Hidden figures no more: Women in STEM are the key to the future

In celebration of the United Nations’ International Women’s Day in Science, Dr. Ayesha Khanna was profiled for her work in AI by Peak Magazine as a trailblazer in STEM, whose contributions have left or will positively impact the world.

“My first few startups failed spectacularly,” states Ayesha Khanna frankly. “My number one mistake was being too theoretical about consumer-centrism. We think we know what the customer wants, but we don’t ask them. I was building cool and interesting things, and I was being so smug about it, but the customer didn’t want or need them.” 

It was a lesson well-internalised because customers most certainly need what her global AI solutions firm, Addo, is offering now: data, AI, and cloud services that help businesses scale, optimise, and operate more efficiently. 

Her over 20-year love affair with data science is fuelled by its creativity and interdisciplinary aspects. “With AI, you can look at everything from saving people’s lives by predicting when they might get a disease to ensuring there are enough taxi cabs during rush hour. But it also involves social sciences because you have to think about AI’s governance and ethics,” she enthuses.

“So in a good AI team, everyone respects different fields — from design and sociology to law and hardcore math. That means anybody — and any woman — can have a place in a tech firm. All they need is the confidence to ask questions. It’s not as highly specialised as many people think.”

Of course, like most outspoken women in a male-dominated industry, Khanna had to contend with self-doubt when her curiosity and eagerness to share knowledge were frequently (and unfairly) criticised. Not that that ever stopped her from moving forward. Armed with degrees from Harvard, Colombia, and the London School of Economics, the Pakistan-born Khanna spent years as a tech consultant on Wall Street before moving to Singapore in 2012 with her husband to raise their two children. In 2017, she co-founded Addo.

“There is no age at which you should stop learning,” she stresses. “The only way to counter bias against women in tech is through skills, through showing people what you know. There is nobody else that can make you believe in yourself.” That’s why she also founded 21C Girls, a charity that provides free AI and coding workshops to girls in Singapore. 

As a self-professed futurist, Khanna is eager for us to “evolve into that sci-fi-like environment” someday. One pathway there would be to create a viable, properly expansive metaverse. “The immediate challenge is interoperability. If I bought a digital Nike shoe in one metaverse, I should be able to wear it in another. My little NFT wallet, profile details, and avatar should carry over with me. We need the equivalent of a metaverse passport containing our digital information,” she muses. 

Still, Khanna is cognisant of the nervousness surrounding how our digital footprints are being used. “And very rightly so,” she agrees. “We are seeing a move towards better data governance, especially after the European Union implemented its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), with Singapore following suit in varying degrees. So data governance is something our clients demand, but also something we insist on. We have to be balanced with these things. We can’t be naively optimistic, nor can we be depressingly pessimistic.”

This was originally published by The Peak Magazine.