You’re listening to my conversation with Dominique Rose Van-Winther, CEO and Chief AI Evangelist at Final Upgrade, an AI consulting firm.
In this insightful discussion, Dominique shares her views on the gender gap in AI adoption. She highlights the critical need for upskilling and underscores the importance of understanding AI’s strategic application to stay competitive and minimize the risk of losing your job.
At the end of this episode you’ll hear practical tips on effectively leveraging AI tools and future-proofing your career.
Sharon Ehrlich: Welcome, everyone, to the Living While Leading podcast. My name is Sharon Ehrlich, and I am an executive coach and founder of Living While Leading. This is an executive coaching practice that supports women leaders to gain control over their careers and their lives and work with purpose.
This is a show where I invite top business executives and thought leaders to share their wisdom on leadership topics which are of particular interest to women and the development of their professional careers. I’m very happy to share with you today that I have Dominique Rose Van-Winther as my guest. Today we’re going to be talking about Artificial Intelligence, Survival and Overcoming Genius Gridlock. Welcome to the show, Dominique. Can you please introduce yourself to everyone?
Dominique Van-Winther: Yeah, so thank you so much, Sharon, for inviting me and to everybody who’s joined today. I’ve been in consulting about 25 years. I’m Danish-American, lived all across the world, but I’ve always really been a tech, whether working with technology companies or bringing technology into the firms that I worked at. Over the past about year and a half, I have focused almost entirely on AI and really figuring out how do you start to bring that into the organization? How do you upskill everyone? And that’s the company that I lead, Final Upgrade, which I’m not only CEO of, but Chief AI Evangelist, which is a role that I understand as being one of the most important roles in order to execute on the digital transformation that’s going to be coming.
Sharon Ehrlich: This is a topic that I think is very important. Everybody’s been buzzing about it since ChatGPT has become available to all of us, and it’s really key that we get ahead of it and not fall behind. If it’s okay with you, Dominique, I’m going to jump right into some questions that I have for you, which I think may be of interest to my audience. The first one is, how are women leaders adopting and adapting to AI compared to their male counterparts?
Dominique Van-Winther: Well, look, I’ve been spending the last about year and a half training thousands of people, and my biggest concern, especially over the course of last year, when everything was just starting to catch on, was I would be doing a session for a couple hundred people, and I would say, who here has been dabbling? Tried out this platform, tried out that platform, all sorts of new tech that was coming out in the AI space, and you’d see a lot of male hands going up.
My concern is there were very few women’s hands going up, or they would come into the session and I would say, how are you doing with AI? What have you been trying out? And they go, I don’t know what this wall is that all of a sudden, very often happens when they put up both hands and go, you know what? I’m not super tech friendly. It’s not exactly my thing. And my biggest concern when I saw that is there’s going to be a massive setback.
Women as a whole, as the industry and every part of our business gets innovated upon and shifts into a new dynamic. If you haven’t started upskilling yourself, when layoffs come, they’re going to come first to those people who are behind on using the newest technology.
I’ve seen a very vast difference in terms of women’s ability to just get a little bit more curious, get a little bit more interested with the tech and experiment. Now, it’s not across the board. You’ll see women who are running, for example, startups, or involved in startups are a lot more agile, quick, easy to pick them up, almost because you have to.
My worry is a lot of people that are working in big corporations, and especially women who are leading departments and practices and functions, are going to put themselves as a setback. The future leaders of those companies and the board and the shareholders, they all want people who can adapt to becoming change. And my worry is, women are already at somewhat of a disadvantage in those senior roles. That might continue to happen even more pervasively because of a setback using the existing technology that’s out there.
Sharon Ehrlich: What do you think is behind this, Dominique? Is it a matter of awareness, or is it something a bit deeper?
Dominique Van-Winther: Well, there’s a couple of different elements. Number one, lack of awareness is happening with everybody. Nobody has the roadmap to AI. This is what I teach executives at the C suite, to regular employees, to functional groups every single day. And no one has been sat down and explained.
The only people who are talking about AI on stage, it’s either the fluffier topics, like, let’s talk about ethics, or is the world in doom and gloom going to happen with AI, et cetera. They’re very future looking topics and issues that obviously, we need to address. But nobody’s addressed the elephant in the room. How do we actually use it? How do we bring it into the company? How do we upskill people?
