy to ensure her program is not only consistently growing, maturing, and nurturing a sustainable environment, but also fitting harmoniously within Nike’s overarching business innovation goals. She is also dedicated to continually upskilling her team to make sure they remain on the pulse of new technology and how it can be implemented both technically and from a business perspective.

Carolina and her team utilize Automation Anywhere’s core platform. She has previous experience with Automation Co-Pilot and has been actively searching for a use case at Nike to use with Automation Co-Pilot to demonstrate its value to her team and stakeholders. The same thing goes for generative AI and ML—she’d love to find use cases to test out those tools. Carolina also says that her team’s goal this year is to create automations faster and at a higher quality (more resilient & sustainable), and she believes tapping into APIs will be the key to achieve that.

If she had one piece of advice for someone new to automation it would be:
 

“Understand the basics first. Check out the core courses from Automation Anywhere, read articles, and make sure you have the basics down. Then get hands on. Try to create a simple bot, and when you’ve completed that, ask yourself if you can do it better.”

What’s Next for Carolina

Carolina admits she just wants her team to kick ass! She's focused on continuing to deliver sustainable automations and maturing her program into the spectrum of intelligent automation, whether that be Automation Co-Pilot, APIs, process mining, etc. She wants “what's next” to fit into their automation efforts. She, herself, also wants to take a beat to become more comfortable and familiar with generative AI and its possibilities. She believes there is a wealth of untapped use case potential in the retail space that many giants in her industry just aren't considering, so she is leaning in and listening to leaders outside of her organization to be inspired by how they are applying automation.

Thank you, Carolina, for letting us all get to know you better. And thank you for your continued contributions to our Pathfinder Community!