The Hindu Business Line, India: Cognizant’s Co-Founder & Head of Strategy, Cognizant Digital Business, Discusses AI’s Potential to Ensure Workplace Equality

"AI has the potential to ensure inclusion in workforce, but we need to ensure that it leads there,” said Paul Roehrig. “It can be used as a part of the solution to bring about gender parity, but it is absolutely not the only solution; the real power lies with humans to assert agency and make the tools that we need, to have a better society.”  Excerpts:

“What AI can bring to the workplace was one of the topics explored and debated during 'The Future of Work - Accelerating Gender Parity' Conference held by Harvard Business School (HBS) Club of India at Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai on September 21. HBS faculty, industry leaders and other experts spoke at the conference to encourage the strategic importance of gender diversity in a changing environment.

Roehrig used the analogy of raising children to explain the kind of responsibility that AI necessitates. He explained how children can be exposed to extraneous factors that we may or may not want them to be privy to. Similarly, it is necessary to ensure that AI is ‘trained the way we expect our children to be trained’, so that they do what you want them to, as opposed to ‘amplifying, accelerating and enhancing what you don't want them to do’.

‘We build the AI system; so it's up to us to make the tools that make the society that we want,’ he said. He emphasized how humans should be made the focal point of technology and reiterated the significance of social scientists in the actual development process. Whether this system becomes amplifiers of inclusion versus amplifiers of toxic behaviour is a decision we have to take, said Roehrig.”

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