IBM Celebrates Global Women Leaders Shaping the Future of AI

IBM (NYSE: IBM) at Think Digital conference unveiled its list of Women Leaders in AI, recognizing 35 exceptional female business leaders from 12 countries who are using artificial intelligence to drive transformation, growth, and innovation across a wide variety of industries.

These leaders were chosen because they and their companies are demonstrating the power of AI to help improve business and work for their customers and employees. The annual recognition not only celebrates the honorees’ accomplishments but also creates a peer network for them to learn from each other and discover approaches for applying AI to solve pressing business challenges.

Research from a recent IBM global AI survey indicates that 34 percent of businesses surveyed across the U.S., Europe, and China have adopted AI. From understanding and deriving insights from tens of millions of financial documents, to improving new employee onboarding experiences, to helping women have a better experience buying intimate apparel, these women leaders are shaping innovative AI use cases. Their AI efforts helped to increase customer satisfaction, improvements in employee retention, faster response times, significant cost savings, and more efficient processes.

Many honorees are demonstrating how the power of Watson’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) can be used to improve efficiency in business processes and drive greater customer and employee experiences. They are leveraging AI tools to build AI and supplement the data science skills shortage. And they are proving, through a variety of AI applications, that human and machine collaboration can truly help improve how people work.

Explore the stories of how these women leaders are using AI to help transform their businesses — and the lessons they’ve learned along the way — at ibm.biz/womeninai. Follow us at @IBMWatson for live social updates.

“Artificial intelligence will be at the center of business transformation over the next decade, and for us to mitigate bias moving forward we need women and diverse teams at the forefront of AI. That’s why we are proud to share the stories of 35 remarkable women who are driving progressive use of AI using Watson,” said Michelle Peluso, IBM’s Senior Vice President for Digital Sales and Chief Marketing Officer, who also serves as the global leader for IBM’s Women’s Initiative. “Their accomplishments are an inspiration to all of us.”

To shed more light on diversity in AI, IBM recently teamed up with Morning Consult to conduct a new global study of more than 3,200 AI professionals. Notable findings of that study, being released today, include:

85 percent of AI professionals believe the industry has become more diverse over the past few years; of those, 91 percent think that shift is having a positive impact. 74 percent of AI professionals believing diversity hasn’t improved say the industry must become more diverse to reach its potential.

While men and women working in AI were equally likely to be interested in math and hard sciences growing up, men working in AI were more likely to be told they had a natural talent for mathematics and hard sciences than women, while women were more likely to be told they had a natural talent for the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts.

Two in five AI professionals faci