Day 1 of HireVue Horizon 2019 is a wrap. If you missed something or couldn’t join us live, here’s a rundown of the day’s highlights.

If you’re not here with us in sunny San Diego, you can still join us virtually for Day 2. Register for the HireVue Horizon 2019 Live Stream

Read up on the highlights of today’s sessions and topics below or register for the live stream and watch them later. On-demand sessions will be available in October.

The Next Wave: The Consumerization of the Candidate Journey, Kevin Parker, CEO & Chairman of the Board, HireVue
The Next Wave: The Future of the Hiring Experience, Loren Larsen, Chief Technology Officer, HireVue
An AI for an Eye: Myths, Facts, and Fads on the Ethics and Bias of AI vs. Human Recruitment, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Chief Talent Scientist at ManpowerGroup and Professor of Business Psychology at Columbia, ManpowerGroup
What Coding Challenges Did for Deloitte Canada and Why They Continue the Journey, Georgia Ilios, Senior Manager, Experienced Hire Recruitment, Deloitte Canada
How Talent Acquisition at Caltex Leveraged Technology to Create Value During Rapid Growth and Unprecedented Hiring, Fiona Howard, Retail Operations Leader, Caltex Australia
The Symbiotic Candidate Experience — How Keurig Dr Pepper Builds Trust, Sherri Rasmussen Director, Talent Acquisition, and Stephanie Ketelhut, Manager, Talent Acquisition, Keurig Dr Pepper
How Technology Has Changed Talent Acquisition and Why TA Leaders Love It, Lisa Krause, Associate Director, Early Career Leadership Development Programs, UTC, Rodney Moses, Head of Global Talent Acquisition, Molex
How Carnival Cruise Line Took Control of the Recruiting Strategy to Effect Change, Ashley Spencer, Sr. Manager, Talent Acquisition, Carnival Cruise Line
Professionals with Autism: Talented and Untapped – How to Hire Them Now!, Marcia ScheinerPresident and Founder of Integrate Autism Employment Advisors, and Tracy Powell-Rudy, Director of Corporate Engagement, Integrate Autism Employment Advisors
How to Make AI Smarter – and Why We Should, Ayanna Howard, PH.D., College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology

The Next Wave: The Consumerization of the Candidate Journey

Kevin Parker, CEO & Chairman of the Board, HireVue

HireVue CEO Kevin Parker kicked off the conference with some milestones. Last year around this time HireVue had completed 8 million video interviews. Today, HireVue is about to pass the 12 million mark. We’ve completed over 1 million assessments and added game-based assessments, leadership assessments, and more coding challenges to the HireVue platform.

All of this is part of HireVue’s mission to make the hiring process more accessible for all types of candidates.

But there’s a paradox. In 2019, the average time to fill continues to rise, while candidate expectations are heading in the opposite direction. The average time to fill sits at around 40 days, though for some organizations it is around 70 days, but 60% of candidates lose interest just two weeks after applying. Though, as Kevin points out, this is likely because most candidates assume the organization they applied to has forgotten about them.

Kevin Parker identified three factors contributing to this paradox:

Frictionless Applications. It is easier to apply today than it has ever been. Gone are the days of 30+ minute applications; most applications take just a few minutes to complete. While a great innovation for casting a wider net for more applicants, it comes with an unintended consequence. Recruiting teams need to sift through more applicants than ever before, many of which are unqualified or only casually interested in the job.
Generational Change. The majority of today’s workforce: Gen X and Millennials, are more likely to job hop than ever. The stigma around job hopping has disappeared, and job hoppers have higher salaries and advance more quickly than their non-job-hopping counterparts. The median employee tenure is just 4.5 years and only 3 years for Millennials. This also contributes to increased applicant volume.
Consumerization of the Hiring Experience. As Kevin states: “Our expectations are driven by our experiences as consumers.” At Domino’s Pizza, for instance, you can watch your order advance through every step of the pizza-creation process. And this isn’t unique to Domino’s: from online retailers to brick-and-mortar retail, we expect visibility into quick and efficient processes. Of course, the hiring experience is typically not quicky, efficient, or transparent.

