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“By 2018, which is about 14 years after I came to the U.S…, I was a bit disillusioned. I was also growing critical of many things in this country around inequality and the innovation sector.
The vibe of Stanford and Silicon Valley – I realized so much of it is either technology driven or hype driven. Certain areas get all the attention. Today, AI is of course very big and gets a lot of attention, and certain areas are mostly neglected. For the students who are studying, they don’t know about the problems. They might spend years learning about a discipline, like becoming a computer scientist or biologist. But how that is translated to actually solving societal problems – that is a knowledge that is missing.
Most importantly, just start with the problem. That’s what we do in our classes (at Stanford Emergence). I think the way AI fits in is that we look at AI just like any other technology, and we say, ‘OK, let’s not think about the solution first. Let’s think about the problem.’ Students cannot figure it out in their head. They have to go out there, interview many stakeholders, just observe. There’s this immersion. They have to see why people don’t use a certain solution.
It’s something I don’t think AI can replace. I don’t think innovation and creativity can be completely replaced by AI because AI basically reproduces what has been written. The needs of people who haven’t been addressed, many of it is yet to be discovered.
“I don’t think innovation and creativity can be completely replaced by AI because AI basically reproduces what has been written.”
Narges Baniasadi
The hardest part of innovation is to go out there and meet people. Just sitting behind your computer, you will not understand real people. So I can give you examples that came because students went and actually talked to real people, which I don’t think AI could have figured out.
One was that there’s this illness called PCOS – polycystic ovarian syndrome – which millions of women have. It takes on average 10 years to get a diagnosis, and it has so many symptoms and really impacts the quality of life. It’s very hard to get a diagnosis because the symptoms are very generic. One of the symptoms is weight gain; another is acne.
So (the students) went and talked to a lot of these people, and they realized people care so much about their appearance. They care about looking slim and having clear skin, so they spend tons of money on cosmetic products. So that became (the students’) insight: how can we capture people when they go to say, Sephora, to buy some lotion for acne? Can we catch them there and say, ‘Let’s have a chat with the doctor’ as a way to shorten the time to diagnosis? That kind of an emotional need that came out in the interviews: that people care about their appearance. That can be used as a leverage towards getting them diagnosed. I don’t know if AI could have figured that out, but I think ultimately AI should be used as a tool.
Entrepreneurship is also about building an organization. So you need to know how to work with people. You need to know how to work with your customers and sell to them. You need to be able to work with your investors. So those skills are probably more important than innovation itself because innovation evolves all the time. People pivot many times, but people who are really committed and know good leadership, they have a higher chance of success. So that’s how I think about AI.
I think we should embrace and use AI. But the most important part is, where do you direct it?”
Narges Baniasadi is the founder and executive director of Stanford Emergence, an entrepreneurship program at Stanford University that focuses on health solutions. Before that, she founded the bioinformatics company Bina.
This profile is one of nineteen featured in the “Humans in an age of AI” portrait series. See more profiles here.
