 Hi everyone and welcome to theCUBE's special program series, Women of the Cloud brought to you by AWS. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We've got three terrific guests for this segment. I'd like to welcome Stephanie Van Eyck. She is the general manager for Western Canada at Slalom Consulting. Jodi Baxter, she is the vice president, 5G and IOT connectivity at Telus. And Dabashri Descupta, she is the country head cloud innovation team at AWS Canada. Welcome to all of you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I'd love to have you all start out by telling us a little bit about your roles at the company and telling us a little bit about yourself. Stephanie, let's start with you. Sure, I'm happy to. And first of all, let me just say thank you. I am honored to be here and absolutely inspired by this series and this program. And absolutely happy to be here with our other panelists today. I'm Stephanie Van Eyck of Slalom. Slalom is a purpose led global business and technology consulting company. And we have a really fiercely human approach. We focus on strategy, transformation and technology. We're growing fast. We have 12,000 employees in six countries and 45 markets. We're thrilled to be recognized as one of Canada's best places to work, including best places to work for women. And hot off the press room reinvent we're also honored to be recognized with five GON global AWS partner in the year awards. A little bit about me and my role. My role is the general manager for Western Canada, first of all, we serve clients across the West in a variety of industries, including financial services, energy, retail, public sector, telecom and agriculture. And truly the through line of my career has been the intersection of technology and humanity and growing leaders of the future. Excellent, excellent. And Jodi, how about you? Tell us a little bit about yourself. First of all, I also want to thank Stephanie, Rebecca and the rest of the crew for inviting me into be a part of this. It's always exciting when I get to be a part of such an amazing panel. I'm Jodi Baxter, I'm the vice president of our five GNIOT connectivity business at Telus. At Telus, I lead a team dedicated to helping our customers transform their business with IOT platforms that leverage the power of data, AI and 5G. So I find the topics that we're gonna discuss today very, very suitable to the path that I've been on. And interestingly enough, Telus has grown from what really started as a regional telco to a global technology company powered by a purpose to use technology to create positive and meaningful changes in our society. Our entire purpose is grounded in helping every business of every size to truly leverage the power of technology to solve critical business challenges and deliver better business outcomes. My team with Telus at industry solutions is utilizing IOT or Internet of Things and AI and machine learning to create innovative end-to-end solutions for our customers and society as a whole. A little bit about myself just quickly because I wanna make sure you understand who I am. I actually have been with Telus for 24 years and I started my career directly out of my post-graduate degree. And one of the things that I found most inspirational about my journey with Telus is, well, there are purpose builds on how we can use technology to support our customers. We do the same inside of Telus and with that, I've had the gift of many great leaders in many different roles. And I always say, I've been at Telus since I completed my undergraduate, but I feel like I've had at least seven careers moving around in many different areas of the organization. Excellent. Dabashri, how about you? Tell us a little bit about what you do at AWS Canada. Yeah, for sure. Really nice to say everybody, really pleased to be part of this panel as well. My name is Dabashri. I head something that's called Cloud Innovation at AWS Canada. So essentially my role, I work with different companies, different enterprises to figure out how can you truly build new products on the cloud? So they should be solving some sort of a customer problem, some sort of a company problem. And if I think about the cloud, it's a great technology, but sometimes how to use it is a question mark. And I lead those conversations with many executives across Canada. My career, and since everybody's covering this a bit, I'm actually a chemical engineer. So I started as a chemical engineer. I used to work in pharma, oil and gas, and through many, many different changes across, I landed in tech and I absolutely love it because power of technology and solving business problems is something else. Well, as all three of you have pointed out, this is a really exciting panel to have three female leaders in technology here today on theCUBE. But diversity in this industry is something that this industry really struggles with, attracting and retaining women and members of marginalized groups. I'd love to have all of you talk a little bit about your personal recommendations to young women who are thinking, young women and members of marginalized groups who are thinking about starting a career in tech. And maybe even those who are starting as chemical engineers or accountants to consider technology and also what recommendations you have for organizations that are struggling with attracting different kinds of diverse workers. Debasri, how about we start with you? Yeah, it's a great question. It's a loaded question though because there's a lot of different aspects you could cover. I think for, I can speak specifically for my case and I give this advice to a lot of women who've asked me in the past, like, how do you land up where you are? And the first thing is be fearless, right? There's gonna be so many different types of opportunities that come your way. And frankly, like for me, even though I've been at Amazon for about seven and a half years, I've only been in cloud computing for three out of those seven and a half years. The remaining four and a half, I was doing product management for Amazon Logistics. I did a lot of work in Amazon Prime, which is again, completely different part of our organization. So be fearless in taking those opportunities because you never know what doors they're gonna open for you in the future. And that's essentially how I made my career transition from making pills at a pharmaceutical lab to oil and gas. I used to own a unit in an oil and gas company to today where I work with customers to develop new products. Great, Jodi, how about you? Same question. So I think I love Debashiri's example of where her