My concern is that women sometimes don’t go and maybe push themselves into using new technologies. They tend to lean into relationships rather than necessarily technology, which is phenomenal. Right? That is absolutely our superpower. But I think it’s just not an area that we’re necessarily as savvy in taking the first steps into. And we’re seeing that a lot of companies are not yet ready to go and educate all of their employees because they’re still figuring it out themselves.
Sharon Ehrlich: Can you share some statistics about the current state of women’s adoption of AI in business? And if you have data, what do those numbers reveal about the gender gap?
Dominique Van-Winther: Yeah, well, there are very few surveys that are out there that we can consider legitimate, mostly because we see a lot of information from, let’s say, OpenAI on how much of the population is using their platform. But it’s very skewed when in reality, if you start to survey the population, I’ve seen stats like, for example, 54% of men use AI on a daily basis in their professional or personal lives. That percentage is cut down to 35% with women.
My challenge is mostly when it comes to the ascension of women into more senior positions. We’re already at a disadvantage. It’s already a smaller percentage of leaders of businesses, and if we don’t have more women leaders in the space, then that’s going to be very difficult. And if you think about it, even there’s fewer women in tech.
Therefore, and I think the stats are something like 67% to 75%, depending on the industry of tech jobs or men. For example, I was speaking at a session not too long ago, Women in Data Centers, which everyone came together in Singapore at a fantastic event. I’ve never seen a group of women so united and feeling like such solidarity because there are so few of them.
But there were very few women leaders that are running businesses, running departments, running functions, and because of the fact that they aren’t entering the space, they don’t end up bringing that also into other areas of the business. So nowadays, you don’t have to go to become your CTO or your head of it. In a technological role, it’s the equivalent of are you using Excel? And if you’re the leader who’s not using Excel, then oh boy, are you in trouble for the future. And that’s my biggest concern, is people are seeing it as a technological question. And really it’s a basic competency that everyone needs to be learning.
Sharon Ehrlich: I think that’s a really interesting point, reframing it as a basic and fundamental competency that everybody needs to have. Are there any particular AI applications or innovations that you believe have been underutilized by professional women. And why do you think these tools have not been embraced?
Dominique Van-Winther: Sharon, nobody’s teaching them. That’s the problem. The only education that we’re getting at the moment at all of the major conferences is how to buy more tech and pile it on in terms of a firm. They are not focused on change management. They are not focused on upskilling employees. And that’s what I focus on day in, day out.
I’ll give you two tips. Number one, everybody tends to use, whether it’s chat, GPT, or Gemini or Quad or whatever supplier you’re using from an LLM perspective, large language model. If you’re using those for research, that is not their purpose. Their job is to, like a six-year-old, figure out and predict how to win Mommy’s gummy by crafting up the absolutely perfect sentence that you want.
Its job is not to do research. But if you go check out Perplexity.ai, you will forever remember how fantastic this tool is at finding everything from a research perspective. Simple tool, but nobody talks about it. And the problem is, and it’s from the C suite all through organizations, because we’re not empowering companies to bring more technology in because companies don’t know how to deal with it.
The other thing I would highly recommend, download the ChatGPT app on your phone. Get a subscription. It only costs $20 anyway. But when you open it up, there’s absolutely fantastic other AI that’s embedded in it. Now, pretty much everybody’s used chat GPT. I’m not naive in thinking so, but how you’re using it is wrong.
When you have the dialog box, there’s a little button with a microphone. I have an iPhone here. There’s a horrible button at the bottom right. That’s Apple’s embedded microphone for dictation. And it does doesn’t work all that well. But the one that’s in that ChatGPT box, that’s a different API. That is voice to text, and it’s an opening on completely separate text.