Just a few weeks ago, HireVue announced a partnership with the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest and most successful private equity firms. The partnership will expand HireVue’s capabilities and the variety of solutions it offers, with the goal of solving that paradox: making hiring more transparent, quick, and effective.

The Next Wave: The Future of the Hiring Experience

Loren Larsen, Chief Technology Officer, HireVue

HireVue CTO Loren Larsen continued Kevin’s momentum by talking about how HireVue and its customers will approach the future. He talked about how companies are using the HireVue platform in a wider, higher, and deeper way and how together, we’ll become even more exceptional tomorrow.

Loren capped off his session by covering how the core of a wider, higher, deeper future — driving toward reusability, new live interview abilities, expanded coding, pre-built and game-based assessments, and making the application process more frictionless with SMS and app-less capabilities.

Reusability

The future of video interviews includes enabling candidates to chose whether or not to re-apply with an existing video interview or take a new one. It also includes letting recruiters set policies on when candidates can do new interviews and how often. Those capabilities are on the horizon with plans for rolling them out for SuccessFactors this fall and other ATS in the coming year.

HireVue Live video interviews will see a future with and an interview-building capability. Interview-building will help recruiters set up interviews and ensure they’re asking the best questions to structure interviews and keep them consistent.

Live will also add support for more targeted branding and features to help candidates get set up, for all parties to share documents, for recruiters to take notes and access structured questions and more. Enhancements to HireVue Live start rolling out this fall and will continue rolling out in the coming year.

Expanded Assessments

CodeVue is getting better and better. Loren shared that now you're able to replay what the developer did throughout the process and access a timeline of what was done when. This helps you detect anomalies on top of CodeVue’s build-in capabilities that detect plagiarism. A new solution debugger also lets you assess what’s under the code and see if the candidate was close, but just had a bug he/she didn’t fix, so is still coachable candidate with potential.

Loren shared that HireVue is developing 100 new high-quality coding challenges, including challenges to assess database and data science skills.

Loren also touched on new emotional intelligence game-based assessments and leadership assessments that are available or on the way. These assessments assess emotional regulation, empathy, compassion, workstyle personality, how a candidate reacts in a given situation, and creativity.

SMS and App-Less Capabilities

Candidates don’t real email. And this fall, Loren shared that the future of hiring arrives with SMS capabilities to invite candidates to HireVue interviews and remind them of the next steps. Horizon will also release an app-less experience where a candidate can complete an OnDemand interview, schedule next steps, and more right from his/her phone browser — and all without an app.

Even More for the Future of the Hiring Experience

As part of a seamless, frictionless application experience, Loren shared a vision of the future with that includes a conversational chatbot to reach out to candidates on their phones and walk them through the hiring process without the candidate ever leaving his/her text messenger.

To take the future of hiring to an even better place, Loren further envisions a HireVue-driven wizard-like experience that lets candidates find a role that fits them rather than try and fit into an existing job description. The candidate will answer a few questions, take an assessment, and see possible roles that work for what the candidate wants and what he/she has to offer along with what your company needs. The future of hiring with HireVue is more seamless, more candidate friendly and different than today.

To learn more about Loren’s visions for the future of the hiring experience, register now to hear Loren’s full session once on-demand sessions are available.

An AI for an Eye: Myths, Facts, and Fads on the Ethics and Bias of AI vs. Human Recruitment

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Chief Talent Scientist at ManpowerGroup and Professor of Business Psychology at Columbia, ManpowerGroup

The “war for talent” as we know it today, started around 20 years ago. According to Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, the data says we aren’t doing so well in addressing it.