journey took her. And mine's actually not dissimilar except that I have a PCOM and then I moved into a technology role in the organization. And I think one of the things that has been really powerful for me is I've always had a strong group of champions that are trying to help me get where I need to be. And I think the other thing that as women, we really need to consider or we should continue to consider is as we move into more technology and cloud and AI capabilities, soft skills are actually almost more important than the technology skills. And so as women, we tend to be better, a little better at the soft skills. So how do we leverage our superpowers to help generate more opportunities to move into the technology fields and help create the right outcomes? Excellent, well, fearlessness, the soft skills, super power. Stephanie, how about you? What is your advice for both individuals and organizations? I love listening to Debashiri and Jodi and just on Jodi's last point, it does remind me of the importance of knowing your superpowers and thinking about just the superpowers that had fueled my career, just that boundless optimism and really a drive to make an impact. Cause I think it ties into the recommendation for women wanting to get into technology and cloud fields. It's an incredible career. It is so rewarding. And I think that's what I want everyone to hear it's just, it's immensely rewarding. So kudos for wanting to get into this field. It truly is a catalyst for a better future for all. I think that's incredibly important. Just on recommendations, adopting a really curious and experimental mindset, getting hands on with technology, it's so easy today. There's just a breadth of opportunities to be able to grow and learn. AWS educates a great place to start. I personally just started a class at Simon Fraser University around digital information and leadership. It's just a constant opportunities to continue to learn and go about being hands on. The other thing I would say, in addition to having as Jodi spoke about the importance of a solid network and I've heard it talked about in terms of personal board of directors and having people that can really help grow and guide your career. Also giving back, it's one of the most important things that I've learned is just how much you've learned from giving back to others and how much you've learned from being a mentor for others as well. All such great advice. So we know that generative AI and other kinds of technologies could disrupt existing jobs. We've heard a lot about the dislocation of potential jobs. And this is particularly poignant around chat GBT's first birthday when it was unleashed in the world and that was in November 30th. Jodi, I'd love to talk with you about how workers can prepare for these changes. Great, so I think one of the things that we can think about when we think about generative AI, it is the industrial revolution of this century. And it does absolutely have the potential to be both disruptive. But it also has the potential to enhance. So on the disruptive side, there's many tasks that we can complete it automatically through automated fashion. We're gonna remove some of the transactional work from people's jobs. But when we actually think about this and how people can prepare for this is on the enhancement side, which I actually get quite excited about, is that the average employee now will have vastly more insight at their fingertips. We're gonna enable more focus on the highest value and most impactful tasks for businesses. And so if we consider to think about it in that fashion, we can actually look at how we can evolve the roles. Even in the last six months, I have actually seen new roles evolve in the world that never existed before. And it's actually quite exciting. And these aren't roles that mean you have to go to school and have a brand new degree of training. It's taking your skills and actually creating these new roles. And a couple of them that I found really interesting is one is called a prompt engineer. So a prompt engineer works with content creators, product teams, data scientists and other professionals to develop and refine AI-generated text prompts that meet the needs of clients and users. So if you think about the arts and humanities side of where you can get your degrees from, you're seeing actually that convergence into technology, which I found really interesting. Either way, I think the best way that workers can prepare is to be hands-on with the technology in both their work and their personal lives. The comfort we gain from being exposed will actually help us take advantage of the generative AI capabilities. And while it will also, in doing so, will limit the impact it will have on its disruptions that it creates for us. Well, it sounds like there is hope for English majors based on this new role of prompt engineer. And Debashri, both Stephanie and Jodi have talked about the importance of continuous learning. I'm curious about the kinds of pilot projects that companies are experimenting with to help their workers learn generative AI capabilities. And if you've seen any real-world case studies that are particularly promising in your eyes. Yeah, that's a great question. I think for, as we, when generative AI first came out and, of course, AWS, we have our own offerings in the generative AI space, the easiest use cases are the ones that people wanted to do right away that would enhance the customer experience of your brand is chatbots. Everybody wants a chatbot, right? I want a chatbot on my website. I want a chatbot for my internal applications. So that chatbot frenzy hasn't really changed, right? Everyone is experimenting with a lot of those things. The other aspect that I'm seeing in terms of trends is, and especially as you think about, getting your employees to use this new technology is inside generation for internal use cases. So like, for instance, if you are a new joiner at a company and you wanna know what the HR policies are around location or around statutory holidays, instead of going and asking your HR person, maybe there is some sort of an internal search capability that allows you to get that information. Maybe there's an onboarding package that you're given through this generative AI capability that searches your internal databases and provides that information to you. We're seeing a lot of those things because there's still a bit of, I wanna call it reluctance for a lot of brands to have an external facing generative AI capability towards their external customers because you don't know how these models are going to, what responses