Founder, Women Defining AI
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Research suggests women are less likely to be using generative AI in their jobs than their male counterparts, and they’re significantly less likely to be excited about the prospect of using it in their work. Kupp is working to shrink that gap. A co-founder of the Slack-backed consortium Future Forum, Kupp recently started Women Defining AI, a community for women to “share, learn, and experiment with AI,” with research and events for its members to get up to speed on AI and what it means for work.
Right now, what is your biggest question or curiosity about the future of work?
Truly enabling more personalized and adaptive ways of working across teams and organizations through using new technologies like generative AI. Despite the clear benefits of more flexible ways of working, organizations and leaders are still having a hard time adapting because the traditional “tools” we have (this includes office buildings and software) are built for a certain type of work model. Our tools have an important role in mirroring the paradigm of how people work together, and we have this opportunity to build a new suite of tools and AI models that can support a different way of working. I think a lot about how we might craft better digital-connections by surfacing the right conversations and work between two people, instead of relying on “the watercooler,” for example. Or how we might help our middle managers expertly prepare for and facilitate a more inclusive discussion from pre-work. There are a lot of these good or better habits that we start to instill by baking them into the technologies that we use, which is a lot more enduring and impactful than trying to only implement change at the policy or process level.
What is one problem leaders should be focused on solving in the year ahead?
Experimentation is an important skill not just in working with generative AI tools, but in all areas of how teams change and evolve with changing needs of the business. But we haven’t focused on creating cultures of experimentation and learning within many organizations. If there’s anything that both flexible work and AI has shown us, it is that there is no one size fits all, and it’s crucial for leaders to let go and focus instead of how to build the muscle for experimentation, sharing learnings and insights quickly, and propagating that across their teams. Our world & innovation is so much more dynamic than it used to be, and I want to see more leaders be willing to say “I don’t know—let’s go figure it out together”. Because honestly, we do not know!