Inclusive AI Starts with People Not Just Algorithms

to being the first woman partner at SoftBank, you know, investing over a billion dollars, to now an entrepreneurial journey at Optimize .io. Today we are talking about scaling human potential, etc. So how have you scaled your own potential through all this that landed you in AI Kiran? Why did you land in AI Kiran now?

All right, yeah, we’ll all get seated since we have all our fellow panelists seated here. So I’m just so excited to be here. And a first call -out to all of the AI Kiran community members here because that is really the story. Amazing. And you come from where? Where are you coming from? Mumbai? Gurgaon? Jamshedpur? Himachal Pradesh. All right. Just a microcosm of the community that’s now officially 10 ,000 but growing to, very quickly, like, multiplying by two or three -fold, and we’ll be, you know, stay tuned for the announcement with partnerships like the one that we have here. So, yeah, my own journey has been one of I guess if I had to think about a theme, it’s my favorite meta poster, which is an offices all across the globe, which says, what would you do if you weren’t afraid?

And it’s a phrase that I want us to think about. You know, what would you do if you weren’t afraid? And think about what comes to your mind. Right. So it’s about, you know, taking risks and not being afraid to start over again. I had someone come up to me yesterday and say, hey, if their business is on a certain trajectory, but now if they have to move over to AI, if it meant starting over all over again, what would I recommend to them? And I said, start over all over again. Right. Because there’s a certain trajectory that if you are in, it is all about projecting where you will be five years from now, 10 years from now.

And if the new trajectory gets you further ahead, you know, by the way, and even if you fail at that, it’s better to shoot for the stars. And miss versus doing a part that. That feels achievable, but there’s not the stretch in it. And of course, with that comes a lot of assumptions about both, you know, the financial ability, the support that you have from your family to do it. But if you have all of that, certainly go out and stretch to that. So that I would say is what what has been my journey and the inspiration for AI Kiran as well, in that all of the different roles that you mentioned, I was often the only woman in the room, certainly the single digit percentage at the max.

And I think all of the women in this room relate. And it has been about incredible male allies who also helped with us getting to the roles that we are in. And so that becomes a position of privilege and responsibility to give it forward. And then that’s when I met Lakshmi, the fearless Lakshmi, who has been a pioneer both in her own reinvention. She was the OG technology 25 technologist. Connected. builder of, real builder, and someone who’s focused on scaling human potential, just like everyone else here. So Lakshmi, tell us your story, and I can’t wait to hear the stories

of everyone else here on this panel. Yeah, so, you know, for me, when I sit here today in 2026, in 1994, 93, 94, we were talking about internet is going to be big, and people would say, okay, what is this? You know, how will anybody make any money in this, etc. So what we are looking at now is nothing new. This is just a reinvention of things we’ve been seeing for the last 50 years, you know. So I’ve been at Intel, I’ve been a venture capitalist, I’ve been, you know, in philanthropy, all kinds of things. But what brought us together to AI Kiran is that for the last 15 years, my work has been about finding amazing people, doing amazing work and get them to tell their stories, because we only hear about the 10 famous people, but innovation is happening everywhere.

So how do you find them, connect them, and get them to tell their stories and teach people how to tell their stories? So I brought TED to India. I mean, I worked at Intel, venture capital, all kinds of stuff. And then I decided for the last 15 years, my journey is going to be how to create a platform to showcase the amazing talent that’s there in India and across the globe that doesn’t get told. So that’s what I’ve been doing. So when I met Kritika and I look at in the AI revolution, there is an amazing opportunity for us to do it right from the beginning. In every revolution, industrial revolution, we messed up the environment, the rivers and everything.

200 years later, we are like, okay, let’s clean it up. Even in the Internet revolution, you know, we have the problems with social media, you know, mental illnesses, all kinds of things, good and bad. But technology is growing. It’s great, actually. You can’t fight it. So how can we be part of this? to make it inclusive from the word get -go. That’s what excites us in this journey. And as she was saying, we have no idea how to do this. You kind of say, we are going to do this. And it’s amazing, like in six months, the kind of progress we had. As she said, you know, one of the things

you must say, Kritika, about the chat GPT thing. Yeah, you know, I shared this when we started AI Kiran. And by the way, this is the most you’re going to hear from both of us because the rest of the session, we are going to hear from our incredible panelists. And when we started, if you went to chat GPT and said, can you tell me about 100 women in AI in India, it would tell you 10 women, right? And it will tell you that I cannot answer this question. And these are some sources that you look at. And so over that period of time, so we launched with 250 named women. So right there, we added a zero.