What you should be doing is thinking about how do you use this as almost your virtual assistant. I’ll give you an example. “I need to write a follow up letter to Sharon to say thank you so much for having me participate in your fantastic podcast. In addition, we had a couple of follow up things. I need to send her a deck that includes some more information. Couple of people asked for it, and then we wanted to schedule also a coffee in a couple of weeks. Let’s see, today’s the 19 June, so let’s schedule it for some time in mid-July. I don’t know, pick one of the Wednesdays, that’s that week, and we can grab a coffee while we’re out in Singapore or a glass of wine. And by the way, also tell her that I was going to introduce her to Bob, who lives in New York, because I think he’s going to be an absolutely fantastic business partner for her. Right, sign it off from Dominique and then go ahead and write it in a fairly informal and friendly way.”
People don’t write prompts like that because it takes way, way too long to write that. But that’s how I write prompts. It will dictate out that entire message. And then when you go into your Chat GPT, you can see now this is a prompt, right? An entire paragraph with all sorts of information. And then when I load it up, I have an entire email.
What you should be doing is treating these platforms as something that you’re going and sharing all of your information into. And then as a result, it’s taking you to the eight out of ten in terms of everything you’re developing. And what people tend to do is they go and they ask it for a template letter and then they copy it over and then they rewrite the entire thing. Well, why did you even use AI? Because then that’s pointless. You might as well just Google and ask for a standard template.
Or they write a fantastic note and then they stick it into AI and say, make it better. And it removes every element of humanity that was originally in that note and turns it into what I love to coin “robot talk” because it is the most nonsensical, emotionless conversations that you could be having as sending that back and forward.
You have to master how to use AI to come up with your tone of voice so you sound like a human, but you’re still using AI. These are all tips, tricks that are readily available out in the world. They’re just not being pulled into a corporate environment. And therefore, employees are either not empowered to be using those new technological platforms because they don’t have access to them, or they’re using it as shadow it, which means they’re using it without their IT departments actually knowing about it, which is obviously a really pervasive issue at the moment. It’s a real shame because there’s massive opportunities to already be bringing it into the business.
Sharon Ehrlich: Well, first off, thank you for that example. I think that really demonstrated the power. I mean, it literally took seconds for that prompt to be transmitted or transformed into something meaningful that you could use. You talked about how people aren’t educated, that they’re missing this useful piece of information, and how to leverage the AI in a way that is part of their daily life effectively. What are the systemic changes that you think need to be put in place to address exactly this lack of education and knowledge that you just described?
Dominique Van-Winther: I think we need to take everything that relates to AI out of the IT department solely because the IT department or CTO’s and what not are fantastic people at bringing tech into an organization. But when the tech has to be used by everyone, this is why I’ve coined this idea of the Chief AI evangelist.
You have to find your company’s evangelists that understand the tech, but they’re not experts in just technology. They know how to bring that into HR. If you want to read an example, that’s absolutely fantastic. You read up on the Moderna case study on OpenAI’s website. It’s how they literally went function by function, team by team, and built 750 GPTs in order to solve all sorts of problems.
Do you know who led the way? The woman who heads up legal, because she goes, there’s a massive bottleneck, and she goes, do you know how easy it is for AI to go and check whether it has all of our standards, terms and conditions and if there’s any red flags? So, they went and built it and eliminated an entire huge bottleneck at Moderna, obviously, one of like the biggest pharma companies in the world and in essence, released all of that bottleneck.
But they can’t do that until they go into the functional teams and sit down with people and build something relevant and then educate them on it. And then on the other side, there’s all the elements of upskilling, because you have to take the time to bring people on a journey. You can’t just rely on the fact that later you’re going to have to cut your team members in half because of all of the innovation that’s happening. You have to kind of bring them on a journey, retool them and move them around the organization so that you can keep a hold of some of your most valuable assets.
Sharon Ehrlich: Taking AI out of the CTO’s imperium.
Dominique Van-Winther: Or, you know, they’re just solely in the CTO’s. I don’t mean that they shouldn’t be involved. And they obviously help in order to help from a technology side. You can’t just have that side when you’re rolling out AWS or Amazon Web Services, there’s no problem leaving it with the CTO. If you’re rolling out different cloud computing platforms or enterprise software, it’s fine with the CTO.
This is not the case. This is a consumer product that we need to upskill and train people. And so therefore, it should be done in collaboration together. And what I’m seeing most of is the fact that it’s run by the tech side with not enough bringing it in, and therefore people aren’t being upskilled in order to use it. So great technology being brought in, but very little usage.
