Amber Lo

Carnegie Mellon University, Tepper School of Business

“Product builder bridging art, technology, and markets to expand access to creativity.”

Hometown: Singapore

Fun fact about yourself: I am working my way through the World Marathon Majors and am halfway to all six stars.

Undergraduate School and Degree: Northeastern University, BA in Communications Studies, Minor in Art

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Sotheby’s, New York. My role began as a sale coordinator for the jewelry and watches auction departments then moved into the new ecommerce department to work across product and operations.

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? Adobe, San Francisco, on the Adobe Acrobat Product Marketing team as a Community Manager.

Where will you be working after graduation? Adobe, New York, on the Adobe Acrobat Product Marketing team as a Community Manager.

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

1. President, Tepper Women in Business
2. Wellness Chair, Graduate Business Association
3. Communications Coach, Accelerate Leadership Center
4. VP of Allyship, Out&Allied
5. Honors: Cynthia B. Padnos for Women in Business Scholar, Traditions Scholar, Forté Fellow

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? Leading Tepper Women in Business during a year of rebuilding and renewed momentum. I wanted TWIB to feel less like a club and more like a community people were proud to be a part. We introduced service initiatives connecting students to local women’s organizations in Pittsburgh, expanded mentorship programs, and built professional development workshops that helped members articulate their strengths, stories, and leadership styles rather than fit into a single mold.

Engagement grew because the programming felt personal and empowering. Students moved from attending events to actively mentoring, volunteering, and stepping into leadership roles themselves. Our 2026 Women’s Leadership Conference became the most attended in TWIB’s history, with stronger ties to the broader Pittsburgh community. Bringing Aisha Bowe as keynote reinforced a message that resonated across campus: Your story is not something to minimize, it is your edge. Additionally, we were able to bring together students and faculty across colleges (both undergraduate and graduate) which is very rare!

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? Leading the launch of Sotheby’s first end-to-end eCommerce platform during the pandemic. While much of the art market slowed, our small team operated like a startup within a legacy institution, building the infrastructure for digital sales across multiple product categories. My role quickly became a jack-of-all-trades: coordinating operations, working with finance and product teams, troubleshooting workflows, and helping shape how the platform functioned day-to-day.

The experience showed me how much creativity and problem-solving it takes to modernize an established industry. More importantly, it reshaped how I think about impact. It made me think more deeply about how creativity, access, and technology intersect at scale, and ultimately motivated me to pursue an MBA to gain the analytical tools needed to scale creative markets with the same rigor used in technology and finance.

Why did you choose this business school? I chose the Tepper School because it treats creativity as something to be operationalized. Coming from an arts-driven background, I wanted an environment where analytical rigor would sharpen creativity rather than suppress it. Carnegie Mellon’s strength in technology, design, and applied AI made it clear that ideas here are meant to be built, tested, and shipped. Just as important, I was drawn to a culture where curiosity is the default and people build things because they genuinely enjoy learning and experimenting. The Tepper School offered the most direct path from imagination to execution, surrounded by people who see building as a mindset.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? Professor Melissa Murphy. She has a rare ability to challenge students while making learning feel approachable. Her classes pushed me to think more clearly about tradeoffs, why brands succeed, why they fail, and how strategy actually plays out in the real world. Whether discussing something random in the news or brand positioning, she made complex ideas feel grounded and relevant. Working with her again in Corporate Startup Lab deepened that experience.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? Design of AI Products. The course shifted my understanding of AI from something impressive to something consequential. We focused on identifying where AI truly adds value and where it introduces risk. Constant product pitching helped me learn restraint, judgment, and clarity. It reinforced that the best products often come from thoughtful simplicity.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? The Annual TWIB Women’s Leadership Conference. It captures what I love most about the Tepper School: high standards paired with humility and care. The conference brings together students, alumni, undergraduates, and Pittsburgh leaders for nine hours to focus on growth, leadership, and community impact. From supporting local women-owned businesses to amplifying real career lessons, the event consistently creates energy and connection. Seeing more allies attend each year has been especially encouraging.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? I would have embraced my unconventional background sooner. Early in the MBA, I tried to distance myself from my experiences in the arts and community work. Over time, I realized those experiences were not distractions. They shaped how I lead, build, and create impact. Owning that earlier would have given me confidence sooner.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it? One case that piqued my interest early on was from my Technology Strategy class. The case examined StockX and its marketplace model for sneakers and collectibles specifically. The platform uses bid-ask pricing similar to a stock exchange and authenticates every item before it reaches the buyer. That was the first case I read where a company intentionally designed systems to build trust at scale.

Before business school, I worked at an auction house with watches and jewelry, where authenticity depends heavily on expert judgement. A signature on a Cartier watch dial where the C is slightly too round, a clasp that feels just a bit off, or a hallmarked stamp that doesn’t quite match the period can determine whether an item is genuine or not. Those markets function because specialists, like my incredible co-workers, built credibility through experience, but that trust is difficult to scale digitally.

The StockX case put language around something I had seen but never thought about formally: in digital marketplaces, trust cannot rely on individual expertise alone. It often needs to be designed into the system itself. By standardizing products and introducing authentication as part of the transaction process, StockX transformed a fragmented resale market into a trusted platform. The lesson for me was that technology products are very human and do more than enable transactions because they shape the rules and incentives of entire markets. When trust is engineered into the structure of the platform, adoption and liquidity follow.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? Pittsburgh feels approachable in the best way with its 446 bridges and 90 distinct neighborhoods. It is a city where experimentation feels possible and personal. You can feel its history while also seeing its future take shape, whether running along the river past old steel infrastructure or walking through neighborhoods that now house robotics labs and startups, the city invites you to build.

What business leader do you admire most? Melanie Perkins. I admire how she leads through trust and clarity. She frequently talks about building teams where people feel supported enough to make decisions based on substance, while also sharing accountability when things do not go as planned. That balance reflects how I try to lead. I also resonate deeply with her belief that creativity should be accessible. Coming from a fine arts background, I often found myself caught between ideas and execution, able to communicate vision but limited by tools I only knew at a surface level. Beyond leadership style, I admire her product conviction. Canva exists because she was bold and tenacious enough to believe in a product others initially dismissed and to see it through over time. I hope to carry that same persistence in building products I believe in, even when the path is uncertain.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? The Tepper School integrates AI by treating it as a decision-making partner. Through hands-on courses, ethical discussions, and product experimentation, we learned how to use AI to support analysis, prototyping, and creative exploration. The biggest takeaway is learning when AI should accelerate decisions and when human judgement must override it.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? Gafar Shitta-Bey. He consistently shows up for others with generosity and integrity. He has a genuine passion for finance and uses it to energize and support classmates, especially those navigating the intensity of investment banking recruiting. Even when he is not the subject-matter expert, he is always willing to think through problems alongside you. He mentors prospective students, heavily supports peers through recruiting, and brings a quiet consistency to leadership. He also has an endless supply of 90s references, which never hurts. Above all, he is someone people trust.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?

1. Build a product (AI-enabled or not) that meaningfully integrates art, technology, and community in ways that expand who gets to create and participate. I want to create something that doesn’t just solve a functional problem, but reshapes how people connect, express themselves, and see what’s possible. My goal is to prove that creativity and rigor can coexist, and that technology can be a tool for inclusion versus efficiency.

2. Work at the intersection of creativity and capital, helping direct resources toward ideas that combine artistic expression, technological innovation, and long-term impact. Whether through investing, platform building, or strategic leadership, I want to help decide what gets built and ensure that imagination and values play a role in shaping the future.

What made Amber such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?

“Amber Lo is fantastically versatile, inquisitive, and hard-working, making her shine bright in a field of stars that is the class of 2026 Tepper MBAs. She has been a leader in her class both in title and in deed through her vision and her grit. Amber has great ideas – exacting and big – and then she gives her all to make them happen.

In many ways, Amber embodies the Tepper profile in her combination of analytical rigor, technological fluency, and deeply human focus. And the concentration of how these elements are at play in Amber shows up in a strong alchemy of interpersonal and communication skills. They grow, in part, out of a life in the Arts, out of allowing herself to be vulnerable and seek growth, and of treating challenge as the catalyst that it is.

I’ve had the privilege of working alongside Amber in some of her most impactful roles. As her supervisor as a Communication Coach with Tepper’s Accelerate Leadership Center, it has been rewarding for me to see – time-after-time – the feedback that she receives about her generosity as a coach, her strong sense of perspective, and her inclusivity. And in both her Presidency of the Tepper Women in Business Club, and her membership in the Zenith Leadership Development Program, I have seen Amber naturally set a vision and then do whatever needs to be done to bring it to life.

When I think of the kind of agile thinker the future of work needs, it is someone like Amber who understands that the place where things intersect is where innovation happens. Her wide array of interests and inclination to push herself is going to make some very special things happen. It’s been great to see how those gifts have already shaped the Tepper school.”

Michelle Stoner
Senior Academic Program Manager
Accelerate Leadership Center
Tepper School of Business

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