Now it’s an incredible community of, you know, 10 ,000 women who are all taking this on their own, rallying it, self -organizing. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about that. creating new ventures. We just heard about Dark .ai, which Komal is doing that and helping tailors and fashion designers use AI. And you have to Awesome, right? So if we can create a platform to even add a little bit of like that oomph and make it bigger, faster, bolder, I mean, we have done our jobs. And so, yeah, so we have already added two zeros to the first number that ChatGPT had. It’s just about, you know, as they say in a startup, add a zero, add a zero, and we’ll be at that million.

So with that, let’s jump in.

So talking about scaling human potential, I have to start the conversation with Radha. I’ve known Radha… I mean, I knew Radha about reading about her first in Silicon Valley. She was one of the first people… people who brought… HP to India in 1987 before anybody thought of the technology corridor. So we used to read about her. And then she started iSupport, which is a software company, which is one of the first unicorns in Bay Area. I was still reading about her. And then through a common friend, Chitra, I met her and been a great friend for the last 25 years. And talking about somebody who reinvents herself all the time to benefit the community that’s been in her, whether it is HP or whether it’s iSupport.

And now she does something called iMerit. And Radha, before, instead of me saying what you do, the kind of work that you do in scaling humanity, the humans in the loop, has been amazing. So tell us about how many people you have, what you’re doing, and what does scaling really mean for

you? Actually, indeed. I said, indeed. you know I’ve had quite a journey together and sorry by the way I have to say how you know when you say Hewlett and Packard she actually worked with them yes so Lakshmi really dates me as well but that’s okay I work with Andy Grohwal so let’s really date ourselves I grew up in HP I’m originally from Madras and that’s where I did my engineering and you talk about being a woman in the room it was we were 17 girls and 2800 boys in engineering and I really had the opportunity and I went to get my masters in the US and just kind of fell into working at HP labs which was one of the most prestigious places then and the beauty of HP was David Packard particularly and I was really literally did the management by wandering around.

You would run into him everywhere, open offices, and ended up being a mentor. I was so fortunate. The two of them created Silicon Valley, the Silicon Valley we talk about today. And then when I had the opportunity by sheer, I ended up in Europe, ran medical products group for HP in Europe. And then at that point, I was like, okay, I’m going back to the U.S. What am I going to be doing? And there’s this whole thing about what is happening in that country of yours. It’s so behind in electronics, the country of mine, India. And I was so kind of enraged by that comment. I said, that’s rubbish. We have the best mathematicians, all of which is true.

So David Packard said, okay. I’ll give you three months. Go and figure out what you can do in India. And I tell you, it was the greatest opportunity because I ended up in this beautiful garden, sleepy town called Bangalore. And growing up in Chennai was, of course, I’d gone to Bangalore for my holidays. And the talent of, you know, when you’re working with computers, I used to actually at that time, I was working on multi -threaded Unix. And the kind of talent and what you could develop anyway, it wasn’t three months. That extended to about five and a half years. And I set up Hewlett Packard in Bangalore. And the first two multinationals of anybody doing software in India was Texas Instruments and HP.

The other most amazing thing at that time, I think even more amazing, was those were the years that TCS started. Infineon. HP started. Wipro started. TCS started. And I was just a little bit more experienced. And so we celebrated together the first million dollars of software export from India jointly. And I remember doing that million in 1989. I bring this up because if you, if when, within a lifetime when you can see an industry, technologies completely transform a large country with a growing middle class. And it’s just the creation. I mean, there is no question that IT is the global leader is in India. There is no question about that. So now you fast forward and you come to AI.

AI in turn is changing IT. It’s changing IT in ways that we never believed. It was even possible. And I think that so we started IT. And we’re still doing it. And we’re still doing it. it. It will be 10 years in AI in April. So thinking, and that’s what’s fun about being in the IT industry early on. Then you say, well, what’s happening to this industry? Multi, multi, multi billion dollars. And we started in AI. So we’ve kind of had a ringside seat. It’s also you go through when you start something early enough, you go through its issues. We have done a lot of work in computer vision, not just the language model side, but the computer vision side.

And I’ll talk a little bit about it. But at this point, we have, and many of them are AI Kiran folks. We have about little over 10 ,000 people working in AI. 3 ,500 or so in India. and our in -house talent in India working in AI is about a lot of, most of them are in -house. And we also decided to set up AI centers, not in the metros, because remember what transformed India was the work in Bangalore, Noida, Gurgaon, Chennai, et cetera. How do you then take it and use AI now, it’s the new technologies, but not have a divide? The last thing I want is, you know, like five or ten years from now, we’re all discussing how do we bridge the AI divide, as we’ve been doing, how do you bridge the digital divide?

If we could bridge it now, which is what I love about AI, Kiran, then you are in charge and you grow and you scale. So we started setting up. We started setting up centers in Calcutta, Vizag. Coimbatore, Hubli, Shillong. And so those are our centers. And each center now has become a center of excellence in a particular area. And the three areas that we work in, it was wonderful to hear this yesterday. We work four areas, actually. We work in autonomous mobility and robotics, which is our largest business. And there we have people in Kolkata and Meche, Bruce. And then Vizag is the center of excellence for healthcare medical AI. Coimbatore, and not because I’m Tamil, this is the first thing I’ve done in Tamil Nadu, but Coimbatore is our first center of excellence in Asia, automotive AI center of excellence.

And the way that center has grown, you know. And then our generative AI work is primarily in Kolkata. Shillong, it’s in multiple places. and we work with the large foundation model companies. So then what do you do? You can focus and focus and focus on the large models. How do you take that into applications for precision agriculture, breast cancer screening, healthcare AI, into the different areas that are so critical for societal applications? So we work with the foundation model companies to create what are called small models, small vision models, small language models, and then fine -tuning those models and working in reinforced learning with human feedback, red teaming, that means collaborating with the models, what we call tormenting the models, because how do you find out whether this model works or not?

You torment the darn thing. You torment it till you break it. That’s an actual technical term, let me tell you. You torment it till you break it. Okay? And then you do the data set creation to make it right. So then we will bring in experts. So we have on as scholars, we call them globally, and you can’t just do this in English, PhDs in mathematics, cardiologists, radiologists. They’re called scholars. Interventional, something, something. I found out more about this. Agronomists. Agronomists in Germany. Agronomists in the U.S. Agronomists. And this is where the beauty of AI and this potential. It’s not potential for me anymore. It’s real. It’s a 10 -year -old company. We run a fairly large business.

It’s cash positive, earnings positive. It’s got all of that stuff. But it’s business that drives the inclusion. And bringing in these experts means. You not only are inventing technology in Silicon Valley, Bangalore, et cetera, you have a global set of people and experts who are contributing to AI. So for me, let me end by one thing, which I know is most important. It’s 53 % women. 53 % women. And I’ll say one thing. I believe in this, really. If anybody asks you, how do you run a company with 50 -50 women, look them straight in the eye and say, have you seen the world lately? It’s about

50 -50. And there should be no reason why AI technology cannot be 50 -50. Thank you. Beautiful. Well, that sets the stage beautifully for maybe the next question to me here. Where you’re a new author. and this is a topic that you spend a lot of

I applaud the vision because as Radha rightly said the idea of getting it at the beginning is the right idea and I’m a big fan the book that you referred to is called a five year century isn’t available it will be available soon available for pre -order because we are going to see the change what happens normally in a hundred years within the next five years now fortunately we have seen this kind of change at least once before in the recent past around 1900 when electricity radio, automobile and planes came in about the same 10 -15 years time frame, imagine you went to sleep and you woke up 10, 15 years later, it would look like a different planet in every way possible.

It worked out for the most part. So we are about to see all of that now in five years. And in my role as a CEO and chairman of Automation Anywhere, we see the world through a very unique lens. We have about nearly half a billion digital workers that are powered by AI today run on our platform. It will reach a billion soon. The human worker to a digital worker ratio is 1 to 20. There’s 20 digital workers for every. And it is happening across 90 countries. We have customers in 90 countries across every industry. So when we saw all of this, we decided to write a book and say, it is time to tell the world what is happening, what is coming, and what is the leader.

playbook looks like.

