Women must play a more active role in shaping how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is developed, governed and deployed, rather than adapting to decisions made by others, speakers at the Women in AI Executive Forum in Lagos have said.
Hosted by TeKnowledge under the theme ‘Why Women Voices Matter in the Age of AI’, the forum brought together more than 30 senior women leaders and emerging professionals in a mentor-mentee format to explore the leadership skills and responsibilities the AI era demands.
TeKnowledge’s President and CEO, Aileen Allkins, urged participants to go beyond using AI tools.
‘We need to move away from just knowing how to use AI to understanding how it is built, the kind of data AI uses and how decisions are made,’ she said.
She said women leaders did not need to become engineers to take part. They needed the curiosity and confidence to engage with AI policy, risk, data and governance.
‘Women have a unique opportunity because very few people know everything about AI right now. We can research, learn and put ourselves in the room and have a voice,’ she said.
Microsoft’s Chief Growth and AI Officer for Middle East and Africa, Ola Williams, who joined Allkins in a session on ‘Leading in the Age of AI: Why Diverse Leadership Creates Better Outcomes’, urged women to move beyond experimenting with AI and help determine how it is integrated into organisations.
‘The question is not whether we are all using AI today. It is more about leading the conversation within an organisation and making AI work in a way that ethically drives business outcomes,’ she said.
She said today’s leaders must prepare the next generation of women for workplaces increasingly shaped by AI.
In a roundtable, participants named curiosity, courage, judgement and discernment as the qualities leaders would need. They also stressed the importance of human judgement: while AI can generate recommendations, leaders must question outputs, understand their implications and weigh them against organisational values. Mentorship, they said, would help younger professionals understand both the opportunities and the risks.
Allkins urged participants to commit to one practical step, such as learning more about AI policy, finding out how AI tools are used in their organisations, or asking about the data behind them.
TeKnowledge said the forum was the first in a series of planned engagements. Allkins said that while AI would keep evolving, human qualities such as creativity, empathy, judgement and intuition would remain important.