FOU musings
FOU Musings is a working marketer’s take on the art and discipline of brand building; part field notes,... View more
Organizers:
- Organized by
-
-
Women Leaders and AI
-
Women Leaders and AI
Late last year, I found myself in a room full of whip-smart women (and a smattering of equally fabulous men) talking about AI hosted by Future Females Australia. The Den at The George on Collins was stunning, but the conversation absolutely stole the show. Guided by a global marketer in the education space (because if education isn’t shaping the guardrails on AI, truly, what hope do we have?), we skipped the glossy “future of work” shtick, and went straight into a real-world battleground: risk, ethics, governance, and a quick realisation that half the country (an overstatement? I kind of feel like maybe I’m understating it?) is playing with AI in the shadows because no one wants to admit they don’t know what they’re doing.
Since then, I have sat through a series of online AI masterclasses, webinars and in-person education sessions. Some genuinely sharp. Others… less so. The signal is getting harder to find. The space is filling quickly with self-appointed experts, recycled prompts, and a kind of dumbed-down certainty that feels completely at odds with the complexity we are actually dealing with. The few good sessions I’ve sat through since only reinforced what I saw in that room at The Den… The people taking this seriously are asking better questions, not offering louder answers.
In the better sessions that offered valuable learnings, there was not one AI evangelist waxing lyrical about “ecosystems” and “synergies” in the room. These are senior leaders from some of the world’s largest and, in some instances, most influential organisations, candidly admitting that the hardest part of AI isn’t the tech, it’s the people, the politics, and the fear of sounding undercooked in front of your peers.
And this is the conundrum I continue to sit with. The deep chasm between the AI conversation we’re all supposed to be having and the one we actually need.
We’re drowning in AI advice but starving for direction
Scroll LinkedIn (powered by ChatGPT, but that’s for another time), and you’d think AI is simultaneously taking your job, fixing your job, and transforming your job title into something extraordinary like “Prompt Choreographer” or “LLM Whisperer, Level 3.”
But no one is asking, “Will AI replace us?” They’re all asking, “How do we make decisions for our teams when the ground keeps shifting overnight?”
This is the moment we’re in: Endless tools, very few truths, and a leadership vacuum because no one wants to say, “We still don’t fuc&ing know (yet), but let’s (work together and) find out.”
AI governance sounds boring, until you realise it isn’t.
A large portion of organisations still don’t have guardrails; they have an AI project team (madly learning on the hop), a few directives, some whispered risks, a lot of unspoken assumptions, and a terrifying amount of uninformed people quietly using AI at their desks, hoping IT never clocks it, or… they have a firewall.
What continues to come through loud and clear: AI governance isn’t a compliance issue; it’s a cultural one. Who gets to experiment? Who defines “safe”? Who gets questioned for using AI, and who gets applauded? And honestly, almost across the board, where are the fu&king guidelines?
This is the real battleground.
The smartest people in the room are asking all the questions.
We all left that dinner with more questions than answers, but every question I left with was one I’d never thought of, and I guess that is the point. We’re sold a version of AI that’s all about speed, optimisation, and efficiency, which is true and fabulous. But the leaders who will shape the next decade aren’t sprinting, and they’re certainly not proclaiming to know all. They’re interrogating at every turn. They’re less interested in “how quickly can we roll this out?” And more focused on “what happens to trust, judgment, and accountability if we get this wrong?
Creative instinct still matters, maybe more than ever.
One of the more surprisingly delightful moments: some major content producers are hiring more writers, because they don’t see AI as strong enough to carry the weight of nuance (Hurrah!).
Behind every governance conversation, there still remains a quiet defence of creativity, not arts and crafts creativity, the creativity that comes from critical thinking, context, and (dare I say it?) lived experience. People are worried that in the rush to optimise everything, we’ve forgotten that culture-shifting work is rarely the most efficient.
Instinct is steadfast. It has to be. AI can speed up the universe, but it can’t think braver than you or me.
What I will say is that women lead these conversations differently, AND the data agrees. There is almost always warmth, blunt honesty and a complete absence of ego. No one posturing and no one pretending. No AI messiah complex and no bat shit dull jargon as camouflage. Beyond anecdote, women are shaping AI in ways the headlines rarely capture.
UNESCO’s AI ethics framework, adopted by nearly 200 countries, was driven by women academics and policymakers advocating for safety, equality, and accountability.
The EU’s AI Act negotiations were heavily influenced by female policymakers pushing for human oversight and harm prevention over commercial speed.
Some of the most credible voices in AI risk, fairness, and bias, Dr Timnit Gebru, Dr Rumman Chowdhury, and Meredith Whittaker, are women who have repeatedly challenged Big Tech’s vision (and or blind spots).
In the US, women are disproportionately represented in AI ethics roles compared with engineering, meaning they’re over-indexing in the “protect people from the fallout” side of the equation.
In Australia, the sectors doing the heaviest lifting on AI guardrails, Education and Healthcare, are female-majority workforces. So, naturally, much of the practical, unglamorous work of shaping AI safety and policy is carried out by women whose names rarely make headlines. It’s a global pattern: women doing the work that keeps AI sensible and safe.
If AI is going to reshape how we work, (I’ll rephrase that:) AI is reshaping how we work, and this is the energy we need steering it: ego-less, whip-smart, culturally attuned, and cemented in the reality of the daily grind.
My takeaway almost every single time: the AI conversation needs a rebrand.
We can stop romanticising “the future of AI.” It’s here. If anything needs work, it’s how we talk about it. We can get overwrought by the ever-changing hype-fest of futurist slides, debate the major predictions, and techno-bro prophecies. Or we can be grown-up leaders, working together to navigate the chaos (and the cowboys) before us. What happens next, good or bad, depends entirely on the conversations we’re prepared to have.
-
0 Replies
Sorry, there were no replies found.
Log in to reply.