Speaking Your Brand: Public Speaking Tips and Strategies

I vividly remember the day after Christmas 2022. Not because I was relaxing, but because I was at my laptop, updating my university courses and diving headfirst into AI tools for my business and podcast. ChatGPT had just launched, and I knew...

Show Notes

In this episode, I share the talk I recently delivered at the ElleX Summit, where I wove together history, technology, and the urgent need for women’s voices in AI.

From Ada Lovelace and the women of NASA to Eleanor Roosevelt and the Brontë sisters, women have always shown up when new technologies emerged that gave them a voice and a platform.

And now, it’s our moment again.

You’ll hear:

Why AI isn’t just a tool - it’s a force shaping how we work, teach, govern, and live
Shocking examples of gender bias baked into AI systems
Why your perspective, leadership, and storytelling are essential in this new era
How I’m using AI to save time on the computer, so I can do more of the work that makes me feel human

AI can either reinforce the past or help us create a more inclusive future. It’s up to us to choose. Let’s make sure future generations find plenty of women in the history books of this AI era.

Links:

Show notes at https://www.speakingyourbrand.com/434/

Check out my new companion podcast “Confident Speaker”: https://confidentspeaker.transistor.fm/

Join our Automate & Amplify with AI program: https://www.speakingyourbrand.com/ai/

Learn how we can work together on your thought leadership and signature talk: https://www.speakingyourbrand.com/work-with-us/coaching/

Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolcox

Related Podcast Episodes:

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What is Speaking Your Brand: Public Speaking Tips and Strategies?

It's time to escape the expert trap and become an in-demand speaker and thought leader through compelling and memorable business presentations, keynotes, workshops, and TEDx talks. If you want to level up your public speaking to get more and better, including paid, speaking engagements, you've come to the right place! Thousands of entrepreneurs and leaders have learned from Speaking Your Brand and now you can too through our episodes that will help you with storytelling, audience engagement, building confidence, handling nerves, pitching to speak, getting paid, and more. Hosted by Carol Cox, entrepreneur, speaker, and TV political analyst. This is your place to learn how to persuasively communicate your message to your audience.

Carol Cox:
Whether you love AI, are curious about it,

or are not quite sure your voice matters to

shape the present and the future.

I'm sharing my recent Ted style talk on why

AI needs women.

On this episode of the Speaking Your Brand

podcast. More and more women are making an

impact by starting businesses,

running for office, and speaking up for what

matters. With my background as a TV political

analyst, entrepreneur,

and speaker. I interview a coach for purpose

driven women to shape their brands,

grow their companies, and become recognized

as influencers in their field.

This is speaking your brand,

your place to learn how to persuasively

communicate your message to your audience.

Hi and welcome to the Speaking Your Brand

podcast. This is your host,

Carol Cox. We're continuing the series that

I've been doing all around.

I hopefully you've enjoyed the past few

episodes to get you thinking about ways that

you can integrate AI into your business,

into your content production,

and into the work you do in in ways that

maybe you haven't thought of before,

and not just doing it manually by,

say, going to ask ChatGPT to do something and

then coming back out, but really thinking

about how to automate what you're doing so

that you can do more of the things that you

love to do, like public speaking,

thought leadership, working one on one or in

small groups with clients,

and so on. In this episode,

I'm going to share with you the recent TEDx

style talk that I delivered at an event

called Elex.

My topic was AI Needs Women why Your voice

matters to shape the present and the future.

If you would like to learn how to create AI

automation workflows that you can use in your

business and your content production without

needing to know how to code,

check out my new live online four week

program called Automate and Amplify with AI.

I'm going to teach you and show you and

provide you with the AI workflows that I'm

using so that you can integrate these into

the work that you're doing as well.

You can get all the details and apply at

speaking your brand AI again that speaking

your brand AI.

Now let's get on to my talk.

It was the day after Christmas 2022,

and instead of enjoying that nice slow week

between Christmas and New Year's,

I was at my laptop updating all of the

business and marketing classes that I teach

at Full Sail University and starting to build

AI applications for my company and podcast,

Speaking Your Brand.

The reason? Well, OpenAI had just released

ChatGPT the month before and had taken the

world by storm, surprising even the company

itself. And as an educator,

a marketer and a technologist,

I'm a former software developer.

I instantly saw that this was going to impact

all of those fields and so much more.

Now. I've been around long enough to see

these hype cycles come and go.

The next big social media platform,

or software application or marketing strategy

that was going to, quote,

change everything.

And of course, they never did.

But AI is different.

It is what is known as a general purpose

technology, which means it really can change

everything. And it most likely will.

But I'm also a student of history,

and I gravitated towards history because I

was always looking for the women in the

stories. I wanted to see women like who I

wanted to grow up, to be sure.

I studied the presidents and the military

commanders, but I wanted to know what were

the women thinking?

What were they doing?

What did they want to contribute?

How did they want to shape society?

Because it's the past that shapes who we are

today, and it's what we do today that will

shape the future.

And as I look out at the tech landscape and

all the podcast and the YouTube videos and

the influencers on LinkedIn.