He identified three critical indicators that there is a lot of room for improvement:

Only 30% of people are engaged. Interestingly, this stat is based on data from the most successful organizations in the world, so for most people, it is probably worse.
70-75% of employees are considered passive job seekers. They’re passively waiting for a better job.
Self-employment rates have been rising for 10-15 years. Despite there being no shortage of well-paid jobs for people, more and more are choosing to work for themselves.

In other words: highly employable people are living pretty miserable lives. Objectively speaking, work conditions are better. But levels of burnout, anxiety, and lack of fulfillment are higher than they’ve ever been.

Tomas identified one core reason: a crisis of understanding. Most organizations just don’t understand their people. And most people don’t understand themselves. They go into careers because of social pressures, despite the well-established science of person-job fit.

That said, this science has not been very scalable historically. In a typical assessment, the more accurate an assessment, the more boring it is. So the best of the best assessments were non-starters for recruiting.

The alternative to scientific assessment, of course, is intuition: one of the least valid predictors of job performance, but also one of the hardest to refute or call out. No manager wants to admit that they are a bad interviewer, and “culture fit” remains an excuse for hiring people we like.

AI solves for this by increasing understanding. Tomas calls it an “X-Ray machine for organizations.” It identifies patterns that aren’t entirely clear to people to make a better, cheaper, and faster prediction. It offers a data-driven way to refute intuition.

The type of AI that will work must also be Ethical AI. While an individual’s Netflix history, Spotify playlists, and Facebook activity can give a lot of insight into people’s personalities, that does not mean they should. Particularly when that data is used to evaluate them as job candidates.

The power of AI creates a new challenge for prediction. Where before employers would need to choose between accuracy and boredom (e.g. “How long can we make this assessment before everyone refuses to take it?”), today we have more data than we’ll ever need. The spectrum has changed from Inaccurate <-> Boring to Inaccurate <-> Creepy.

Assessments today can be both short and highly valid. In today’s world of work, what matters most isn’t how well someone can perform a job they’ve performed before, but how well they’ll perform in a job they’ve never done.

Tomas identifies the three core competencies required for people to succeed in jobs they’ve never done before:

Fast Learning
Likability
Drive

Today, those key skills can be measured in a 7-minute game-based assessment. The outstanding question is if we (human evaluators) will have the humility to accept the results and the courage to deploy validated science across job roles: from entry-level to executive.

What Coding Challenges Did for Deloitte Canada and Why They Continue the Journey

Georgia Ilios, Senior Manager, Experienced Hire Recruitment, Deloitte Canada

Georgia Ilio’s breakout session covered the powerful story of how Deloitte Canada has overcome the challenges of hiring qualified developers, including by using HireVue CodeVue.

The challenge of finding developers for Deloitte is not small. Not when the public perception of your company is that of a conservative, stuffy uninnovative culture of accountants.

But in fact, of the 4,000 to 5,000 people, Deloitte Canada hires annually a full 30% are for tech roles that span cybersecurity engineers, Python developers, full-stack developers, cloud engineers, DevOps folks, data scientists, and AI/machine learning pros.

But add to the perception challenge the challenges of a competitive market and a hiring process that took too much time. Add the challenges of losing workers to the U.S., competing with tech giants that offer higher salaries, competing for a limited pool of talent and how to find and attract them, and the shortage of the right skill set and not enough grads to fill the roles.

It was a huge batch of challenges to deal with. To start, Georgia and her took on the perception challenge. To break the perception of Deloitte Canada as stuff, they undertook multiple measures to stand out to tech talent.

They next tackled the time factor and losing candidates to the timeline of an overly long hiring process. Deloitte Canada had had a 50% increase in tech roles in 5 years, but they couldn’t find enough candidates to fill them.

They realized their process had too many steps and too many interviews were needed to thoroughly assess candidates’ skills. Time to hire took at least two weeks and often longer.

The solution? Turning to HireVue OnDemand and CodeVue.

The result, in less than one year, Deloitte has shortened its time to hire from weeks to days. To show how it’s worked, Georgia and her team did some measurement. What they found was astounding. They showed savings of 2.5 hours per candidate for experienced hires. What took 4 hours per candidate before now takes only 1.5 hours per candidate.

What’s more that time saved and the fact that fewer people have to be involved results in money saved — $9,547 not per year, but per technical candidate. At roughly 1,000 technical hires a year, that’s a lot of money saved.

Deloitte is using the same process for its campus hiring too. They’ve managed to get to a final offer in 3 or 4 days for campus hiring by using HireVue OnDemand and CodeVue. It used to take 3 weeks.

Georgia describes CodeVue as a game changer for Deloitte Canada.

Success didn’t happen overnight. Georgia and her team did a lot of work to ensure adoption internally and to show recruiters and hiring managers the value. But once they saw the value, adoption has snowballed and continues to grow.

And the candidate experience is solid with a satisfaction rate of 87.8%. Not bad for a “stuffy accounting firm.”

Hear more of Deloitte Canada’s story. Register now to see Georgia’s full breakout session on-demand once on-demand sessions are available.

How Talent Acquisition at Caltex Leveraged Technology to Create Value During Rapid Growth and Unprecedented Hiring

Fiona Howard, Retail Operations Leader, Caltex Australia

Caltex is a leading fuels, lubricants, and convenience provider in Australia, serving over 3 million customers each week. In this session, they shared how they managed an organization-wide expansion from 800 team members to over 5000 in just a couple of years. The expansion was driven by an evolution in their retail strategy, transitioning from a franchised to a centralized model.

In order to avoid a “Kodak” moment, Caltex sought to redefine what convenience meant in the midst of a declining fuel market. This means quality fresh food, more lucrative retail offers, and a purpose-driven employee base that puts a premium on service. That evolution was not possible under the current franchise model. By 2020, Caltex aims to completely transition off franchise sites: bringing their total employee base from 800 to 6,500+.

Prior to HireVue, Caltex had two full-time recruiters, responsible for recruiting 480 employees each year. Candidates would need to complete a phone screen, some online testing, a face-to-face interview, and several background checks before receiving an offer.

With HireVue, they’re recruiting 500 new employees per month with four recruiters.

Interestingly, they rolled HireVue out via stealth. They simply pulled the plug on phone screens and online testing, and strategically shared candidates from HireVue with highly influential leaders. Those leaders loved it and shared how great the experience was with their colleagues - in other words, a “pull,” rather than “push,” mentality.

Caltex is also leveraging HireVue Assessments to uncover high-impact talent that sticks around. They’ve seen that candidates who score well on their HireVue Assessment are much more likely to stay in their role 180 days longer. For roles where yearly turnover is over 40%, this is huge.

The new employees are also more engaged. In their latest employee engagement survey, Caltex saw that employee engagement rose by 78%.

Partnering with HireVue, they:

Save 5000 hours a year of recruiter time.
Rank over 4700 candidates per month.
Significantly impacted their overall growth strategy.

The Symbiotic Candidate Experience — How Keurig Dr Pepper Builds Trust

Sherri Rasmussen Director, Talent Acquisition, and Stephanie Ketelhut, Manager, Talent Acquisition, Keurig Dr Pepper

What is a symbiotic candidate experience? It’s one where the candidate interviews the company as much as the company interviews the candidate. And Keurig Dr Pepper has created an innovative way to do just that. It’s also realized significant benefits as a result.

It did so with what seems like a super simple idea. Actual employees explain the details of doing a certain role in a video. Candidates watch the video and then answer a question. The process actually includes a series of six to seven videos each followed by a question. For example, an actual driver explains that a typical day might involve multiple delivery stops where a driver encounters multiple upset customers.

The candidate is then asked to explain a time he/she encountered an angry customer or colleague and how he/she handled it. It’s a beautifully simple idea and a brilliant implementation. But as Sherri and Stephanie explained in their breakout, it took a lot of time and planning to get there. The results though have been worth it for the company.

