At the TIME Women of the Year Leadership Forum in Los Angeles on Tuesday, three leading businesswomen discussed the increasing significance of technologies like AI on a panel led by TIME’s senior correspondent, Alice Park.
Park began by asking the panelists how they assess and determine which new technologies their organizations should implement. Debby Soo, CEO of OpenTable, a Booking Holdings company, stressed the need to embrace technological advancements, but only those that align with the business’s objectives. She stated that OpenTable aims to serve both restaurants and diners.
“Our evaluation process centers on our core business objectives,” Soo explained. “Our decisions on deployment and investment are guided by whether it benefits our restaurants and diners.”
Soo was joined on the panel by Padmasree Warrior, founder and CEO of Fable and a Spotify board member, and Leslie Cafferty, SVP and Chief Communications Officer at Booking Holdings. (Booking.com, a Booking Holdings company, sponsored the TIME Women of the Year Leadership Forum.) Cafferty stated that any technology adopted by a company must bring value to its operations and offerings. She mentioned that Booking Holdings developed a Gen AI product for its customers, but it didn’t see much usage.
“That was a valuable lesson,” Cafferty remarked. “It’s about creating value, not just using tech for the sake of it.”
Warrior highlighted that technology has “a life cycle.” Early adoption can be risky, but it generates buzz. As the technology matures, it becomes more practical. Cafferty believes that people are realizing that AI is more accessible than they initially thought.
“We’ll likely see entrepreneurs and innovators building applications using these major technology platforms, which I think will accelerate innovation and improve consumer products,” Cafferty said. “For example, Uber was only possible after Apple created the iPhone.”
In addition to the advantages of new technologies, the panelists addressed their concerns. Warrior warned that Gen AI, which can generate content like text and images, may contain biases. “If the models aren’t trained with culturally sensitive and literate content, they’ll introduce those biases when generating content,” she said. “We should be cautious about using such tools in customer-facing and B2B businesses.” She stressed the importance of diverse teams evaluating these tools for biases and developing solutions.
Warrior also admitted that Fable “made a mistake with Gen AI.” Earlier this year, the app, a platform for book discussions and tracking, faced controversy when users reported receiving offensive, AI-generated personalized reader summaries. One user who reads Black narratives shared her summary online, which suggested that she “surface for the occasional white author.” Fable apologized and promised to implement safeguards.
Warrior has addressed the controversy, and during Tuesday’s panel, she encouraged other companies and entrepreneurs who make similar mistakes to do the same.
“We should share our failures with this technology because that’s how it improves,” Warrior stated.
The Women of the Year Leadership Forum was presented by Amazon, Booking.com, Chase, Deloitte, the American Heart Association, and Toyota.