Incredible. And maybe, Ashna, we’ll go to you. You represent another iconic company, AMD, that has been at the heart of this revolution. As we think about scaling human potential and as we think about the opportunity globally and in India, what do you feel are the limiting factors or the enablers? Is it talent? Is it capital? Is it compute? How do they interact?

You know, just to build off what both Radha and Meha said, there is no debate about the transformational nature of what we’re all experiencing. But change inherently is always personal. And what happens when you see either people who are super positive or super negative about something, it’s because they’re internalizing what they think it means to them or what it means around them. And so when you talk about… infrastructure or assets or how the world is shifting, these are all going to happen. I mean, we have, as a generation, relied exclusively and maybe I would say not exclusively, but at least extensively on human intelligence. Human intelligence has done the most brilliant things, but human intelligence has also made way for artificial intelligence.

And it’s about a model of coexistence as this develops that has to be evolved. And so from an infrastructure perspective, when we think about it, our goal is to make sure that the innovation that we as humans have ambition for is fully supported in what we build and what we deliver for the world. That’s simply put. How that ambition gets realized ultimately is in our hands, right? And so I think that’s where we have the ability to shape it early. We have the ability to drive success. and we have the ability to learn from history. Now, I will say that having been a history buff growing up, you always want people to learn from history, but people never do.

And so you should just expect that this is going to be the most interesting time that we are living and experiencing. And I would encourage and challenge everyone to make the most of that challenge of what it means to them personally and how you drive it. I mean, that’s my personal view. We will continue as a company to go build the best technology out there to support and drive and be the best partner to the businesses we work with. But ultimately, it comes down to the ambition each of us sets, each of the corporations set, each of the organizations set on the kind of change you want to drive.

No, I think it’s beautifully put. I think it’s very different people coming together, people in hardware, software, services, training, all kinds of things coming together. And that’s why for us, at AI Kiran bringing very diverse forces is important and one of the biggest things for us is youth. When we look at AI Kiran, we say what can we do to get women into the fold and what do we do with youth and how do we make sure it’s safe for youth and it furthers the knowledge. It’s not just consumption but creation. So I think we have a program called Fellows Programs. Every year we pick 20 amazing people from different disciplines and put them together and I always say that that’s a great way to adopt children without carrying them.

So we have over 250 of them and Anurag is one of our Inc. fellows and he runs something called Manzil Mystics and the reason we wanted to bring this perspective is working with youth and creativity is extremely important. So Anurag, you’ve been in the music field for a long time and you’ve been in the music field for a long time and right now you’re working with over… 60 ,000 children across 900 schools teaching music. They have taken on one thing. They said, we’re going to teach music. And you actually have a van that you take to different schools and teach them. And tell me a little bit about, you teach things like intellectual property and human rights, all kinds of these things through music.

So tell us about that journey a little bit.

Yeah, and thanks, Lakshmi. Lakshmi, I remember eight years ago, like seeing this dream with you. And she used to see my eyes glittering when I used to talk about this mobile music school. And it’s a reality now. And what I would say, for me, it’s less about AI. It’s more about HI, heart intelligence, because we’re talking about human. And what makes us human is a heart pumping and making us alive. And the heart is learning all the time. And so, and we. Thank you. and i personally saw like my story um i grew up in a low -income family in delhi studied in a government school got 52 hence no college started learning music and i in within a year i started my band i was in the u .s in seattle learning marketing and sales and how did it happen um it happened because music helped us learn that but because i create my original songs based on ideas of kabirji and gandhiji and first thing was what if someone steal my work and this this thing was there like what what if someone steals my idea and and it was very easy for anyone to just take your idea or maybe take your song and sing in a movie or a stage so for us one of the first thing that we teach you how to sing write compose and perform a song it it is very important for us that we may that that they don’t lose their property with their create.

