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Contributed on June 29, 2020

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Women Leaders in AI – 2020

Blog: NASSCOM Official Blog

The excitement of using Artificial Intelligence has not dwindled from the time it has been unfolded. In KPMG study on “living in the AI world 2020: achievements and challenges of AI across 5 industries (retail, financial service, healthcare, transportation, and technology), revealed that 92% of respondents agreed that leveraging the spectrum of AI technologies will make their companies run more efficiently.

Amidst the admiration towards AI, IBM created the Women Leaders in AI program in 2019. This was a way to acknowledge the women leading in AI and encourage females to lend a hand in the field of AI. Through this IBM, planned to make the efforts of the honourees more visible to the world.

2020 IBM women leaders were honoured for outstanding leadership in the AI space.

Here is the list of women leaders in AI 2020 honorees:-

1. Aarthi Fernandez

Who is a Global head of Trade Operations and SEA Trade COO at Standard Chartered Bank? She is a C-suite executive with deep insight on how digitalization can positively disrupt US$17 trillion global trade. She is into deploying AI/Machine learning to make trade financing simple, faster, and better for corporate clients and mitigate compliance risk.

2. Piera Valeria Cordaro

She is a commercial Operations Innovation Manager, Wing Tre S.p.A., Italy. She is a speaker, advocating the use of AI in customer operations. Along with her team and with support by IBM Watson, implemented two chatbots, to improve customer experience. Both bots have made it possible to handle a million queries efficiently.

3. Amala Duggirala

Who is the enterprise Chief operation and Technology officer, Regions Bank, United States. To handle customers’ inquiries she deployed IBM Watson’s assistant- virtual banker persona, ”Reggie”. From the time of its implementation 4.3 million customer calls have been answered, with 22% of them being handled by AI.

4. Mara Reiff

Vice President, Strategy and Business Intelligence, Beli Canada, Canada. She used AI to improve operations, loyalty, and brand. She worked with IBM to install Watson studio Local using Red Hat open shift. This resulted in smarter, fast decision-making with improved customer experience leading to increased sales. Mara suggests everybody to “Make sure to stop and smell the roses. Take each opportunity to learn something new and embrace change”.

5. Amy Shreve- McDonald

She is lead Product Marketing Manager for Business Digital experience, AI&T, USA. EVA (Enterprise Virtual Agent) was launched in February 2019, to improve customer chat experience, it uses Watson assistant. This system has been able to handle 45% chats on its own, resulting in reduced costs and expanding 24/7 support. She also received AT&T’s 2019 Visionary Award for her work advocating EVA.

6. Ryoko Miyashita

Manager, customer service department, customer service section JACCS CO., LTD Japan. She launched a Watson-enabled operator onboarding tool, that resulted in reduced new operator training period by 30%. The tool has increase customer satisfaction. Her advice to the younger self is “It is important to believe in yourself, but it is equally or more important to believe in people around you. I would encourage myself to have many experiences and garner knowledge to objectively evaluate things, not blindly accept or exclude others’ opinions”.

7. Carol Chen

She is Vice President for Global Marketing, Global Commercial, Royal Dutch Shell, United Kingdom. Along with her team, Carol is partnering is planning for digital transformation with the creation of “Oren”- a Smart Minning Platform, by partnering with IBM. This platform will offer an innovative and creative experience for users in the sector to deliver connectivity and integration across the ecosystem. To use AI, she advice commencing with analyzing the business outcome that one wants and customer pain points that one can cater to. The next step would be to determine how to leverage AI and data to solve the problem.

8. Rosa Martinez

Cognitive Project Manager, CiaxaBank, Spain. For those who consider using AI, her advice to them is ‘first to understand the business case as it may take time more than expected. This phase can result in a non-AI project example a ‘software as usual’. But moving further with the project there can be more AI application for sure to work on’.

9. Lee- Lim Sok Know

Deputy Principal, Temasek Polytechnic, Singapore. Under the leadership of Sok Keow, The higher education institution in Singapore ‘Temasek Polytechnic’ launched the “Ask TP” chatbot in January 2018. The chatbot helped current as well as prospective students to get answers to the questions asked about Temasek and also gave personalized course advice. In the 1^st two weeks of 2020, ‘Ask’ TP’ responded to more than4,351 questions. She suggests everybody “deeply appreciate ‘people’ as they are the most critical asset in an organization, and a leader must develop a team”.

10. Itumeleng Monale

Executive Head of Enterprise Information Management Personal and Business Banking, Standard Bank of South Africa, South Africa. By deploying many analytical tools in her organization, she can uplift the revenue of the company. Through models of analytics relationships, bankers are experiencing a 40% revenue uplift when comparing to their peers. She sees AI as a tool through which business delivery can be accelerated, value could be added to human capital and relationships can build further.

With this AI era, Research has postulated that corporate giants still have less percentage of women in the technical department. Facebook’s diversity report suggests that there are 22 % of women in the technical department and 15 per cent of women work in the AI research group. Similarly, Google’s diversity report suggests that only 10% women are working on  “machine intelligence”. There is a need to encourage women participation as there are many more women around the world, stepping out of the pre-existed sheathe and going beyond the walls to shape the future. Opening up the AI platform for all will fetch us more talented beings which can help us celebrate the use of AI in different fields and different ways.

Reference:-

https://www.ibm.com/watson/women-leaders-in-ai/2020-list

https://advisory.kpmg.us/content/dam/advisory/en/pdfs/2020/technology-living-in-an-ai-world.pdf

About the author:-

Kirti Kumar is a budding HR professional currently pursuing PGDM in HR and Marketing at New Delhi Institue of Management. She looks forward to opportunities that can hone her skills. She is agile in her attitude with versatility in her action

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