Episode 64: Women and AI – Building Inclusivity and Innovation in Biotech with Key Opinion Leader Reut Lazo

Are you a woman in AI? Well, in this episode, you'll discover the journey behind the organization Women and AI, the importance of inclusivity in tech, and how you can help shape a fairer, more diverse AI industry. You're listening to BIO from the Bayou, empowering biotech leaders with the tools, assets, and expertise to improve healthcare outcomes.

Each episode provides insights and information to expand your network, advance your product line, and help your company thrive.

Serving the entire Gulf South, but recorded in the heart of New Orleans. Welcome back to BIO from the Bayou. From the Bayou, recorded from BIO on the Bayou. I'm Dr. Elaine Hamm, the Executive in Residence at Tulane School of Medicine, and today's guest is Rayyout Lazo, an AI thought leader and one of the founders of Women in AI. If you haven't heard of Women in AI, it is both a killer podcast that you should be following in addition to ours, and a nonprofit dedicated to supporting women in artificial intelligence through community resources and collaboration. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Elaine. It's great to be here.

Well, okay, first, can you tell me a little bit about your background outside of your organization? What is your role in the AI ecosystem?

Yeah, of course. So first of all, I'm a product leader, so I implement AI solutions in different companies, mostly emerging technologies out there. I'm also on the board of directors at AI2030, where we build ethical and responsible AI tools. So, that's my other hats besides being the founder of Women in AI.

So, that's 2 hats we have now, maybe 3 hats.

So, it's all great fun, right? Like, yeah, building AI, learning about AI. So, it's all great, and I love everything that I do with it.

That's amazing. So, now I want to ask you something that James Zanewicz, the other host, may know, but what was the origin story of Women in AI?

This is a fun story. I'm—

I figured since he asked the question, now I have to know.

Yeah. So how did we get started? So we're 3 co-founders, right? There is me, Jenny Kay Pollack, and Lana Dubinsky. And I would start with my own perspective. So it was, I think, 2021, before ChatGPT broke into our life. I had the pleasure of implementing a safety AI tool in a gaming company I worked at.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. And it was 3D avatar space, very cool, where, you know, users can chat with one another either via text or voice. And what this AI tool was doing is basically detecting harm behavior, text or voice, and reducting it from the platform for the user.

Wow.

Yeah, it was amazing. And I built the database, built the flows, the interaction, what would user A see, what user B would see, what kind of database and the learning that we want to have in the AI. And when I saw it in action, I was floored. I'm like, oh my God, this is, this is amazing.

It's working.

It's working, and it's great, and I want to do more of this. So it really opened my mind to what AI could do. And then ChatGPT broke into our life in 2022. And Jenny, Lana, and I were sitting in Jenny's balcony drinking wine, you know, chit-chatting. And we were talking about this New York Times Magazine article that came out with all the who's and who's of AI and a list of like 100 people, I think.

Yeah.

And we couldn't find a single woman on that list.

I was about to say, I can guess, I can hypothesize the makeup of that for sure.

Of course. And we were like, wait a minute, we're 3 strong women in Silicon Valley. I know I implemented AI. I know that there's other women who are building AI or funding a company with AI or doing something out there. So we should do something about this. And we thought about, okay, what can we do? What can we provide to the community? How can we provide a voice, a platform for other women to express themselves, right? And give them the media exposure that they need because apparently currently it's not happening.

Yeah.

So Jenny and Lana is like, we should do a podcast. And, uh, And, you know, not being a native English speaker, I'm like, I don't want to be— I don't want to do a podcast. But we talked about it. We said, okay, let's start with a podcast. We were sure we're going to, you know, talking to a void. Like, nobody would listen to us. It's okay. Just the 3 of us.

Just 3 of you drinking wine on a balcony with some microphones.

Exactly. That's exactly what we're doing. And I'm like, okay, if nobody would listen, I don't mind doing it. Let's do it. And we started with a podcast and we started to build that community. And all of a sudden we have a lot of women in our waiting list to come on the podcast. And all of a sudden we have listeners and I'm like, hold on, hold on. People are actually listening to us. People actually care.

Yeah. You promised me—

You promised nobody would listen. This is— but it's been a great experience and I think it taught me how to come out of my shell as well, especially with AI, especially with Things that I'm not comfortable with, but you need to break through that glass ceiling. And I'm hoping that will give inspiration to other women as well to just try things out. Trust your friends too.

Yeah, trust them.

Yeah.

But try it out. And it's been great. It's been so awesome to build this community and this initiative. And as I said, we have many women waiting to come on our podcast and we do events. as well. So we're connecting one another and empowering each other to get to those opportunities to be in front of the stage and empowering each other.

That's amazing. And, you know, if you, if you don't find something, just build it yourself is, I mean, that's incredible. I mean, why not? So take, take a deep breath, take a drink of that glass of wine and just jump in. I love that.