Also, they don’t steal anyone’s property, which was there. And I was doing that, translating some English song, putting some Hindi lyrics and making myself cool. But I was like, no, that’s, create AI is there to help us learn things. And that’s what we made sure that every time we go in a classroom and a child learns to write a song or compose a song, they must know that intellectual property is a thing. And it is a big career opportunity right now. All the streaming platform have made sure that people who are like me creating a song get the royalty. But if I create a song through AI, they don’t get money. So we always say, if you want to be, if it’s fun, if you want, then do like create song through AI.

but the streaming all streaming platforms is you cannot earn money so we always say if you want

to earn money create a song on your own absolutely well I mean one is so amazing to see the diversity that’s represented on this panel and you know start thinking of your questions we’re going to do one more prepared question but then we want to hear what’s on your mind as well and so let’s bring us back maybe to this historic India AI Summit and I know you know many people many announcements being made by the panelists and you know our attendees here as well on my end certainly you’ll see a number of AI announcements has already started we’ll turn to be here in a few minutes to talk about that as well so there’s AI announcements there’s also my startup Optimize Geo where having helped brands with a move to mobile and social and being relevant there Optimize Geo and I have to say in India it’s generative engine optimization it is not JIO it’s Geo we are helping brands with being relevant because business decisions consumer decisions are being made off of questions being asked by chat GPT perplexity and the like so that’s the platform and we have a bunch of announcements there but Ashna maybe coming to you we are sitting here at this Historic India AI Summit and if access to advanced chips is going to determine who can build powerful models are we at

service intelligence and complement it with artificial intelligence. And that complementing of artificial intelligence is about how do you then have a thoughtful strategy as a country, as a company, as a startup to build that compute layer and that compute investment structure that gives you the outcomes that you need that complement the human ambition and the human scale you want to achieve. So I think it’s both. I don’t believe it will be a limiting factor for those that want to move fast. You just have to be creative with the resources you have. And believe me, we’re building fast and as quickly as we can to meet all the demand that we have. So Radha, continuing on that about being faster here than anywhere else, you’ve been doing that for 10 years before AI was a fashionable word.

What kind of investments do you think are needed to move people up the value chain of AI in India? And maybe we’ll have to comment on the same because I think it’s a really important question.

Right. So if you look at the three parts of investments in AI, think of it as a triangle, right? And we’ve heard a lot of this. It’s the AI, let’s call it the technologies, the models, all the stuff, the open AI, the anthropics, the Google, deep minds, et cetera. Then there’s all the infrastructure, and you’ve heard all the announcements, multi -billion dollars of infrastructure. And then there is AI intelligence, and that is the human intelligence. And it’s the nexus of the technology intelligence, the infrastructure to do this, and the human intelligence that really scales AI. So yes, should we be worried about AI taking away jobs? I think we should. But to me, it’s not taking away jobs.

It’s how the jobs are evolving. So you ask me, what are the investments needed? And this is where I think, really, I mean, yesterday, I felt so, I feel very hopeful with young people anyway. Average age of our company is 24 .5. You would never know that looking at me. And the sassiest people in my company would say, if it was not for you, it would be 23. I’ve actually, and that’s that sassy young people from all over India, not from the cities, necessarily, not the IITians. So what is changing in AI? You can take young people from a variety of different backgrounds. And we had some young people come into the iMerit booth and say, we’re in commerce, or we’re in something else.

How do we become AI people? that transformation or that it’s like an equation how do you take a large number of young people and you i don’t want to use the word skilling but they become ai ready so you want to make data ai ready you want to make young people ai ready and you want to make the infra ai ready when you do all those three things the daunting scales the second thing i would say is and this came out quite a bit in the discussions yesterday whether it was daria speaking from anthropic or definitely you know from google sundar talked about this what are the applications of ai that is where we are today we’ve got the large models and of course they are scaling how do you apply it to the big picture and how do you apply it to the big picture and how do you apply it to the precision agriculture because if you do and you can you can actually catch crop failure We work with people like John Deere, and you catch the crop failure in an area like this.

You’ve saved the entire field from just, and they have seen immense amount of production increases because of that. If you can look at breast cancer screening for women, and you can screen people all over, breast cancer in India for Indian women versus Asian versus Caucasian versus black, the smaller models are very different because the parameters are different. If you can use that, then you’re starting to get AI into societal applications and then into enterprise AI because that’s where the big business, any technology scales and gets adapted and adopted when the enterprise. Start to use them, accounting, legal, et cetera. So that is the investment that’s needed. handing it over to

you Mihir I think I’ll cover it in two different dimensions the first is focus on applied AI so I think it is best especially for India it’s good to develop the models but not to blindly chase this model race that’s happening in western world because if you look at the history the printing press was invented in Germany Dutch used it and became a superpower for few hundred years industrial revolution was invented France has all the parameters to succeed a small island of England used industrial revolution in every aspect of the economy became Great Britain making a point that you don’t have to invent a technology the success lies in applying that technology in every aspect of economy and that is India’s superpower if it focuses on is on it.