Sharon Ehrlich: What you just said is extremely powerful. Just a quick question. Not that I want to create a TV commercial about your business, but is that what Final Upgrade does? Is that what you’re doing is you’re helping organizations strategize how to bring AI in in a more practical way throughout their entire organization?
Dominique Van-Winther: Yes, we look at business strategy from many different layers. You look at it at the personal layer, which is what I’m talking about. How do you upskill individuals then you look at it at the team or the function level, because you should be looking at what technology you should bring in for the legal department, the marketing team, the comms team, finance, et cetera, because it might be different tools and different things that we want to enable people and empower them to be able to use.
Then you look at the product level, because obviously, sometimes there’s elements of AI that should be embedded in, whether it’s the customer or the client experience or whatever product it gets put out there. And then you look at the company level, which is a lot more organization, transformation, and how to realize and find where you have optimizations along the value chain so you can better build proficiency and efficiency within the business.
And then we also look at the category and what consumers and customers and everything like that are doing. Most of my time is spend public speaking, running workshops, educating people, because in reality, that’s the stage that we’re at right now, where a lot of leaders of businesses are just under an enormous amount of pressure to try to do something in AI, but nobody really knows what to do. There’s not a real roadmap in order to be able to figure out what’s right. And if you go to conferences, all you see is people who are selling like big, huge technologies that you can come and integrate into your company at enormous cost, an enormous amount of time. And I’m not saying any of those are the wrong decision. I’m saying there isn’t a very clear framework to prioritize what you should be doing within the organization. So we focus on a lot more of the upskilling and just educating business leaders to kind of navigate the space.
Sharon Ehrlich: Let’s go back to women, because you know that the whole conversation, we have here is to inform women about how they need to take control of this whole AI movement and skill up. What do you think of some of the strategic advantages AI offers women that they probably haven’t considered just yet?
Dominique Van-Winther: If you’re an early adopter, you’re gonna be ahead of the game. It is early days at the moment. And that’s why I’ve been on a vengeance to go get more women up on boards and in leadership positions, because if you think about it, the future, people who are going to be hired to lead organizations, and I’m not talking the future in 5 to 10 years. I’m talking in the next one to two to three years.
Every single leadership position has to understand AI. They’re at about a one out of ten right now. If you’re the person who leads at the front end of that, you can pick your job, you can pick your seniority, because it’s going to be the absolutely most in demand role in order to really understand it.
And I’m not talking about going and doing a three-day course online an hour each day. That’s not knowing it. You need to figure out business applications. You need to start to dive into it a little bit. Do it slowly but invest the time in order to make yourself — instead of a dabbler —somebody who’s a bit more advanced and more proficient, and your career will just skyrocket.
There are so many people right now worried about layoffs, so many people that are worried about what the future holds. Upskill yourself. This is one of very few bets that will help you to skyrocket your career far faster than everyone else. And I give that advice all the time. And in fact, all of the sessions that I do, we charge quite on the premium side for a lot of the workshops and the trainings and the talks that I do.
I have an entire pro bono stream of ones that I do for any women audiences. I want us to win. I want us to do phenomenally better, and I want us to narrow the gap between men and women by more women actually stepping into this tech and being able to lead organizations through change, because you know who does it the best? Often women. Very phenomenal leaders through change, through transformation, when you have to educate, when you have to talk to employees, understand their hardships, understand how they’re using technology.
These are phenomenal skill sets for women to have. So, all you need to supplement that with is some basic knowledge of AI. I just see the advantages to be massive.
Sharon Ehrlich: I’m sure we have a lot of listeners who are saying, that sounds great, and I’ve bought into your message, Dominique. I want to get started, but I don’t even know where to start. What would you say to that person?
Dominique Van-Winther: You know what, it is so easy nowadays to get into the space because really every single big tech company is on board, even with slightly product agnostic but not entirely tools, universities, online schoolings, etcetera.
Check out the ones from Google, Meta. All of the Coursera courses from all of the major universities now have started launch more modern, generative AI solutions. You don’t have to go into what are linear regression models with machine learning. Most people don’t want to do that, but that’s also not where the technology is.
