After an afternoon featuring inspiring business leaders, group mindfulness breaks, and activities to help attendees tap into their authentic selves in their work and personal lives, one audience question about AI seemed only natural.
“Do you think AI has the capacity to be holistic in its thought process, in spirit, soul, body and mind?” asked conference attendee Dolores Gill-Schoenmakers of Unify Consulting, toward the end of a panel featuring leading women in technology at JPMorgan Chase’s PowerHER conference Wednesday in Seattle.
“That sounds like the title for a really great TechCrunch article,” responded panelist Nancy Wang, venture partner at Felicis Ventures, founder and board chair of Advancing Women in Tech, and a former Amazon Web Services general manager, eliciting laughter from the crowd at Benaroya Hall.
Better yet, a GeekWire article!
“I do believe that we’re on the path to what we would call artificial general intelligence, or AGI. I don’t think we’re there yet,” Wang said, citing the need for observability and controls to ensure AI is ethical, unbiased, and fair.
Wang continued, “The scaffolding isn’t quite in place right now. Would I trust it to be holistic? Not yet, but I’m optimistic as a technologist.”
The exchange underscored the duality facing an industry and increasingly a world simultaneously awed by the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence and daunted by AI’s implications for humanity.
The other panelist, Sinead O’Donovan, is a Microsoft vice president of product management for the SSE (Security Service Edge) product line as part of the Entra identity and network access platform. She was careful to point out that she isn’t involved in Microsoft’s Copilot initiatives, but said she embraces the vision of AI serving as an assistant for work and life.
At the same time, she acknowledged some larger concerns.
“I think it’s going to change everything. And it’s the first time for me, personally, where I’m a little scared,” O’Donovan said, citing the precedent of society not fully understanding the impact of social media until it was too late.
She continued, “AI is really just starting, and I think the consequences are even greater, because of its ability to influence what we think … If it’s wrong, if it’s unethical, if it’s in the wrong hands, I think its impact is profound.”
The panel’s moderator, Monika Panpaliya, head of the Global Technology Product & Agility Office for JPMorgan Chase & Co., joked at the outset that perhaps ChatGPT might conduct the panel just as well. Wang sought to dispel Panpaliya of that notion when the topic of AI came up later in the session, assuring her that no AI could compare.
However, the growing use of large language models and generative AI by big companies means “more and more decisions are going to be made by these models,” Wang said. “Which brings us to a final question, which is, are these models fair? Are they non-biased? Are they accurate?”
Wang said this was top of mind for her because of a conversation earlier that afternoon with a woman who founded a company focused on model observability and accuracy instrumentation.
“That’s really what I’m excited about,” Wang said. “Because if we are going to rely on this new technology to help us make better decisions, make faster decisions, then we have to be confident that these technologies themselves are not biased, and are fair.”
But what about the person whose question provided our headline?
I connected on LinkedIn and spoke on the phone today with Dolores Gill-Schoenmakers to learn more about her background, and to ask why AI’s ability to be holistic in spirit, soul, body, and mind was top of mind for her.
Gill-Schoenmakers explained that she works in a consulting role on Microsoft’s Intelligent Automation team, focused on marketing communications and growth strategies. (She was speaking with me in her personal capacity.)
She has become concerned over the past decade that business decisions are too often based on what sounds good, and what’s trendy, without analyzing the full impact on humanity over the long run, she said.
“If you just stopped for a moment and reconciled profitability, the profit-and-loss statement, against the profit and loss of humanity, would you make the same decisions?” she said, citing as examples the impact of social media on human behavior, and ride-hailing and delivery services on the environment.
She added. “We can’t speak from both sides of our mouth and say, ‘We want a better world. We want cleaner water, we want climate control,’ but yet, we don’t allow it to seep into our businesses in general. We don’t allow it to seep into product management ideology. We want to fix things afterwards. And it costs us billions and billions of dollars.”
Speaking to the theme of the conference, she said women will play a key role in raising these issues, and ensuring that businesses operate from this holistic view.
“I feel that artificial intelligence has a place in the world, in helping humans elevate their own creativity and their own productivity,” she said, “but we shouldn’t be so caught up in the trends that we put AI above humans.”
The event was part of JP Morgan Chase & Co.’s Women on the Move initiative.