You have 18 or different industrial hubs in each of them, very specifically applying applied AI like I heard automotive AI, right? Can you create global competitiveness with those models? That’s where the primary investment has to go and it can completely change the economic outlook. The second thing where investment needs to go is an inclusion. I think this is a remarkable technology that can include a vast amount of people that were previously not included in digital economy. Think about the first computers with an English keyboard. You can’t include 90 % of the world population in that interface. Then came the mobile phone that got a little easier. Now you have a technology where anybody can talk, easily participate.

So this is the time to include everybody. And one of the things AI Kiran and we are doing together is we announced a partnership where together we will, in the next five years, we will train a million women and youth on AI and automation together. And I think both sides have to happen. We need to make economic growth and we have to make sure we

And tell us a little bit about the wonderful work you do as you also ask your question.

Hi, my name is Anupama. I am one of AI Kiran members. Professionally, I’m a data scientist. Now moved to a technical lead role where I’m actually helping a lot of banking and financial institutions come up with AI and automation solutions. So I work a lot in building up POCs, use cases, and at the end of them, building up strategies for them to come up with enterprise solutions for them. My question is basically to Anurag you, and this is a little bit of a personal question. We’re talking about AI, and we’re talking about scaling. We’re talking about a new world. My question is, what is it that we as parents should be teaching our kids for the next 15 years when the world is fully automated?

They are already in an AI age because they’re growing in an AI age. They see AI. They hear, do, and in fact, they’re doing everything right. So what are those skills that we as parents should be teaching our kids to be ready? For the next 15 years and, yeah, in the AI automated age. what is it that we should be you know thinking through at this point i mean of course skills will come at a later stage but what is it that we what are what are those blind spots that we don’t see as parents and as people or as professionals who are just busy in building up solutions who are busy in automating things but there’s a human factor out there right uh after 15 years what is it that is going to make them stay

that’s a brilliant question our og mama is here so she can answer better um i guess i when i became an ink fellow i became a father also my son is eight years old i am an ink fellow for eight years uh for before that two years i learned to be a father uh then i became a father so i feel the more onus is on us um i put this is my very personal i feel the five senses um and then nine emotions Navras and India has a lot of literature I guess as a parent I just made sure that my son understand the five senses and nine emotions and then I plan everything according to that it’s not like I don’t want to give phone to my son or I don’t want to do this or that so my son does all those things one of the things he started doing was birthday celebration going on street or maybe going somewhere and making him sense all these things so I guess five emotions, nine emotions five senses if we know it we can

so basically you are saying that we need to be consistent with the five emotions the five senses and nine emotions like and ensure that this is there at the same time parallelly where we are even automating and we are bringing AI. And you should send us that list of five senses and nine emotions and we’ll share it with the community as well. I mean this is maybe I feel fairly strongly about this. I think we need to teach all our kids resilience. They need to learn to fail. They need to know it’s okay to fail. They need to know life is not easy. They need to know life is unfair. And they need to learn to survive and thrive and learn to be happy in it.

So if they have resilience they will survive all these changes. And I think that’s where you see kids struggle because when kids don’t know how to be resilient that’s when they struggle. When you teach them early and you know you’re there as a support mechanism for them to go through those experiences they will learn. And especially with the change we’re about to experience. even we don’t know I mean we can sit here and speculate as a panel what the world is going to look like in 15 years we don’t know

that’s something that’s really great you know it can add one thing to this oh yeah it is so she didn’t ask the question she said as parents I’m gonna talk as a grandparent okay hey age comes with this right and it wasn’t so much them asking me it was my asking them and this is my niece and I said Nikki so what is it you think you’ve learned at school he’s a junior it’ll say he’s an 11th and just one more year to go I said what do you think we should be teaching kids at school and he says party and I said what do you think we should be teaching kids at school and he says look I don’t think there is anything you can really teach us at this point because AI is beyond all the parents which I actually agree with and we started talking about it and the thing that came out is being a curious learner because he said and I’m repeating to you not what I said to him but what he said to me he said whatever I learned last year I wanted to go into computer science at Stanford it was my biggest dream hey that’s not going to get me a job and I have to do different things I have to know what’s going on resilience I totally agree I loved your answer to it because it gave a completely from the heart and from the brain and from nature but this thing of knowing what’s around you learning about it, being curious about it because that is really important in AI.