Yeah. And, you know, in that gaming company, I was wanting to do more, right? And I pitched to my CEO. I'm like, hey, we should change our ecosystem to be something different. We should focus on AI. Everybody can be a creator now. Everybody can create their own furnitures or create their own story. And the reaction I got that my feature was deprioritized because NFT was a thing. You remember that phase? Do you remember that crypto was a thing?

I do. Uh-huh.

And that only contributed to my feeling that I want to build something that nobody can tell me no.

Yeah.

Nobody can deprioritize what I wanna build. It's started to form this something that we wanna build together. Yeah. That we know what we wanna achieve and nobody can tell us you're going down the wrong route here. So.

Well, and you started with 3 and how large are you now?

So we have a community over 12,000 members.

That's incredible.

And we're less than a year.

Yeah. I was about to say, you haven't been, you know, Doing this very long. So that just tells you sort of the, the community that's out there waiting to be a part of the broader conversation. And so that's great. Well, since women are still underrepresented in AI and tech, how does your organization, Women in AI, work to address the gender gap in AI? And what unique strategies have been really the most effective in your mind in helping address that issue?

Right. So I think we're addressing the gender gap fundamentally with our podcast, first of all.

Yeah.

First of all, we're making those voices of women and AI and what they're doing being heard and making that platform available for them, right? And reaching out. And we're ourselves going out there and looking for those founders, CEOs, their CTOs that are doing something and bringing them in to also give them a sense of community. to feel like they belong here. There is somebody who cares what they're doing and what they're building. And I feel like the strategies that we find are more effective is, first of all, introducing the opportunities to our women because it's very easy to stay behind the computer.

Oh, absolutely.

Right? We all do that.

Yeah.

But getting ourselves out there and exposing ourselves to the outside world and expressing ourselves, that's a big leap sometimes. So I found that we provide a safe space for women to grow, to make them feel confident in what they're doing, making sure that we find the opportunities for them to speak on stages, to go on competitions, to find that news article that they can be a part of.

Right.

And really exposing their work as much as we can. And making their work count out there.

I think that confidence issue is such a big deal because in addition to working at Tulane, I'm the executive director for the Alliance of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare. One of the things that we do is organize panels and organize white papers, and we really try to, you know, my big focus is also trying to be diverse as well to make sure that our panels represent the very industry we're trying to help, which is, patients, you know, it has to reflect everybody. It's really hard to convince women that they deserve to be on that stage with all of these other people. It's an imposter syndrome that can be really hard to get over. It's just like, of course you should be—

Yeah.

At the table, of course you should be on that stage. And I refuse to have a mannel, an all-male panel at a conference. I just can't abide by that. But it's challenging to be able to get women on the stage. So I really love that you're focusing on that, that confidence, because that's Really the first step.

Yes. To feel confident in what you're doing, right? And communicate it outside. And I had a similar experience when you go to conferences and you see a panel full of male, which is great. Again, I'm sure there's other—

There's others. You just have to go one other layer and then you, then yes, you have to convince them like, no, you have incredible thoughts that we need to share with people and you have every right to be on that stage as they do as well.

Exactly. And I think that for us as the founders of Women in AI, we're trying to get to those organizers of those panels or those companies that are building those boards and introducing our women to those organizers, to those companies, and offering, look what we have. We have a pool of talented women that can provide their knowledge and expertise to this panel. We found that most of the time that we reach out to people, people are very receptive of this.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, we're begging for people to come and be on panels and be a part of white papers and really pushing for that. But yeah, that first step of like, hey, where are you? It's a little bit of a catch-22. Like, there are people that want to make sure that we have diversity, but we have to get people, the scientists, or we're scientists, of leaving the computer, leaving the bench, and stepping out a little bit. Yes, it's hard.

Absolutely.

Well, switching the topics just a little bit as we think about AI and women in a different way, it's very challenging in the healthcare industry since medicine, a lot of drugs have been tested on white males, and that has caused a massive problem in the healthcare industry because now we have drugs that don't work in women or work in other ethnic populations. And so one of the challenges with AI is that you end up having, I mean, you're relying on data. Not everyone thinks about diversity when they think about data. I mean, we're having to beg people to like, hey, I love that you are choosing male mice, but you're gonna have to throw in a lady emails every now and then, that could be a big challenge. So, like, what are some things that you are thinking about as it relates to making sure that the AI systems are diverse and fair?

Right. As you mentioned, Elaine, it has to be a proactive decision that people have to make, right? You need to think of diversity, if it's from data, if it's from panels. We need to make it a norm.

Yeah.

It's not something that is an afterthought of like, oh, we already tested only on male mice, maybe we should do that. Or by looking at the outcome, like maybe that's not the outcome that we hope to have, and let's look what we did wrong. So I'm thinking that removing the bias, which is very hard to do because human, in our nature, we're biased.

Very.

And the data that we're looking in AI is biased already. But we can do better, right? So that's the whole point of it. Like, even the recognition of like, we want to change the bias and we're going to look deeper in the data. We're going to look further of like, what can we change in it goes a long way. Yeah. So yeah, that's what I think will impact the bias a lot.

Well, and it's easier to fix if you start thinking about it at the very beginning.

Exactly. Yeah.

It has to be taken into account. And I get it, as scientists, you want to Start out with the least amount of variables and start introducing a new variable each time to ensure that you know very scientific method. But gender should be introduced at the very beginning because it's so harder to fix later down the road.

Right, and wasn't that the case with COVID vaccination?

Well, yeah, that and they weren't really listening to women, weren't trusting women when the women said no, my period is weird after the COVID vaccine. And there's a lot of sort of like concern of like oh people aren't going to take the vaccine and they're you know da da da da da. But this The dismissal of women in that conversation was problematic because that data wasn't being heard. The data was there, but people were finding it on blog threads and Reddit and things like that, and the NIH wasn't really listening.

So thinking ahead will take us a long way.

It's absolutely— planning is everything.

It is. It truly is.

Well, as a fellow, probably reluctant podcast host as well, I'm particularly interested in your work on the podcast as well, your Women and AI Podcasts. It's a platform for discussions such as these, talking about gender inclusion in tech. And so how has it evolved from that balcony conversation that you, you had a long time ago? Well, not that long. And what kind of impact have you seen on listeners and really the wider AI community?

That's a great question. So again, we started at like 3 women, right?

Yeah.

Like, let's just chat about it. Let's chat and see what's out there, see if any women would like to come on the podcast. And I think the podcast went a long way since we started. As I mentioned, we have a waiting list. We see that the women who are coming to the podcast getting a lot of echoes back from being on the podcast because people are listening.

Yeah.

And we end each podcast with a question about how the women in our community, Women in AI, can help you be more successful in what you're doing.

Yeah.

And sometimes it's funding and sometimes it's beta testing for their app or anything that they need. And we found that question really interesting because first of all, women are mostly surprised, like, really? You want to help me? I'm like, yes, we want to help you be more successful. So tell us how we can do that. And from that question, women found that they actually move forward, right?

Yeah.

People are listening. People want to help them be more successful. They want to be in the beta testing, and there are venture funds out there that supporting women specifically, and they're listening to our podcast as well. I think that another big impact is that we're partnering with a lot of companies, initiatives, and we're trying again to introduce our women to the front of the stage.

Yeah.

And making the stage more inclusive. And by doing that, we see that our women are getting more recognition. For example, we had a partnership with Convex most recently, and they were doing an AI ultimate pitch competition, which was so much fun. It was like 9 companies pitching their AI ideas, and it was great. And we had 2 women from our communities pitch in that competition. And actually, one of them, Sari Kaipa, from Double, she ended up winning in that competition. Amazing.

Yeah, yeah.

She did all the work. All we did is introduce the competition idea to her and to Convex, and it worked and it went well and she ended up winning.

I love that.

So having that recognition and making sure that our work is getting heard and recognized, I think that's our goal.

That's your goal. Well, are there any partnerships or initiatives that you have thought about in addition to that that can really help create more of these opportunities?

Certainly. So, as you know, we're partnering with Ballpen, of course, and we're partnering with Tulane University now. We're partnering with MIA, which is Mission Impact Academy, and their goal is to train 1 million women in AI by 2030.

Very exciting.

Yeah. So, we're always open for new partnerships that can advance women in AI and what we're trying to do and get our women to get that recognition of their work. So, yeah.

Well, I'm going to end on a question that you ask. Is there anything that we can help your organization do?

Again, I love that question. I love getting that question too. So we would love to hear from women if they're CEO and founders or venture capital that are involved in AI space. Please reach out to us. We are here to provide a platform, a home, a space. for you to express your work and make sure that they're successful. So please reach out and we'll happily get involved.

If they do want to connect with you or join Women in AI, how can they do so?

Oh, we are everywhere. First of all, we're on LinkedIn. We have a page on LinkedIn. We have a website, womeninai.com. You can find me on LinkedIn and my email, rayout@womeninai.com.

Yeah, and just shoot us a note, join our community, and help us support Well, Rayyoud, as always, anytime we get to spend with you and swap stories, some good, some bad, some shared experiences, is an incredible opportunity. So we should probably do this again.

Definitely. I would love to.

Maybe have a spin-out series, our own podcast, just the two of us. It'll be the Frasier podcast.

Let's do it. I'm here for it.

But as always, we will have Rayyoud's contact information and informational links posted in our show notes. Make sure you check them out to learn more, especially about women and AI, and be sure to check out their podcast. Thank you again for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks for joining us for Bio from the Bayou, and we hope you'll join us again.

To never miss the latest updates in biotech, hit the subscribe button now.

We'll catch you on our next episode of Bio from the Bayou.