Female tech leaders face the new 'industrial revolution' with gen AI

NEWS

The tech industry often contains greater obstacles to success for women. Recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence have the potential to prevent or further skew biases against employees of marginalized identities.

“It’s important to consider the sources of bias, and there are many sources,” said Stephanie Van Eyk (pictured, center), general manager at Slalom Inc. “There may be bias within your organization, or there may be bias in the problem that you’re trying to solve or the opportunity that you’re trying to capture. There can also be bias in data, in large language models with AI, specifically. The most important thing that we can do is build a diverse team.”

Van Eyk, along with Debashree Dasgupta (right), head of digital innovation (business development), Canada, at Amazon Web Services Inc., and Jodi Baxter (left), vice president of 5G and internet of things connectivity at TELUS Communications Inc., spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Rebecca Knight, during an exclusive Women of the Cloud interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how women are creating a space for themselves in tech and the impact of gen AI on diversifying the industry. (* Disclosure below.)

The role of gen AI in company culture

In the coming years, gen AI will have a huge influence over every aspect of the industry, from employees’ day-to-day tasks to company infrastructures.

“Generative AI … is the industrial revolution of this century, and it does absolutely have the potential to be both disruptive, but it also has the potential to enhance,” said Baxter, who highlights how AI can empower its users with new information. “The average employee now will have vastly more insight at their fingertips. We’re going to enable more focus on the highest value and most impactful tasks for businesses.”

Although gen AI will make some jobs obsolete, it can also create new jobs, such as prompt engineer, according to Baxter. Prompt engineers work with a team of data, content and product specialists to refine AI-generated text prompts. Another benefit to employees is what Dasgupta terms “inside generation for internal use cases,” which would allow employees to search company databases for important information about company policies with the help of AI.

“How can generative AI maybe reduce some of the manual work that you are doing and get to various industry-specific use cases?” she asked. “We’re just scratching the surface … in that space.”

The best response employees can have to AI-fueled changes is to engage with the technology, according to Baxter.

“The comfort we gain from being exposed will actually help us take advantage of the generative AI capabilities,” she said. “In doing so [we] will limit the impact it will have on [the] disruptions that it creates for us.”

Combating bias from within

One major concern for implementing AI models is bias seeping into their outputs. This could worsen existing discrimination against women, minorities and other employees of marginalized identities.

“[It] is so important that we actually have a human element, because the generative AI tool is learning … from us,” Baxter said. “We have to ensure as organizations and as end users that we are providing it with an equally diverse set of information.”

In addition to having a diverse team with people of different genders, ethnicities and other identities, it is important to have a diversity in skills, Van Eyk added.

“Pairing the technology and data specialists with emotional intelligence specialists to really consider the human impact of what we’re doing … it’s anchored on the business value that we’re delivering,” she said.

A place for women in the AI era

Interpersonal and communication skills often associated with women could be particularly valuable for training AI models, according to Baxter.

“As we move into more technology and cloud and AI capabilities, soft skills are actually almost more important than the technology skills,” she said. “How do we leverage our superpowers to help generate more opportunities to move into the technology fields and help create the right outcomes?”

For women looking to enter the tech industry, it is important not to shy away from potential opportunities, Dasgupta emphasized.

“Be fearless in taking those opportunities, because you never know what doors they’re going to open for you in the future,” she said.

As for gen AI, the surge of innovation is inspiring. Healthcare is a sphere that particularly stands to benefit from the fast and highly-detailed analysis large language models can provide, according to Dasgupta. However, all industries stand to see a huge shift in infrastructure and capabilities.

“What’s really the most exciting to me is the pace of innovation and how it’s truly unlocking the limitless opportunity to help humanity,” said Van Eyk.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Special Program Series: Women of the Cloud” event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the special “Women of the Cloud” program series. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE