Rachita Pandya Shah, Head of Products – Ads and Promotions at Gojek, has spoken about the Role of women technopreneurs in shaping the future of ads powered by augmented intelligence at Analytics India Magazine’s Women in AI Conference: The Rising 2022. In her talk, Rachita provides an insight into the future of advertisement industry culture and reveals her viewpoint on the age-old question, can women in tech contribute differently in shaping a double-edged sword of a technology that this is emerging to be?
Rachita starts off by delving into the basics of advertisement. She states that ads are nothing but just staple. She refers to an ad describing the popular cartoon Flinstones with a modern consumer product. Rachita talks about relating with a cartoon about the stone age having modern items like cars, etc. This example is what we call influencer marketing. “Ever since humans have learned how to communicate, ads have been around. Ads are a staple. We need ads to know what are the products and new services that are out there. What are our friends or people in our network using?” says Rachita.
The concept of right and wrong
“A lot of our actions, whether sponsored or non sponsored, affect the AI that suggests with an ad. But is it that simple? Who decides what’s a good or a bad ad? What’s harmful? What’s an annoying ad?” questions Rachita.
She further provides an analogy by referencing a popular mythological show and talking about the leader of the seven kingdoms being the one who has the collective wisdom of the present, past and future leaders. Similarly, AI is supposed to aggregate data from many sources and predict the best decision. She states that brand is the AI, and the choice of the people is augmented intelligence. Collective wisdom has its merit, but it is not enough to make a great ad. That’s why augmented intelligence plays a huge role, as it caters to the feelings of the individual in comparison to the collective data.
Sheldon’s algorithm for friendship
Rachita states that collective wisdom is biased as the input accumulated in the data also contains bias. She emulates this concept with the example of “Sheldon’s algorithm for friendship” from the famous show, the Big Bang Theory.
Rachita states, “Any situation with friends could be tackled through this algorithm. Sheldon generally starts off by offering the friend a hot beverage. But, what if the friend prefers cold beverages to hot ones? Does Sheldon take that input?” Rachita explains that collective wisdom acts in a similar manner, and that’s why ads can be annoying. The collective wisdom does not take into consideration the user’s input.
The Yin-Yang imbalance
Rachita opens up about the imbalance existing between the ratio of men and women in any enterprise workforce. It’s not that women are just needed in tech. Women need to represent their community in all roles of an enterprise. Furthermore, women need to nurture their voices by making themselves heard on a platform to promote women’s empowerment. “Today, a lot of these conversations revolve around diversity. It is one of the most glaring problems present. But, this problem is not just present in developing countries like India and Bangladesh. A global dialogue needs to be set for the holistic balance for women technopreneurs from all walks of life, like ethnicity, age, religion or sexual orientation, etc. And by technopreneurs, I don’t just mean founders. If you’re a woman and you’re into tech, then you’re a technopreneur for me,” says Rachita.
She further states that this imbalance can only be nullified by women raising their voices and making their points heard. She ends her talk by urging women around the conference to be the voice of all minorities and build an ecosystem of cultural inclusion and diversity.
