Three women who are leaders in the business world spoke about the growing role of new technologies, like AI, on a panel moderated by TIME senior correspondent Alice Park, at the TIME Women of the Year Leadership Forum in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
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Park started the discussion by asking the panelists how they evaluate and decide which innovative technologies their companies should adopt. Debby Soo, chief executive officer of OpenTable, which is part of Booking Holdings, emphasized the importance of embracing technological advancements—but ones that serve the purpose of your business. For OpenTable, she said, that purpose is serving both restaurants and diners.
“The way we evaluate is: What are our North Stars as a business?” Soo said. “The way that we decide what to deploy, what to invest in, is: Is it helping our restaurants and is it helping our diners?”
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Soo appeared on the panel with Padmasree Warrior, founder and chief executive officer of Fable and a Spotify board member, and Leslie Cafferty, senior vice president and chief communications officer of Booking Holdings. (Booking.com, which is part of Booking Holdings, is a sponsor of the TIME Women of the Year Leadership Forum). Cafferty said that the technology that companies choose to adopt must add value to their business and services. She shared an example of how Booking Holdings built a product for its customers with Generative (Gen) AI, but customers weren’t using it much.
“That was a really interesting learning [lesson] for us,” Cafferty said. “It’s not tech for the sake of tech, right? It’s what is valuable.”
Warrior pointed out that “there’s a life cycle” with technology. Early on, adoption can be risky, but everyone is talking about the technology. Later, the technology matures and can become more useful. Cafferty said she believes that people are starting to see that AI is more accessible than they had initially thought.
“I think we’re going to start to see this layer of entrepreneurs and innovators building applications on top of these big technology platforms, and I think that’s really going to accelerate the innovation and make those consumer products better,” Cafferty said. “If you think about it, for example, Uber couldn’t exist until Apple built the iPhone.”
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In addition to the benefits of new technologies, the panelists discussed their concerns with it. Warrior cautioned that Gen AI—which can create content, like text and images—can contain biases. “Unless the models are trained in content that’s culturally sensitive and literate, it brings those biases as it creates the content,” she said. “I think we should be careful about adopting those sorts of things in consumer-facing businesses, but also B2B businesses.” She emphasized the importance of having diverse teams testing these tools for biases and developing solutions for those issues.
Warrior also acknowledged that Fable had “made a mistake with Gen AI.” The app, which is a platform for people to discuss and track books they read, sparked controversy earlier this year when some users complained of receiving offensive personalized reader summaries that had been created by an AI model. One user who reads Black narratives shared her summary online, which suggested that she “surface for the occasional white author.” Fable apologized, and said it would implement safeguards.
Warrior has spoken publicly to address 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 why the technology gets better; that’s how it gets better,” Warrior said.
The Women of the Year Leadership Forum was presented by Amazon, Booking.com, Chase, Deloitte, the American Heart Association, and Toyota.