From Korn Ferry:
“In a global economic climate, diverse teams are expected to become more prominent in the workplace—to put it simply, there are more companies out there attracting varied employees from around the world. But as technologies like artificial intelligence continue to gain momentum, the case for creating diverse-by-design teams right now is even more compelling, says Mike Solomons, Inclusive Innovation Solutions Leader and Senior Client Partner at Korn Ferry. “We’ve seen statistics that say 70% of the routine tasks that homogenous teams tend to be better at are going to be automated,” he says. In turn, diverse teams will become a huge advantage as they’re able to work on complex challenges…Beyond just developing diverse-by-design teams, inclusive leaders must remove barriers and cultivate environments where every participant has a voice and differences are valued. “We may have a team with great potential now, but they’re fragile and new, and we want to make sure we can activate them,” says Solomons. ‘That’s where the leadership really comes in.'”
Diverse Teams, a New Strength in a Growing Field of AI
As the article mentions, we are potentially approaching a field where a majority of simple decisions can be made by artificial intelligence. Whether that is something you agree with or not, it will to some degree occur and already is with some of the new tools available to businesses on todays internet. So where does diversity fit as a topic in all of this? There are a few points to be made; Artificial Intelligence exists on a heavy bias due to its training data. There is no easy way to obtain all of an AI model’s training data, but understanding the state of the internet we can be sure that it likely does not have an ideal amount of diversity. So when it comes to decision making, we can be confidant that an AI will make a similar decision to your average white, American, middle class, heterosexual man. And for small decisions this might pass, but for anything remotely complex that is not something we can risk without being passed through a proper group of real human beings, and ideally a group with diverse and intersectional backgrounds.
