Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj* says the increasing popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is providing all sorts of leadership opportunities for women.
Image: Gerd Altmann
According to EY, 95 per cent of all customer interactions will be controlled by AI by 2025, to the point where users will be unable to differentiate between human or online interactions.
Selma Turki is on a mission to ensure more women understand the impact of new technologies on their careers and engage with the change from the planning process.
She works with EY’s clients to find solutions using new technologies and she shared her views on where the problems lie.
The most common problem cited for AI lies in programming.
Gartner estimates that, by 2022, 85 per cent of AI projects will have incorrect outcomes due to biases in data or algorithms.
We are all familiar with the problem: too few women in the tech sector and not enough representation of women to challenge biases in the design and programming of new technologies.
Turki argues that women often step back and are less inclined to engage in the development of solutions.
Time and again, male colleagues will jump into the design element, while their female counterparts will hang back or not engage at all.
She cites an example when working with a national children’s hospital in providing a virtual assistant for children preparing for surgery.
During the ideation phase, which required individuals dealing with patients to provide input on the experience for a patient, male colleagues were keen to share their perspectives covering the surgical experience.
However, female colleagues were far more reticent in getting involved, and initially, their views were not included in the patient experience and the programming.
Through her work with a wide range of clients, Turki argues this is more common due to women pulling back from the conversation and having a significant impact on the broader application of programs.
“AI-based solutions and conversational solutions, in particular, need to be engaging and drive an experience or a journey designed for its target end-users,” Turki says.
“The level of engagement is determined by the original design and data that drives the whole journey, hence the need to have a diverse team driving the initiative to include everyone’s voice and input.”
The uses of data shape our world, which means the most comprehensive range of stakeholders needs to feed into the development of data.
Turki highlights the challenge: “We have access to more data than ever before, but we are not harnessing data in an intelligent way.”
One of the most crucial elements in providing effective AI-based solutions is ensuring tacit knowledge is embedded in the programming, and this can be challenging when pulling together complex functions across diverse teams.
The lack of diverse voices that occurs causes biases embedded in programs and algorithms.
Understanding the impact of AI is not the same as needing to know how AI works.
The technical complexity creates perceptual barriers that in particular, stop women from engaging and contributing to what can be feed into a program and what needs to be held by humans.
Engaging with new technologies can see daunting if it’s not your thing.
Turki identifies three things you can do to create stronger engagement with new technologies and developing a stronger leadership presence.
Learning on the job is the best way to get to grips with new technologies and how they will impact the work you do.
The field is still emerging in terms of how technology plays out, and there are interesting conversations that will develop.
Curiosity and not being afraid to ask questions are essential.
Get specific: Understand the impact of new technologies in your sector.
Shift your thinking from the high-level scanning to the detail of how processes and services will be affected.
Grab opportunities to speak to individuals working in this area and find out what is going on in your sector.
Once you are engaged in a topic, find out everything about this space will work focusing on execution and delivery, and understand what data is needed and how you can apply it to delivery.
If you know what data is required and how the technology works, you start working on solving problems.
Being prepared to understand the impact of technology is essential if you want to remain in the game and become an influencer.
Embrace a growth-mindset and be prepared to learn on the job.
As you become more engaged with the impact of new technologies, open up conversations, and create opportunities to collaborate to understand how others view the impact of technologies in your sector.
Be open to working with the data and techies as well as your team members.
Become the technology influencer in your team to work on collaborations; if you are at the heart of the action, then you influence the agenda.
The absence of women in tech is well documented, and the time has come for women across every sector to embrace new technologies.
While this may be daunting, there is an opportunity to become more innovative as leaders.
Interacting with new technologies requires leaders to understand and embrace different mindsets — in other words, cognitive diversity in generating new ideas around how services and products will evolve at a rapid pace.
This level of change becomes the constant, as Turki states: “You have to stay on top of what is coming, new techniques, new products, reading different sources of information demonstrating the end use of technology and applying new knowledge and approaches to your work.”
* Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj is Associate Professor at the UK University of Reading’s Henley Business School, CEO of Boardwalk Leadership and a Forbes contributor. She tweets at @Shaheenajj and her website is boardwalkleadership.com.
This article first appeared at www.forbes.com.
