From martial arts to machine learning: An unconventional path to AI leadership

“It’s interesting when you get thrown into new situations like learning a new language and culture and having to make new friends,” says Hoyoung Pak ’00 MBA. “It forces you to adapt, builds resilience and makes you comfortable being uncomfortable, which is a skill that’s helped me throughout my life.”

Those characteristics proved critical for Pak when his family moved to the Chicago area from South Korea when he was six. From those early days, adaptability, resilience and curiosity fueled his personal, academic and professional growth, through a career that has now spanned engineering, entrepreneurship, management consulting and leadership roles in business and AI.

Here, Pak shares his journey before and after Kellogg and how each experience has helped shape and inform the next. 

Martial artist, engineer, entrepreneur

“Martial arts changed the trajectory of my life,” Pak says.

He struggled in early academics, due largely to poor concentration. Everything changed his sophomore year of high school, when he went to see a Bruce Lee double-feature. He says, “I wanted to be like Bruce, and enrolled in a martial arts program and practiced hours daily.”

Beyond his physical skills, the training in kung fu, a Chinese martial art, built Pak’s focus and confidence: “Martial arts gave me the discipline I lacked. I could sit at a desk for hours and power through complex problems, and it completely turned things around for me academically.” 

Toward high school’s end, a career fair visit piqued Pak’s interest in engineering, which led to an electrical engineering major at the University of Illinois-Champaign Urbana, followed by a PhD there in that field. Pak completed his doctorate in four years, about half the time most students take.

“I did lab work most of the day, then hours of martial arts training, then dinner, then back to the lab to work until the early morning,” Pak says. “The lab would be empty by then — quiet, no distractions. It was just a good time to think clearly and make real progress.” He adds, “Keeping your body strong keeps your mind sharp — it’s all connected.” 

After his PhD, Pak joined Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he worked on Monte Carlo simulations to optimize the etching of semiconductors. “I had evenings free, so I thought, ‘Why not give back by teaching martial arts and helping people to be the best they can be?’” he says.

That motivation led to teaching six students at a health club, an enrollment figure that doubled the next month and the next. Eventually, Pak was teaching 300 students in a 5,000-square-foot building — the state’s largest martial arts school — alongside his work at Sandia. Meanwhile, he became a five-time national champion in the tournament circuit for martial arts.

But his career was about to take another major turn.

Kellogg and a fast-growing business career

Running the martial arts school made Pak interested in business more generally: “Getting to scale was frustrating, and that motivated me to pursue formal education in business.”

Given his analytical background, he chose the Kellogg Evening & Weekend MBA Program for its strength in “soft skills,” and used the experience to broaden his perspective beyond the technical — diving into HR, marketing, finance and operations. He adds, “Kellogg didn’t just teach me business — it taught me how all the pieces fit together. That holistic general management training is what effective executives rely on: not just knowing marketing or finance in isolation, but understanding how strategy, operations, people and numbers connect.” 

That general management training led to an offer from McKinsey, where Pak broadened his capabilities as a management consultant.

“I always followed my passion,” Pak says. “That leads to better outcomes — you go deeper, work harder and have more fun along the way.” His post-McKinsey career proves that, as Pak excelled in progressively higher-responsibility roles at businesses including Ace Hardware, Groupon and Uptake. 

Working as Uptake’s general manager was pivotal, as it exposed Pak to machine learning. “We took Internet-of-Things data from wind turbines, locomotives and other machinery to predict failure using machine learning,” he says. “My research background gave me the technical grounding, but the real differentiator was being able to translate that into business impact.” 

After Uptake, Pak became COO of branding and marketing services firm SGS&CO, where his former Kellogg and McKinsey colleague Piyush Chaudhuri ’01 MBA was CEO at the time. He led a team of about 3,000, driving a $40 million increase in EBITDA through a combination of conventional levers like process improvement and the introduction of AI. 

Bringing AI into a 75-year-old company with limited prior exposure required more than technical implementation — it demanded cultural change and cross-functional alignment. That work built on everything that came before and led to his current role at AlixPartners, where he now serves as Partner & Managing Director and Co-Leader of the firm’s Global AI Practice. He advises senior executives on applying AI strategically to drive measurable business impact. 

An AI Playbook for CEOs

To date, Pak has consulted with over 200 top executives on how best to apply AI. 

As he explains it, a strategic playbook for AI comprises three layers: strategic, foundational and execution. “Start with the value — what are the high-impact use cases aligned to your strategy? That’s where we guide executives first.” 

This is critical because leadership sometimes invests in shiny objects that don’t deliver meaningful impact. Pak shares an example from a $5 billion growth company that deployed a customer-service chatbot to reduce the cost of a 50-person team. “It sounded impressive,” he says, “but it wasn’t going to move the needle. In this case, AI-based pricing, churn mitigation and personalization were the kinds of levers that actually mattered.” 

Using AI strategically also means getting key stakeholders “aligned early and often,” as Pak suggests, to drive change organization-wide. “Too often, great models get built and then shelved because no one brought the right people along for the journey.” 

The foundational layer is about the key components needed to execute on the strategy, including data — “not all the data possible but the right data to deliver on strategic use cases,” Pak notes — along with technology, team, organization and AI models to succeed. In this way, he says, “the strategy and people inform the use cases you select, which inform everything else.”

A thoughtful, strategic approach is imperative. “Many people think about AI backward,” Pak says. “It shouldn’t be, ‘Let’s apply AI.’ It should be ‘What’s the business problem — and what’s the smartest way to solve it?’ Sometimes that’s AI. Sometimes it’s not.” 

At AlixPartners, Pak and his colleagues partner with clients to apply AI where it drives measurable value — across both growth and operational levers. On the growth side, this includes pricing optimization, churn reduction, customer acquisition and lifetime value enhancement through tools like segmentation models and recommendation engines. On the operations side, they help clients improve forecasting, manage inventory, increase on-time, in-full performance and streamline operations and G&A functions. “It’s not about using AI for the sake of it,” he says. “It’s about finding the highest-impact opportunities — then applying AI to deliver speed, scale and smarter decisions.”

Lessons from the past

Pak sees clear links between his past experiences and present AI work, especially his martial arts training. 

“We’re all making predictions in life all the time,” he says. “In martial arts, it might be, ‘Is my opponent going to throw a reverse punch or roundhouse kick?’ It’s all prediction — just like AI.” 

Similarly, progress is all about resilience. “In martial arts, you come back from a failure ready to learn and adjust. It’s the same with AI — you rarely get it right the first time. It’s about fine-tuning and improving with each iteration.” 

Continuous learning, then, wins the day: “Nobody becomes a black belt overnight. It’s about really being in the arena and keeping at it.” The same goes for building AI capabilities — at both the individual and organizational level. 

Those values will be critical as we move toward new frontiers of AI in business and life, such as developments in artificial general intelligence (AGI), “It wouldn’t surprise me if, in the next 3 to 5 years, we see AGI-type capabilities — systems that can reason, adapt and collaborate like leading experts. We’re building toward a future where people and machines work together in entirely new ways.”