You keep pinging it to make it better, right? And this is part of the intelligence. So thinking critically, curious learners, none of this is going to happen by keeping phones away from them. They’re going to learn to be curious because they want to be and go out in nature and learn it, right? Or wherever. And go out into the field. If you want to work in precision ag and a kid from the city doesn’t know anything about it, or in medical, whatever the thing. So to me, the answers

I was going to quickly say there are three elements, in my opinion. The first is, in my generation, we only studied one subject, like computer engineering. I think today, people are going to do multiple things, right? So combining. And when you combine, the possibilities are limited. less. People who study rock climbing and video game design and when that person creates a rock climbing video game, it will be the most authentic experience you could ever get, right? So things like that, neuroscience and medical, there are just unimaginable possibilities. So that is on the career side, how you progress. I think second thing I asked my daughter, just like you said, you asked them and she said, that stayed with me, she said that the future is that there are no worker bees.

There are only queen bees. I loved it. I loved the spirit of it. You know, the empowerment it embodies, the ambition it embodies and I think if everybody had that mindset, amazing things are possible.

You know, I think what we are going to do is actually we are just going to ask the question we are going to combine the questions. So just we’re going to hear a bunch of questions and then the panelists can just pick whichever they want and what they want to do. Okay, question.

Sorry, I remembered the third one. I think the third thing is the power of the question. So this amazing thing AI that we have, it knows many answers, but it doesn’t know what are the right questions. And it is not likely to know anytime soon. And so having the right questions, I share this example with you on our family dining table. I do this experiment to learn from the younger generation because they instinctively know what the future is, right? They know better than us. So we made a rule once and said, you know, we’re going to talk about a subject and you can’t tell me anything that Alexa, Siri, or ChatGPT would tell me. So they said, okay, bring it on, Dad.

I said, okay. So we talked about some bird with the longest wingspan or something. And they said, Dad, that’s not fair. The question itself is, bias towards chart GPT. Ask me something that is, they said it nicer than this, but they said, ask me something that is worthy of human. So I said, okay. So I said, the Patagonia has the ecological imbalance after all the industrial development. In order to restore it back, it’s a complex thing. How do you introduce new species and complex problem and so how do you bring it back to its original state? That dinner conversation went on for three days. Various tools were used and together as a family, we came out with a plan on if you were to do it, what would that look like?

Now imagine those conversations happening on every dining table, if we have the right questions.

Amazing. All right. Just quick spattering of questions and then we’ll have the panel just take yes, yeah, question.

Hi, my name is I’m founder of an AI company. We work with global higher education institutions. So I actually led my life very differently when I went to IIT. I never studied. And I look back and I say I did the best thing. So my question right now is that with the disruption that we are seeing and pretty much like IQ is gone by AI, the only thing that we are left with is EQ. And if you look at the education system and the system here, we actually hold on to something. Like we hold on to some exam, some college, and then some company. Then eventually we grow. So I want to hear from you guys how would you like to now disrupt at the fundamental levels, which is K -12, going into higher education, in order to support what is happening.

Disrupting education at fundamental levels. Hi, I’m Hemendra. I teach AI and sustainability at IIM Udaipur. And quick question. We. A lot of countries are now banning multimedia because the harm is obvious, because we didn’t have the guardrails and things came along. AI is only going to amplify the harms, just like it’s going to amplify the power. We heard about the power, and we know maybe AI can be used. The guardrails that we need for the younger generation is just connected to the question, follow -up to him, is what do we need to protect our kids from the harm while we give them the power? Thank you so much. This is Anjali. I represent Tech Mahindra.

I have been doing throughout my career, you know, connecting the left brain with the right brain, which is creative in technology. So hence, you know, AI is very close to my heart as well. So, ma ‘am, the question that I have for you is basically today in the world, people are getting overwhelmed and confused. There are so many platforms. coming over, so many methods coming over, right? If somebody has to ideate and strategize what to learn first and what next, right? How to go about it? Because so much is happening. There’s a lot of panic around Last question. Bina, AI Kiran member, part of ServiceNow, also a woman for ethical AI movement. How do we build trust in the internet?

Earlier you had provenance via people curating the internet. Now people are turning to ChatGPT and trusting those answers over human answers. How do you build provenance? That’s the main question. Last question, sorry. I do grassroots training with people for AI, but their digital gap is still very high. I have to go back and teach them tech before I can teach them AI. How do you solve this? Because we are having a lot of conversations around the youth and the power of the question, etc. All of you are fermented with wisdom. the application of AI and what you bring to the lens, how do you crunch that wisdom cycle of the youth? Because at the end of the day it is information age.

There’s so much information coming. So facts, figures, information, you’re brilliant at. But how do you build that wisdom to infer, to ask the right questions and to interpret? Can you crunch that wisdom?

So we’re going to give like 30 seconds to each of the panelists as they close. I mean, I think on learning you just start. There are incredible tools. I mean, it’s amazing how quickly the tools and the capabilities to learn in this space have developed. And how fast you can learn. I mean, if any of you were paying attention to the series of events, TCS did a hackathon where they got women from all over the country. This was 1 ,200 women, right? Non -native, they’re not English speakers. They come from different walks of life. And in four hours, they were able to do brilliant things with the training that they received. I mean, these are the kinds of things.

So the potential is massive. So I think anybody, and that’s the beauty of what we have in AI and the positive side, is you can just take it and run with it and learn. I’m an optimist. So I believe you can always find what doesn’t work. But I think if more of us focus on what works, we can do a lot more good a lot faster than what can go wrong. This is the only panel where nobody has asked us about impact on jobs. So I’ll leave it at that.

I’ll take the aspect of how do you teach them digital skills and then the AI skills. I think there is an opportunity here to skip some of the old digital skills because they weren’t very friendly. I think that in the new… In the new world, we have seen… I’ll give you a few examples. We train… We trained 700 women in Africa for six weeks, and 500 found a job within a week. We trained people in Mississippi Delta, which is a very poor part of the U.S. There was somebody flipping burgers at $12 an hour. Six weeks later, they had a $120 ,000 job in AI. This is a technology that doesn’t require you two or four years training courses, which normally the people who are needed the most can’t afford to have it.

So the fact that you can provide this kind of mobility on this technology is arguably the best thing about this technology.

I guess for EQ, education disruption, EQ, to work on EQ is arts, and that’s a disruption. I’m glad AI came, and hence Invest India just shared that the 3 trillion Indian rupees, it’s going to be that’s the market size, because… for media and entertainment sector because the world has recognized that if you want EQ to be developed, invest in arts. Live music classes are increasing drastically and that’s where I’m here. We can talk more about this.

So for me, this is not a question for the future. 72 % of the people who work at iMerit come from very low -income backgrounds and come from the hinterland of India. So it is absolutely possible to be able to… You start as though they haven’t been skilled before at all. You know, AI is new. There’s no baggage. It’s wonderful. As Mihir said, there’s a whole new way of doing it. And they learn and they are… They use AI to learn and what they learn, they teach AI. It’s really… It’s really interesting to watch. You have young women in a place called Meteor Bruce who came from tailoring and those kind of backgrounds. Why are they a center of excellence for computer vision?

Because the focus on that single pixel level accuracy is something that they have, and they learn the other skills. I would finish by saying you also have a foundation called Anudip, and this is really working across. And 630 ,000 young men and women, 50 % being women, have been skilled, have been skilled in AI literacy. Literacy, just knowing what is AI, how do you use it. I know it doesn’t address the IRM part, but I’m just talking about at the grassroots level. And when they learn how to work with AI, it’s not an enigma. It’s harder. I would say the last thing I would say, and I love my industry colleagues. it’s harder to take somebody from industry and train them in AI because they have to unlearn first than to take a young person out of some place in Odisha who comes from a second tier or even villages and be able to skill them in AI as to how to be working with AI so it’s the nexus of AI technology and that human and I’m such a believer that we can do this here.

Awesome, so with that let’s give a huge round of applause for our panelists one, two if you want to get involved in the AI moment around women, youth, differently able, we have incredible leaders here, Prerna, Neha Vaibhav, they are truly the heart and soul of making this happen so let’s hear it for them, please ask them their questions and feel free to come grab any one of us if your questions didn’t get answered. thank you I just want to say end up with saying that if you can work with people smarter than you if you can work with people half your age and twice as smart I think we’ll find all the answers and thank you so much for giving your time, thank you you