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When asked what are the future skills that we need to teach, Ayesha Khanna started with “The most important thing is to understand why people are resistant.”
What does a successful implementation of AI look like? According to AI expert Ayesha Khanna, Ph.D., it’s when “the AI is working for you. And the only way it can work for you and your customers is if it knows about you.” Khanna is cofounder and CEO of AI company Addo and recognized by Forbes as a groundbreaking entrepreneur in Southeast Asia. She spoke on the Convene Podcast before presenting a keynote at the upcoming PCMA APAC annual meeting, The Business of Events 2025: Master. Mind., April 13-15, at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.
Dr. Ayesha Khanna
Khanna broke the AI implementation process into three steps, starting with organized data that should be given to AI. The second part, she said, is change management. And the final: governance. She took us for a deep dive into each.
In our industry, most companies will stop at the very first step, giving all their internal information and their secret sauce to AI. We hear there’s a lot of concern, especially around ethics.
First of all, it’s very good when customers ask such questions. You should feel very confident asking questions. You should [ask]: How does this work? And can you tell me how you’ve ensured that there’s no bias here, that it’s protected, it’s not hallucinating — which is, it’s not making up things and saying incorrect things? [That] it’s implemented responsibly?
The first thing is, whenever you start out with AI — use cases, which are a set of problems or goals that you want to start with AI — you want to have a catalog of all the AI you’re using, all the business problems or goals you’re doing with AI in the company.
It’s an Excel spreadsheet or Google sheet. Put all your use cases on the left and on the right, you put other risks. And in the third column: This is what I’m going to do to mitigate the risk.
That’s what we provide to all of our clients. That is what you need to demand from your vendor, from your consulting partner, or from your internal team.
What about the people skills? What are the future skills that we need to teach?
The most important thing is to understand why people are resistant.
They’re afraid or they don’t know. And then you think, “Okay, what are they afraid of?” Well, they’re afraid of losing their job. They’re afraid of being embarrassed because they don’t know how to work with it.
And these are, I think, legitimate concerns for anybody.
This is not anything to look down on condescendingly, but what should be very empathetic towards that. And the best way to help people be part of this change is to bring them along for the journey and educate them.
Because the moment they figure out that this is going to make their lives easier by having these copilots, then they will be interested in them. Now when you tell them how to make it easier, you also have to tell them how to be careful about it.
For example, you don’t want company data to be uploaded to something that’s a personal license and not an enterprise license.
And of course, then the real leadership failure sometimes happens when people use these tools for productivity and then they have 20 percent more time, 30 percent more time on their hands. And when they do that, their fear is that people will compress the team. A team of 10, you’ll make it a team of five. Again, it’s a legitimate concern.
But the right way to think about this is, well, you know what, these are the people who know the company really well. We’re not going to fire them, we’re not going to let them go.
We’re going to [upskill] them into something else. And I love the IKEA example. IKEA, as we all know, is a furniture store. It decided to use artificial intelligence to replace many of its customer service agents, which makes a lot of sense. The call center agents could now be AI-based, could speak in multiple languages, could look up all the information much faster than a human being.
And then instead of letting those people go, they said, “Well, these [people] are very loyal to IKEA. They know our customers. Our customers have been calling them for years, talking about their design, what they want, what their room looks like.” So, they [said], “Look, why don’t we upskill them to become virtual interior design consultants?”
And so here you have this amazing way of actually expanding your customer centricity and dealing with more customers coming, because now you have better customer service, but then you have this personalized touch as well.
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And the final part, the governance piece. Are there any frameworks that you could advise people to follow, especially in the business events industry?
Well, I think the simplest one is the NIST framework, which is by the United States. It’s a National Institute of Standards and Technology and it provides a framework for looking at risks, it’s a risk-management framework.
It has a catalog and develops guidelines, tools, and benchmarks that support the responsible use of AI. The European Union also has one. Lots of countries do. I find that quite basic and easy to use because if you’re not a technologist, you just need to understand the overarching governance framework.
That’s the single most important thing. What it does is it says, we’re going to map all the risks, then we’re going to measure — literally measure — what could be the downfall for the brand reputation, data loss, [etc.], and then we’re going to manage it.
And that is governance, essentially. There are also new startups like CREDO and others that actually help you do this through software. So, I would encourage everyone to look at these, but don’t overthink it.
At a minimum, just put it in a Google spreadsheet and start tracking it. Just put the process in place. So much of life is having the right process and all of the hype and the excitement and the drama, that’s just for the media. Good governance is actually quite boring and balanced.
Magdalina Atanassova is digital media editor of Convene.