Debbie Botha, Global Chief Partnership Officer, Women in AI
Shahrin Oli Mohamed, Head of Information & Digital Technology (CIO) Global LNG Trading at Shell
Q: What is your take on digital transformation? What value will it add to the community moving forward?
Debbie: The importance of digital transformation for me is to really cross the analytics chasm from being able to do retrospective business intelligence up to autonomous and automated machine learning and AI models to improve your business processes
Q: Moving to you Shahrin, what’s your take on this topic?
Shahrin: Digital transformation has the potential to change lives directly or indirectly as companies use the power of technology to get more efficient and to get better at what they do, and I think it will impact the world in multiple ways.
Q: What operations do Women in AI run in the UAE?
Debbie: Yes, so we do have an office for women in AI in UAE and we call them ambassadors and they are leadership teams. The ambassador for women in AI in the UAE is Dr. Hoda A.Alkhzaimi and the Chief Operating Officer is Yasmin Al Enazi. So I work closely with them for partnerships but I represent global. We have a fantastic upcoming opportunity at Gitex where we will run several things over there as we will be present physically. We have been more virtual with events and hackathons and all sorts of gatherings for women with education and talks but now we will go a bit more face-to-face. We will really start organizing. There are so many fantastic women in AI at this event that are not yet members. So we will definitely make sure that we gather all these women and have much more representation.
Q: Very informative speech. Thank you for it. My final question to you is how do you see Dubai’s digital transformation path and future digitizing endeavors?
Debbie: Yes, the future is massive. I would talk from an artificial intelligence perspective. UAE as we all know is the first nation with a minister for AI and also the first university for Artificial Intelligence. I have already seen many fantastic people graduating from Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence | MBZUAI. There are women and men in really influential positions that have already gotten masters at this university. So that to me is fantastic. I would just like to add that in the UAE we as women are really privileged. We are given the opportunity to really thrive and reduce that gender gap that we have because worldwide only 25% of the technical experts in data analytics and AI are women. 10% of articles and publications in this field are by women and as we have said 50% of women in this field drop off mid-career.I think UAE is on the right path to close that gap.The AI solutions that are being built in general are very biased and there are lots of research about that showing that it is because of the gender gap.UAE is on the path to close that gap for sure. I am very confident in that.
Q: Women represent a small percentage in the technology field, can you elaborate on this point and give your opinion on how can women have more rights and be more represented?
Shahrin: Thank you for the question. I think it’s an important question, especially one that is asked by a man because men have an important role to play to help achieve equity & inclusion. So how do we help increase the representation of women in tech? So apart from the amazing work that people like Debbie and her team are doing already, there are a few things that companies can do. So the first is, to have concrete targets for the representation of women in these leadership positions from C-suite to mid-level managers and that’s what we have done in Shell because especially in trading, the problem is a lot more acute as there are not many women in trading and in tech its slightly more challenging, so that’s the first. The second thing that I found immensely useful is mentorships. So pair up women with more senior leaders to help them navigate their careers because it will help them across various instances for example to act as a sounding board or tackle relevant challenges for instance building executive presence, building their brand, how to be more credible, confident or even just to test ideas and get perspectives for dilemmas, etc. So mentorship and coaching and investing in them are very impactful. It does not need to be expensive as I think it can be done for free for instance connecting folks with networks. The third for me would be to build a pipeline across the different layers of the organization. We typically see a drop-off of women at middle management-level and there are multiple reasons for that. One of the reason is sometimes not being competitive enough to get to the next level. To overcome that, the solution lies in providing opportunities for growth. We also want to be mindful about inadvertently creating positive discrimination. We do not want to hire someone just because they are female or from a minority race but we want more women and minority folks to have the opportunities to prepare them to be able to be competitive for it.
Interviewer- It should be because of their qualification and not out of mercy.
Shahrin: Exactly. We want them to be the best person for the role. Person- not female or male. So how do we do that? The answer is by providing opportunities that they may not have and opportunities could be exposure to projects, it could be international assignments, it could be broadening assignments, it could be training, support for development areas and all of the above. So that’s crucial, and the last piece is to cater to their needs. I think we are seeing this with the hybrid working where we do not have an appreciation that each person is an individual and individuals have individual needs. One person might appreciate taking one month for snowboarding, another person might appreciate working remotely and it’s about creating an environment and culture that is accepting of all of that. So coming back to the question of diversity, it is about understanding the unique needs of these folks and building an environment where we are absolutely alright with that, so for instance, mothers who take time off for maternity leave, how do we ensure that they have a softer landing back into the organization when they come back. That could also be normalizing things like sabbaticals.
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