Women Entrepreneurs In Artificial Intelligence Domain

The definition and context of entrepreneurship have been changing for decades maybe due to the change and advancement in technology around us. Brewer (1992) defined entrepreneurship as "The capacity and willingness (of a person) to develop, organize and manage a business venture along with any risk in order to make a profit." By tradition, businesses had always been dominated by men. But in the last decade or more, especially when artificial intelligence or simply AI industries have boomed, ‘women entrepreneurship’ has grown to connote the rising numbers of women who ventured into businesses around the globe. AI is not the only factor to give that has played a role in boosting women entrepreneurship, however, the field has opened many doors with a lot of opportunities for everyone. The challenges of modal uncertainty in entrepreneurial decision environments are being resolved by the novel solutions of AI and data sciences. Therefore, the field creates new ways for future forms of entrepreneurial action. 

At present when everyone is concerned about gender equality, there are already many promising women as entrepreneurs in the field of AI and data sciences who are the role models for other women and even to men too. To name a few, Neeti Mehta Shukla is the co-founder and senior vice president of ‘Automation anywhere’, Abi Ramanan is the co-founder and CEO of ‘Impactvision’, Laura Gomez is the founder and CEO of ‘Atipica’ etc. Their firms have adopted AI in their businesses and are doing well in their respective domains. In India too some women entrepreneurs do reconcile the disclosures of entrepreneurship, gender and culture so as to construct a unique entrepreneurial identity in their reflective narratives. For instance, Bakkha Sharma who’s a successful entrepreneur at ‘Bash.ai’ a startup. The company introduced using natural language processing (a subset of machine learning) to automate human resources (HR) responses. Niyati Agarwal along with others formed a startup in AI called ‘Morph.ai’ which works on AI bots. Suriya Prabha is the founder of a startup called ‘YouCode’, the company uses AI in the field of education, especially for children. These are few successful women out of so many in India who didn’t wait for opportunity but created an opportunity for themselves as well as for others. 

Due to the pandemic, when India witnessed massive job cuts, jobs in AI were least affected. The corporate world is already on the patch to create more efficient virtual work environments leading to the huge demand for AI professionals. AI is the most happening field of technology that is going to shape the future, and India is doing well in this facet of technology too. Therefore, besides employment, AI is going to create a lot of entrepreneurial opportunities. The pandemic has taught us a lot, some people have come up with innovative ideas and implemented them. Some successful women entrepreneurs with great ideas in AI were already listed above. According to Lews (2014), women entrepreneurs juggle and alternate the ‘doing ’ of both masculinity and femininity. Even though the gender gap in entrepreneurship remains, many academicians and industrialists suggest that more ‘role model’ women entrepreneurs are needed.

Dr Akhter Mohiuddin

Guest Author The author is Assistant. Professor of Machine learning & Data Sciences at Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon