Running toward the unknown
The Phyusion founder on career pivots, making space to think and why technological change can open new paths for women leaders.
Rachel Salis-Silverman is chief communications officer at Ragan Communications.
Long before Samantha Stark founded an AI transformation consultancy, she was a musician, painter and self-described theater kid who assumed her future would unfold in the arts. Then an internship at a small Baltimore public relations agency introduced her to the strategy behind storytelling and changed the direction of her career.
“I think there was a moment where the click happened,” Stark said. She realized that the instincts she had developed as an artist — understanding story, motivation and what moves people — translated naturally to communications.
That pivot launched a 25-year career spanning public relations, marketing, digital innovation and executive leadership. The common thread throughout has been her fascination with technology, and the moments where it has reshaped culture. She leaned into Napster and Pandora as they changed how people discovered music, joined Twitter and Facebook when social media was in its infancy, and taught herself search engine optimization and online reputation management before any of it was standard practice.
AI felt like the continuation of that pattern but on a far larger scale. Stark worked on AI pilots at Ketchum as early as 2018. When generative AI arrived, she tested an early version of ChatGPT by asking it to develop a crisis communications plan for a fictional hotel emergency. The quality of its response stopped her cold. She showed the output to her husband and thought: This is only the beginning of what this technology can do for communications.
What attracts Stark is the intellectual work of understanding a new technology deeply enough to make it useful. “Working with AI is like working with a different life form,” she said. “Learning how to prompt it, refine it and produce something meaningful is part of the challenge, and the fun.”
Stark’s instinct is to run “toward the unknown” when she believes it will have an extraordinary impact. That instinct eventually led her away from the familiar agency path and toward entrepreneurship.
After leaving her previous role, Stark gave herself three months, the longest pause of her career, to determine what should come next. She already believed AI would transform communications, but she needed to pressure-test both the technology and her business idea. She used AI to help build Phyusion from the ground up, including its strategy, audience definition, website, brand and logo. The experiment confirmed that organizations would need discipline-specific guidance to apply AI at a high level across communications and marketing.
The pause also taught her something that extends well beyond AI: Leaders need headspace to move beyond tactical thinking. Stark said this can be especially difficult for women because professional and personal expectations can leave little room for reflection. But without space to consider what creates energy, where passion lies and what success should look like now, it is difficult to choose the next step intentionally.
For Stark, reaching senior leadership helped demystify success. After growing up in a small steel town and eventually working alongside top CEOs and cultural figures, she recognized that the people in those rooms were not fundamentally different from her. “Once you see yourself at that same level, there’s room to ask: Now what do I really want?” she said.
Her advice is to resist assuming the most obvious path is the right one. Careers are often shaped by the unexpected invitation, the new skill learned independently or the opportunity that feels slightly beyond reach. “It’s saying no to the stuff you really don’t love, and believing in yourself to lean into the stuff that you do.”
At Ragan’s Leadership Retreat & Summit for Women, Stark hopes attendees will have candid conversations about the scale of change unfolding inside their organizations and give themselves permission to consider what that change makes possible. She will join Christina Furtado of Dell Technologies and Miri Rodriguez of Empressa AI as a panelist for the session, “Heating Up the AI Sector: Panel With AI Trailblazers.”
