How women in AI are breaking barriers and driving innovation

Artificial Intelligence (AI), once thought of as a futuristic concept, now influences every aspect of our lives. It has revolutionised the way we work, interact and make decisions. In business, it enhances productivity through automation, data analysis and decision making and is playing a significant role in industries like healthcare, finance, content creation and design, and the creative arts.

In India’s rapidly evolving AI landscape, several women are playing key roles as researchers, investors and entrepreneurs.

At YourStory’s flagship event, TechSparks 2024, prominent women leaders from the AI ecosystem discussed the art of breaking barriers, driving innovation and fostering diversity in an exclusive panel on “Women in AI”. Ritwika Chowdhury, Founder & CEO, unScript.ai, Dimple Sadhwani, co-founder, PrivateBlok and Poorvi Vijay, Vice-President, Elevation Capital, shared their insights and the future of AI from a gender-inclusive perspective.

The session was moderated by Lathika Pai, Country Head, Venture Capital and Private Equity Partnerships, Microsoft.

Vijay who leads the AI charter at Elevation Capital spoke about investing in exceptional founders in AI.

“I have two founders in AI in my portfolio doing exceptionally well who also happen to be women. They are building cutting-edge technology. One of the founders we invested in last year at the seed stage mentioned to me that it felt really good to have women in the room with decision-making power. I was doing my duty without bias but the way she felt was surprising. No male founder had ever come up to me and said this,” she shared.

Vijay emphasised the need to “be intentional, see them, give them the right opportunities, celebrate them and then they will flourish. ”You just need to be intentional. You need to see them. You need to celebrate them.

Picking up on the “intentional” aspect, Pai asked Chowhdury whether she stumbled into the AI field or was it something she always wanted to do.

An AI research scientist before turning entrepreneur, Chowdhury was working with images and video and in the process, felt that there was no impact coming out it since the time taken to productionise is very long.

“I thought I would build something where I can create impact and also use research to do that. I started speaking to people. I was not very fixated on video or content generation. But while talking to businesses across profiles and functions, I realised that the world was moving towards videos,” she explained.

“About 3.7 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. But video creation is still not a hassle-free process. It’s super difficult when human beings are involved in it… I thought there’s definitely a founder market fit which I believe in and thus unScript.ai took root,” she added. unScript.ai automates video editing, making high-quality content creation faster and more accessible.

After interesting stints in companies like JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, Sadhwani took a leap of faith by starting PrivateBlok, a GenAI co-pilot for private markets.

“The techie keeda (itch) was still in me, even if I had travelled the globe and worked at NASDAQ, and various other roles, but ultimately I found my sweet spot in AI for finance which I was doing within global banks. I came to a point where I felt I could do more, build something really valuable of my own,” she said.

Elaborating on PrivateBlok, Sadhwani added, “It is a beautiful and deep verticalised implementation of GenAI that it's going to make a huge impact on the markets. Private markets are expanding tremendously around the globe and they are going dark, and less information is known about them. We want to change that.”

Pai, while recognising the privilege of opportunities enjoyed by the panel wondered whether AI was going to leave women behind, and at a macro level, were there solutions that could help them and the less privileged.

Vijay believed that AI was not going to leave women behind, but reiterated that efforts had to be “intentional”.

“What is AI? It’s garbage in, garbage out. If there's good data, there’s a good outcome. So those in charge of what’s going on need to be very intentional about the outcome. When you are building an AI system for hiring, somebody needs to be intentional on taking the inherent available data, but actually cleaning it and not making sure it’s biased, and then providing it to the model,” she explained. “I am surrounded by phenomenal women, and I feel like they are going to make that change,” she added.

Sadhwani said that it was heartening to see the vast amount of talent available and since everyone’s a beginner when it comes to AI, it has changed the game.

“The large language models are new to the scene and so the younger people who are curious and are on the top of their game are able to pick up a lot and are very engaged,” she said.

With newer technologies emerging at a faster pace and the worry of being redundant is real.

Chowdhury said, “If you had asked me this a year ago, I would have said I was worried because then it was mostly about the tech. But the fact that we have been able to model human faces very well, creating their expressions, lip sync very well, and publishing this model has given us some more time to enter into the market faster than probably like a lot of other companies,” she added.