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Building tools with generative AI has never been easier, but developers must also remember to experiment and focus on human end-users.
Jessica Gilmartin, chief revenue officer at Calendly, said during the Women in AI Breakfast at VB Transform today that while so much of generative AI is exciting, the technology shouldn’t be the goal at the end of the day.
“AI is great, but you have to build for humans and work with them. Technology enables change; it cannot be the end result,” Gilmartin said.
She added that thinking of AI tools as human-first tools brings people of different backgrounds into the development process. Gilmartin said that at Calendly, the company encourages teams to include people with different expertise to collaborate. Other speakers echoed the idea that AI still needs a human in the loop, especially if the end product is meant to be used by people anyway.
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However, it isn’t always easy to convince people that they can play a role in bringing generative AI applications to life.
Encouraging experimentation
“Lots of people don’t have a generative AI background because it’s new. I believe that you can use your background if it’s in education, English, legal, you can play a role in AI development, you just need to experiment with it and actually use the technology,” said Aparna Sinha, head of AI Product at Capital One.
Acknowledging the speed of development, LinkedIn‘s head of Data and AI, Ya Xu, said, “There’s no better time to jump into AI” than now, with several tools, podcasts and videos pointing to the best research papers to get up to speed now available. Kari Briski, vice president of AI models, software, and services at Nvidia, pointed out it’s essential to carve out the time to learn tools and play around with AI.
What is clear, the speakers said, is that people have to become comfortable with AI tools and in the process of building applications with the technology, it will only become better if more people of different backgrounds participate in developing it.