In 2025, I stepped into AINvision's Business Development and Strategy Team as a high school intern — an opportunity that would reshape how I think about technology, markets, and my own future. Under the mentorship of Prof. Kyusang Lee, my mission was clear: analyze the global perception sensor market for Physical AI and translate those findings into a pitch deck compelling enough to stand in front of investors.

The early days were a crash course in vocabulary I'd never encountered. LiDAR. Tactile sensors. Force/torque modules. Multi-modal sensor fusion. But as I worked through industry reports, competitor white papers, and technology analyses on my own, a coherent picture emerged. As AI moves from the digital world of language models into the physical world of robots and embodied agents, software alone can no longer bridge the gap between machine and reality. That bridge is hardware — sensors — and the market surrounding it is younger and wilder than most people realize.

My work was hands-on and quantitative. I segmented the sensor landscape into three modalities — vision, tactile, and force/torque — and analyzed the technical specs and cost structures of 21 global suppliers. Vision is a mature $33.5B market. But tactile sensors ($9.0B) and force/torque sensors ($2.4B), tightly coupled to the rise of humanoid robotics, are projected to grow at CAGRs of up to 47% by 2030. I built competitive landscape matrices mapping incumbents against new entrants across product functionality, business scale, and platform breadth — and delivered a complete, investor-ready pitch deck the team could use for real IR activities.

The most lasting lesson wasn't technical. It was learning to translate. Taking deep-tech engineering concepts and reframing them as asymmetric investment opportunities — that, I discovered, is what strategists do. Knowing a technology and articulating its value are entirely different skills. This internship showed me exactly where I want to stand: at the intersection of technology and business, whether in tech entrepreneurship or tech strategy. The direction feels sharper now than it ever has.