You don’t have to know programming. You don’t have to have to understand how machine learning is done. You need to understand the business application for it and start to use it and change your behavior on a daily basis. There are a lot of different platforms that are out there to educate. Look at LinkedIn, look at Coursera, and look at Google. They’ve launched entire curriculums that are about generative AI, how to use it. They’re very high quality.
Whatever you do, don’t look at anything that’s more than a year old, because technology of AI, as of a year and a half ago, transformed and it now moves ten times faster. It moves that much more quickly through the organization, and it’s in rapid acceleration mode. So, if you go and listen to a program that’s, I don’t know, IBM from five years ago, they’ll talk about the fact that to build up a solution, you need a full year. If I went and told any of our clients that it’s going to take them a year to develop something, they’d laugh me out of the hallway, because that just doesn’t work today.
It’s all just exponentially growing. We build stuff in four or six weeks. Fast prototyping, running it scrappy quick, and moving quickly. If you’re not learning that sort of tech that moves at the speed of light, you’re not in the right program. Look for the ones that are very modern and ideally within the last six months. That’s when the best ones come, come out.
Sharon Ehrlich: I think that’s wonderful advice and actually very prescriptive and descriptive. You talked about the rate of speed in which AI is moving and how things just in the last 18 months have just moved forward, like gangbusters. Are you able to share your thoughts on what you think the future of AI is in business and how that’s evolving?
Dominique Van-Winther: I think everything is going to be optimized. The strongest companies are going to go through their entire value chain, set up their entire systems from start to finish. If you start using, for example, AI for data analytics right now and using some of the platforms, you can see it already, can make strategic recommendations, analyze data. It won’t be 100% correct on the data, but the recommendations will be exactly the right direction.
That means you don’t need to have these big analyst teams, et cetera, in the future. The roles of the future will be either very senior roles or relationship roles. I also see a lot of concern because even if, for example, where I’m based in Singapore, you look at the majority of jobs that are out there, it’s front office, back office, finance, lawyers, consultants, etc. And we’ve had no evolution and innovation in that space.
You think about automotive manufacturing. They had all of the innovation of robotics that came in. But our space, what we’ve had computers, how long did it take to roll those out? Mobile phones, how long did that take in order for everyone to start to get those? You’re looking at this technology that’s being adopted so fast that within three years, everyone’s going to be using it and it’s going to transform how we work, and it’s going to destroy a lot of jobs. And I only say that not as a threat, it’s more as an opportunity, because you’re going to have to reskill yourself on how to lead that organization and lead those teams through that change in order to help everyone.
When it comes to a lot of those cutbacks, even customer service, I’ve seen some phenomenal platforms that go and create AI avatars and run entire customer service calls. If you haven’t seen the Klarna case study, that’s about them eliminating 700 of them. Klarna is the buy now, pay later button that you see on e-commerce. They eliminated 700 roles, and AI took over like, 75% of all of their customer service.
And you know what? Customers were over the moon. The entire future is changing to the point that when you call your bank right now and you go, hey, do you want a teller? Or do you want, like, the machine and you’re like, oh, my God, I just want the teller because, of course, it’s useless right now to actually get all of the automated systems.
Everything’s going to transform because you’ll be like, I want to be like Klarna. Because they cut down all of their interactions from like eleven minutes to two minutes. Every customer would be happy with that. And that’s how it’s going to transform our customer experience, our client experience, and how we work with each other. But it’s going to require a lot of rewiring within our own systems, our company systems, and our own personal ones.
Sharon Ehrlich: Dominique, this has been a very enriching conversation. I first would like to thank you for being with us and for speaking so openly about this topic. I think it was extremely useful. How can people find you?
Dominique Van-Winther: I’m on LinkedIn. Dominique Rose Van-Winther. That’s where I publish most of my stuff. I also have a Substack that you can join that is for Final Upgrade. You can see links to it.
Also from my LinkedIn profile, I have all sorts of updates and all sorts of information that I put out in order to give kind of tips and tricks and help to navigate the space. So, feel free to reach out, feel free to follow me, and I’ll continue to share everything that I know because I’m a very firm believer that we all deserve a lot more information. I sell my business to corporates, not individuals.
Sharon Ehrlich: Thank you, everybody, for joining in.
