About Polly Allen
Polly Allen has more than 20 years of experience in software development. She has built and led engineering teams and guided cross‑functional groups of scientists and engineers.
As Principal Product Manager at Alexa AI (Amazon), she led projects where science and tech met. She worked on tools that improved how people interact with voice systems.
Work in NLP
Polly focuses on natural language processing. Her work covers search, navigation, text understanding, and text generation.
In 2020, she led the team that built and shipped Alexa’s first automatic web content summaries. These summaries used transformer models similar to the models behind ChatGPT.
Advocacy and Leadership
Polly works in both product management and machine learning. She supports diversity, inclusion, and equal access in tech. She aims to make AI easy for more people to use and understand.
Investing and Speaking
She is an active angel investor and a former corporate director. She has advised startups and spoken at events on product management, ethics, and DEI in AI.
Education
Polly holds a master’s degree in software engineering from MIT and the University of Victoria. She also earned an MBA from the University of British Columbia.