The videos offer what is essentially a virtual job simulation. One that uses the HireVue Platform for a two-way conversation with candidates.

The process has also included eliminating hiring managers from the hiring process for some roles. That’s resulting in a much faster time to hire for those roles. Anyone in TA probably raised an eyebrow reading that.

Sherri and Stephanie explain though that getting to that point involved a lot of steps to educate and get buy-in. The steps included determining roles where removing the hiring manager was realistic, such as high-volume drivers, warehouse workers, and select staff roles, doing an in-depth job analysis to determine key behaviors and skills for success, and then creating the video virtual simulations.

The results though were well worth the investment and include time back in the process for business leaders, candidates, recruiters, and more; an improved candidate NPS score, reduce turnover rates, and a faster time to fill.

Candidates complete the job simulation and video interview before talking to a recruiter. Recruiters simply review the video interviews, do a phone screen and make the decision. They’re fully trained to make the hiring decision because of the analysis created with hiring managers before the process launched. Recruiters are also paired with job profile/job family roles to make it repeatable and standardizable.

To get there, the company used a 4-step process to get buy-in:

They limited removing the hiring manager to specific roles.
They involved the business leaders to define high-performance measures for each role, including key skills, what questions to ask, and how to assess success for the role.
They defined how the shift benefits the hiring manager — for example, the massive time saved in filling open roles.
They defined how the outcome for recruiters and communicated the benefits and outcomes to executives.

To vet the process, Sherri and Stephanie and their team measure results. After just 12 months, they’ve seen:

A 2% jump in NPS
More than 21,000 NPS responses with 82% falling in the promoters category
A reduction in time to fill for drivers of 14 days, coupled with a 2% reduction in turnover and just 25 unfilled positions on average
A reduction in time to fill for warehouse roles of 1 day, coupled with a 2% reduction in turnover and just 10 unfilled positions on average

They’re still seeing improvements today.

Catch the full Keurig Dr Pepper when you register now to see the full breakout session on-demand once available.

How Technology Has Changed Talent Acquisition and Why TA Leaders Love It

Lisa Krause, Associate Director, Early Career Leadership Development Programs, UTC, Rodney Moses, Head of Global Talent Acquisition, Molex

HireVue’s Dina Taylor (VP, Solution Architecture) sat down with Lisa Krause, Associate Director, Early Career Leadership Development Programs at UTC, and Rodney Moses, Head of Global Talent Acquisition at Molex, to discuss how they have used technology to transform talent acquisition. The global presence and sheer volume of employees make both companies interesting use cases for technology adoption.

When asked about the culture of talent acquisition before implementing HireVue, Rodney started off with the perfect description, "The process before was BS…a broken system.” Molex’s process was a reactive one, focused on tactics not goals. Since implementation with HireVue, they have been able to drill down on the hiring criteria that matter most to them, which include values such as humility and entrepreneurship.

How Are They Using HireVue?

On campus recruiting, Rodney says, “HireVue takes down the walls of geography.” They’re seeing more employees from a diverse range of colleges and universities.
Both Molex and UTC are using HireVue for executive hiring. Lisa Krause and team helped with adoption by sitting down with executive team members and their admins to do a quick demo before implementation—one small step that ensured a smooth transition.
Technical hiring for positions like engineers has become democratized, removing barriers around judging competencies with CodeVue where non-technical evaluators can still move candidates along in the process.
At UTC, leadership development is a core focus, and replacing phone screening with on-demand interviews has improved the quality of candidates they’re able to recruit.

What Results Are They Seeing?

