Hi! I'm Tab. Tabitha to some. Tabs to others.

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There are few things I struggle with as much as speaking about myself.  It's a lot easier to talk about other things.

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Here are a few topics I could speak about endlessly:

• Emerging technologies and how they might help or hurt humanity

• Economics in general, and specifically Canada's productivity problem

• Financial literacy in general, and specifically how critical it is for upward mobility

• Gardening generally and specifically how do I stop growing more seedlings than I could possibly ever plant??

• Entrepreneurship in all of its forms

 

Ideally we would have the discussions drinking either a good whisky or wine and some food. Basically I'm still a philosophy grad student who took a right turn into technology and business and still wonders sometimes how I got here. 

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This is how I got here.

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In 1996 I wrote applications for my Masters in Philosophy. In those applications I wrote that the area I wanted to study was how the Internet might change the idea of personal identity, because you could be anyone you wanted to be and no one would know better.

• I was accepted into the program but ended up leaving because building websites was more lucrative than philosophizing about how they might be used​

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In 1997 I started a business called HomeStart which offered to put pictures and videos of houses that were for sale up on the Internet so that people could see them without having to visit. 

• I was laughed out of realtors offices 

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In 1998 my friend and I got the idea to start a business putting movies online for people to watch in their houses. We called Real Networks the largest provider of MP3 servers and struck a deal. We went to the head office of WorldCom one of the largest broadband providers and got their agreement to host the servers at their hubs. 

• Blockbuster refused to work with us because they said no one would ever want to watch movies on their computers

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After these first two failed attempts at entrepreneurship I went to the corporate world.

• It was much easier to be taken seriously and be successful, if I gave the ideas to another company to execute than tried to execute them myself.

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In the early 2000's I found myself up against a new foe - R.O.I. - which stands for Return on Investment (although I just realized it also spells King en francais, which isn't unironic). In a post-Black Monday environment, everyone wanted to be sure that technology had payback and wasn't just a blackhole of foolish spending.

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• So what's a girl to do but go get her management accounting designation? It made it clear how to connect the dots between investment in technology and financial return. 

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Then along came the Great Recession. At this point in my career I'd had a lot of success in the corporate world but still hankered to do the entrepreneurial thing again. But wanted to do something that had social purpose. Here is what I learned from that experience.

1. There is "money" and then there are the "market makers". And they literally make the markets and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

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3. There is a certain amount of money you need to ask for as a tech founder, to be taken seriously to prove you have sufficient growth potential to make the investment payback worthwhile.​

 

After that experience, I moved back to the corporate world, focusing more than ever on the financial services industry and the effect that emerging technologies could have. And I found my voice to add to the discourse in a variety of public forums:

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• Consumer Electronics Show (to speak about blockchain and money movement),

• Federal Government in both Canada and the U.S. (it was pretty cool to go to Washington and have the opportunity to speak with Congressmen on the topic of fraud and payments)

 

And I have now served for almost 10 years as an advisor to the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) advising on grants for the commercialization of new science and technology.

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I've also had the privilege of working for and advising to some of the largest (and smallest) and most influential financial entities inside the Canadian economy. 

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But what does all of this have to do with Women and A.I.?

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I know that A.I. isn't just another technology. The last time I saw this much disruption potential I was laughed out of realtors offices and mocked by Blockbuster.

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Here is what I believe: A.I. levels the playing field for women in ways the Internet never did. It does so in several different ways, including;

• free access to information in ways that are easy to understand for each individual

• eliminating "coding skills" as a threshold of entry to digital business models

• enhanced analysis capabilities across nearly every dimension of knowledge

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But it doesn't do everything. We still need networks, access to capital and time to take our creativity and genius to make our ideas real.

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And everything I've said is an even a bigger opportunity and a bigger challenge for BIPOC and non-CIS women/womyn, of whom I am an ally.

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And we still have to address the issues around bias that are built into models. 

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So that's what AI 4 Women is all about. A little bit of a passion project, a little bit of giving back and a lot of love and excitement to see what we can do with this