they're gonna have, right? Which is, it ties nicely to Jody's first question about how it disrupts jobs because you're always gonna have a human in the loop, right? Just so that you can make sure that these AI systems are answering the right way. But yeah, so those two ones are the biggest ones that I'm seeing. We're also now seeing a lot of companies start to look at their entire value chain of their business and start saying, okay, if I have my finance function, if I have my accounts payable, maybe there's other functions within your company, how can generative AI maybe reduce some of the manual work that you're doing and get to very industry-specific use cases? We're just scratching the surface in that space. So it's hard to say exact trends, but based on the industry, you can come up with different trends there. I wanna turn the conversation to bias in AI. This is a big issue that a lot of organizations are really grappling with right now. Stephanie, how can organizations ensure their gen AI systems are developed and applied in ways that prevents unfair or harmful treatment or bias against different individuals and groups? Yeah, I think it's such an important topic and I'm really glad you asked. I think it's important to consider the sources of bias and there are many sources. So considering could be a source that may be bias within your organization or there may be bias in the problem that you're trying to solve or the opportunity that you're trying to capture. There can also be bias in data and large language models with AI specifically and thinking about just the challenges that from underrepresented groups, minorities, there's gender disparity, things that contribute to really that unconscious bias. And I wanna tie back to a few things that Devashri and Jodi said in terms of having humans involved. And I think the most important thing that we can do is build a diverse team. And back to Jodi's point about, there's new roles emerging in this field. If you think about pairing technology and data specialists with emotional intelligence specialists to really consider the human impact of what we're doing, it's anchored on the business value that we're delivering but also making sure that there's strong legal and compliance approaches to what we're delivering. Excellent. We're actually around. We do have. Sure, go ahead, Jodi. So I think I perfectly said, Stephanie, the piece I think that we've, I agree with you, this is so important that we actually have a human element because the gender in the AI tool is learning. So it's learning from us. And so we have to ensure as organizations and as end users that we are providing it with an equally diverse set of information. I think the other thing as organizations that is really key and it's something that we take really seriously that tell us is you need to, like AI has actually been around for a number of years. Generative AI is actually the new evolution that we're seeing. And so you need to look at your privacy and your security by design capabilities that you've instilled into your organization and ensure that you're leveraging those capabilities and that you're instilling those capabilities into whatever you're doing with Generative AI just to ensure that you have the safeguards in place for any corporate adoption or customer adoption of the tools. Yeah, building even more on that, being able to embed ethical AI policies in everything you do. And the technology is so advanced it can help you think about Amazon Bedrock and being able to train a generative AI model and LLM a large language model and training not just what to include but also what not to include, which I think is super important. So taking the human and thinking about how to design these technologies. Yeah, that's absolutely true for journalists too in their writing stories is what you include is almost as important as what you don't include. As we wrap up, I'd love for each of you to talk about, I mean, all of your enthusiasm for this industry and in particularly new innovations and developments is palpable. I'd love for each of you to talk about which developments or discoveries are most exciting and energizing to you for continued progress in this field. Stephanie, how about going back to you? Sure, I think it's all about just the pace of innovation is what is most exciting to me. I can pick out any single use case whether it's incredible new ways of working or improving the customer experience or breakthrough business models. There's so many in each industry to think about but what's really the most exciting to me is the pace of innovation and how it's truly unlocking the limitless opportunity to help humanity. Jodi? Yeah, I think well said on the pace of innovation I think that is so exciting. I think the other part that I get really excited about because I get to live in the world of internet of things and how are we creating a digital environment for not just a chat or an AI, a generative AI tool but how are we helping machine learning and machines make decisions? And I think all of this just creates such a powerful ecosystem. And the one thing that I'm the most excited about is how does this help us to solve real problems that we're experiencing in the world both in our domestic environment and in our international environment and just looking at how we can create new opportunities for people but also solve real business and real organizational problems across the world. Excellent, Debashri. Last word. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think for me, of course like pace of innovation all of that stuff is at an astounding pace right now. But to me, what's really exciting is actually the healthcare piece. We're seeing so much things happening and I have a family history of cancer as an example and I've seen the amount of work that goes behind just identifying if somebody has cancer, right? And I've seen some of these new technologies with gen AI being applied to figuring out if somebody has those diseases just being able to identify those things and reducing that time span so that you can start treatment options right away like those things in terms of impacting my life and my family's life, like those things are super exciting to me and I think it's gonna make a huge difference in people's personal lives as well apart from just our work lives. So really excited about that. Terrific note to end on. Debashri, Stephanie Jodi, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you. And thank you to our viewers for tuning in to this special program, Women of the Cloud brought to you by AWS. I'm Rebecca Knight.