Anna Hannem, MMAI’25

For a person who works in risk management, Anna Hannem is surprisingly drawn to situations outside of her comfort zone. “I’m a curious person, and I love to learn,” she explains. “I’m not afraid to take chances on opportunities that might not seem obvious, even if they’re scary.”

That open-minded outlook helps to explain her choice to enroll in Smith’s Master of Management in Artificial Intelligence (MMAI) program in 2024. She didn’t need a career boost: she’d already reached the vice-president level at a major bank, working in a field with plenty of growth, and she was confident about her prospects. Nor did she need the prestige of an advanced degree. She’d completed an MBA nearly a decade earlier. And she certainly didn’t need another item on her to-do list, as a busy executive with two small kids at home.

What Anna did want was credibility. Over time, her career had evolved into leadership roles in the data and analytics space. She’d always been quick to pick up knowledge on the job, but as AI quickly became a key—and, soon after, core—part of her mandate, she began to crave a more rigorous educational base. “I was in the field day-to-day, but I didn’t have the foundational concepts and knowledge in place,” she explains.

Anna was drawn to the Smith MMAI program for a few reasons. She liked that she could do it as she worked, and that she could complete everything in a year—albeit a demanding one. “My thinking has always been, if something is important to you, you’ll make the time for it,” she reflects. “I looked at where I was in my career and in my life, and I looked at how AI was changing, and realized the timing was actually really good for me to enroll in a program like this.”

Anna was also drawn to the rigour and discipline baked into the program: “Some people are really good at self-learning. I am not one of those people,” she says. “But if I am held accountable, and if I have paid to do something, I’m going to show up, I’m going to listen, and I’m going to absorb everything I can get.”

Once the program started, Anna quickly felt the calibre of the knowledge she’d be gaining. After she returned from the program’s introductory week-long immersive session in Kingston, her boss asked for guidance on what he should say about AI in an upcoming board presentation. “I remember it so vividly,” she says. “I’d only been studying for five days, but I could already advise him, because I’d gained a better understanding of what the technology meant to us as a business.”

Back in the classroom, Anna—a lifelong people person—was immediately drawn in by her fellow students, who represented a diverse range of industries and career stages. “I was surrounded by so many really intelligent people,” she says. “I was probably one of the more senior people in our cohort, in terms of career experience. I found there was so much to learn from everyone, and it helped me see different points of view.” (It went both ways: Anna has since coached several of her MMAI peers through career moves.) She also built relationships with faculty that have endured beyond the program, many of which she hopes will evolve into future opportunities to collaborate.

And while Anna didn’t go into the program looking for a career boost, the MMAI did make her a more attractive candidate. In the spring of 2025, as the program was drawing to a close, she was tapped by TD—where she’d spent the first decade of her career—to serve as Vice-President of Data Risk Management. Today, she spends her days working to ensure all stakeholders in the bank are using data, and applying it  new technologies like AI, with both speed and prudence. “I got this job because I not only had experience, but also the cachet of this educational experience,” she says. “It made me more well-rounded, and it confirmed that I am credible in this space.”