Time savings for TA teams. Molex and UTC are both seeing reductions in time spent on phone screens, scheduling follow-ups, and other rote tasks. Removing tactical work gives valuable time back to their teams.
Improved brand experience. Lisa Krause emphasized the importance of having a seamless tech experience for candidates when recruiting for employees at a tech company, and Rodney reiterated that HireVue creates a better brand experience for candidates.
Fewer bottlenecks. Molex hires countless engineers, and Rodney realized that a backlog was being created because one hiring manager needed to do all technical skill evaluations, causing a 30-person interview backlog with 10 open recs. CodeVue immediately removed the blockage.
Cost savings from reduced travel. Paying for flights and hotels gets expensive, but with live video interviewing, both companies are reducing costs.

Lisa and Rodney both made it clear that implementation in massive enterprises is possible across a range of roles, and when implementation is successful, the bottom line is improved in myriad ways.

How Carnival Cruise Line Took Control of the Recruiting Strategy to Effect Change

Ashley Spencer, Director, Global Talent Attraction, Carnival Cruise Line

Recruiting for a cruise line is unlike any other variety of recruiting. Each cruise ship is effectively a floating entertainment complex, with over 1,000 employees on each. Talent will be away from home 6-8 months of the year and needs to be sourced globally. Typically, this is done through 3rd party recruiting agencies.

Carnival is flipping that all on its head with an ambitious program to centralize 50% of its onboard recruiting by 2021. Right now, that number is <1%.

To do this, Carnival is building a sophisticated funnel designed to widen the aperture for candidates, while also delivering recruiters great talent. They’re first evaluating applicants with a few knock-out questions and a game-based assessment, then inviting the top 50% to complete a video-based assessment. Then the top 20% of those candidates are invited to a live interview with a recruiter.

Carnival also shared some initial results from the AI-driven process, leveraged to vet marine and engineering roles. Some classic problems with recruiting for these roles are:

High attrition;
High recruiting costs (the highest of any role); and
Limited diversity (officers historically come from one of two countries).

The limited diversity of hires risks creating a “mono-culture” on board, where cliques develop and passengers are not delivered the best possible experience.

With the new process, Carnival saw:

A 200% increase in nationalities in marine roles.
Time to offer shrink from 6-8 weeks to under 3 weeks.
A 66% reduction in time spent pre-screening candidates.

All with 91.9% of candidates expressing satisfaction or extreme satisfaction with the video interviewing experience!

Professionals with Autism: Talented and Untapped — How to Hire Them Now!

Marcia Scheiner, President and Founder of Integrate Autism Employment Advisors, and Tracy Powell-Rudy, Director of Corporate Engagement, Integrate Autism Employment Advisors

In their breakout, Marcia Scheiner and Tracy Rudy-Powell drove home that people on the autism spectrum are, in fact, highly intelligent, innovative, individuals with a propensity for creativity. They also pointed out that too many hiring practices weed out these candidates.

Marcia and Tracy went on to share how they help companies put a neurodiverse hiring process into practice. Doing so matters, because 500,000 people on the spectrum will become adults and need employment soon. And while 35% of 18-year-olds with autism are in college, 85% of people with autism with college degrees are unemployed — higher than the 55% of those without college degrees that don’t have jobs.

The challenge for educated people on the spectrum tends to come down to the interview process, which is largely based on social communication skills, the very place people on the spectrum can struggle most.

But why should we care about those on the spectrum with college degrees? Because people on the spectrum are 48% to 140% more productive than their neurotypical colleagues — that’s why. Says James Mahoney, executive director and head of autism work at JPMC: “They’re more productive because they’re highly focused and less distracted by social interactions. There’s talent here that nobody’s going after.”

Tracy and Marcia shared that implementing a neurodiverse program requires planning to succeed. If there’s no plan to help those on the spectrum to succeed on the job, it tends to lead to termination.

Tracey and Marcia have developed an autism at work roadmap over the last decade. It includes assessment, education and training, recruiting, and employment support.

They recommend finding an executive champion to help drive the program and then:

Assessing physical locations where those on the spectrum can succeed and what jobs they can best succeed in.
Having a hiring manager volunteer to manage the person/people, which can have a huge impact on the program’s success.
Examining hiring processes and ensuring they work for someone with autism. They pointed out that the same applies to ADHD. They encouraged looking at the questions you ask. And if you don’t know what may or may not create bias for someone on the spectrum, consider engaging Integrate Autism, Employment Advisors or another expert for help.
Educating and training staff on what the spectrum is, what to expect, and how to effectively work with it. Training them on the interviewing and onboarding processes and how to most effectively modify your existing process to avoid unintentionally screening people on the spectrum out. They point out that training shouldn’t end after initial training. It needs to be ongoing, scenario-based and interactive.

Best practices they shared, include starting small and thinking big. They suggested starting with 1 to 5 candidates for a pilot program and using internships and work from home. They also suggest a customized application that highlights executive functioning and skills-based assessments that allow candidates to identify strengths rather than focus exclusively on interpersonal skills.

They also stressed the need for employment support and that it must be ongoing. That support isn’t for the candidate, but for hiring managers and HR who need to support the candidate in being successful.

If you’re interested in seeing this great breakout, register now to see their full breakout session on-demand once on-demand sessions are available.

How to Make AI Smarter – and Why We Should

Ayanna Howard, PH.D., College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology

AI gets a lot of bad press. But is it as evil as people think? Dr. Ayanna Howard closed out day 1 with a keynote to discuss just that.

She pointed out that the question today is what is the function of AI and it is useful. Essentially, what’s in it for the user. The question is not can the machine think but can it act as intelligently as a human being?

What fascinates Ayanna about AI is that it's quickly becoming an alternative technology for hiring, retention, and retraining programs. Its very existence will change the nature of work, which skills are needed, and what people need to be trained for. AI can follow a person performing a job to train them as they go based on how they’re learning. It can facilitate someone becoming an expert on the job. This is all happening today.

There’s even an AI system that helps make users happier, hence reducing turnover. How? It identifies signs that indicate potential turnover and allows the employer to address it.

That’s collaborative AI — where humans and machines work together. AI can be used to make us more productive. The Mars rover was one of the first examples of collaborative AI where human and robotic expertise were combined to make something possible and make it work. It was archaic then compared to today.

Now though, we can do a lot more with what we have. We’re using robots to explore the earth. It’s being used on glaciers. And we have emotional AI, where the robot recognizes, interprets, processes, and simulates human emotions to understand us — when we’re tired, etc.

AI can and is being used to support children with diverse abilities and older people as whose abilities might decline with age. It can be used to Identify if an older person needs a screen reader for example. 19% of people in the U.S. have a disability and in countries with life expectancies of 70+, people spend roughly 8 years living with a disability. AI can help compensate.

AI can assist a worker to still do the job and recognize emotions that indicate something needs changed.

Ayanna went onto talk about experiments that show AI can be trusted by people. But she stressed that has to be developed intentionally. She pointed out that biases can creep into AI, such as toward one’s own race, gender, or age.

And because machines — an algorithm — are influenced by their creators, Ayanna stressed that as we train systems, we have to be careful not to introduce bias into them. It’s possible though to train out bias so the systems can actually be better than people. Not perfect, but better, “better than what we have.” That, she said, is the hope for these systems.

She said to always question. There’s that 1% chance that AI is wrong. But AI is here to stay, we just have to seize the opportunity, use it for what it’s good for, understand its limitations and what power it offers and limitations it holds. It can help us have a better world if we use it right.

And develop it right, by ensuring diversity in the development team to ensure bias isn’t designed into the AI.

Ayanna closed by sharing that it’s not too late to make AI work for us. It will not destroy us. It will transform our lives for the better. We control it. It doesn’t control us. We can use it to work together to make the world a better place. Just like Ayana and the early scientists at NASA used it to explore Mars.

If you missed Ayanna’s keynote or couldn’t join us for the event or live stream, register now to see her full keynote session on-demand once available.