And I look at the CEOs of AI companies and

their boards. I see a lot of men and not as

many women as I was like.

And it's important for all of us,

no matter who we are, but especially women,

half the population to have a say,

to be part of the conversations,

the decision making and the leadership around

AI because it's going to impact how we work,

how we teach, how we learn,

how we govern, and how we interact with each

other. I mentioned that I'm a former software

developer. I founded two tech companies in

the first part of my career,

but I don't look like the typical techie.

You probably think of the guy in the hoodie

hunched over his laptop,

writing all the lines of code with millions

of dollars of venture capital money funding

his startup, and it is most likely a he

because women only get between 3 and 5% of

venture capital money for their startups,

and that number has not changed in the past

20 years and is actually getting worse

recently, not better.

But tech hasn't always been coded as male.

Way back in the 19th century,

Ada Lovelace pioneered how we even thought of

what a computer could be.

In the 1960s, NASA employed what they called

human computers, who were women,

primarily black women,

as portrayed in the film Hidden Figures who

calculated by hand.

On paper, the trajectories of rockets talk

about mind blowing.

In the early part of the 1800s with the rise

of the novel. Women like George Eliot and the

Bronte sisters wanted to have a public voice.

So what did they do?

They published under male pseudonyms,

so that, number one, they could get

published. And number two,

so that their work could be taken seriously.

In the early part of the 20th century.

I told you I was a history person.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy

Thompson used the new technology of radio to

broadcast their voices,

which was so unusual at the time for women to

have a public voice.

But they did so to millions of homes across

the country. And of course,

more recently, millions of women around the

world have used the internet,

social media and mobile to build their

businesses, their brands and their careers.

But again, as I look out at the tech

landscape, I want to know where the women

are, where they're making an impact and how

we can amplify each other's voices.

Let me give you two examples of why what

we're doing with AI and understanding what AI

is doing to us is so important.

About a year ago, I asked ChatGPT to give me

a list of five well-known women

entrepreneurs. Sure, I could have searched

Google, but I figured ChatGPT would give me a

nice little summary.

A very simple, straightforward Request that

she starts writing.

You know, you can see the the words coming on

the screen and it says number one,

Oprah Winfrey. Number two,

Sara Blakely of Spanx and so on.

I'm like, okay, good. And then I can see it,

right? Number five period.

Elon Musk and ChatGPT continues.

Although Elon Musk is not a woman,

he has founded these businesses,

etc.. And I was like, okay,

hold on a second. Chatgpt first,

thank you for acknowledging that,

you know, he's not a woman,

but then why is he on my list when,

you know, I was asking for women

entrepreneurs. So that makes me wonder what

is going on in the training data and the

reinforcement that is causing it to give this

answer. Here's a more recent example.

A couple of months ago,

I was co-hosting a writing and speaking

retreat, and one of the activities that we

had the women do was to write on post-it

notes and ask that they have an A give that

they would offer. So an ass could be

something like they needed help with social

media strategy, and to give that they would

offer to be beta readers for someone's books.

So they put out their post-it notes on a big

white piece of paper, and then we needed to

transcribe that into a spreadsheet to hand

out to all of the women.

Now, I could have transcribed it,

but I figured, well, ChatGPT could do this

and save me time.

So I gave it the photo and I gave it very

specific instructions.

I told it just transcribe what you see in the

post-it notes, do not add to it,

do not change anything,

just transcribe.

So it did it. That was great. I'm looking

over the spreadsheet and it looks good.

And then a row sticks out to me under the ask

column it says the per the request.

I'm looking for women to interview who change

their career path after marriage.

And I'm like, huh? There is no woman here

who's working on a book topic related to

that, so that seems kind of odd.

I go back to the original post-it notes and

everything is legibly written.

Here's what the original post-it note said.

Looking for men to interview,

not women looking for men to interview.

Who changed their last name upon marriage for

whatever reason when it was,

quote, transcribing.

I assume that ChatGPT is neural network,

which is based on word associations and

likelihood of what words go together.

Decided that the words interviewing men who

changed their last name upon marriage was so

unlikely that it changed it to interview

women who changed their career path after

marriage, because that seemed much more

likely to it based on all of its training

data and its word associations.

So you can imagine, as more and more of us

are using AI and more students are using it.

How are biases and stereotypes getting

reinforced in AI versus being challenged and

questioned and even noticed?

So this is why it's so important for us to

use AI. So I'm not saying don't use it.

We absolutely need to use it so that we

understand what it's doing,

and we can be part of the conversations to

question how is interacting with our kids,

whether it's at school or with the AI

companions, and how it's going to impact our

work. I want us to be in the driver's seat.

This is how we can make sure that we are

collaborating together,

using our voices and amplifying the voices of

other women. I think of women I follow who

are making a big impact,

like Joi Palomino and her Algorithmic Justice

League, which is making sure that the

algorithms that are right now are influencing

hiring decisions, criminal justice,

law enforcement, and so on are more fair,

transparent and unbiased in women like

Fei-Fei, Li is Stanford University professor

who created ImageNet.

Without ImageNet, ChatGPT and the other AI

tools would not be able to see and analyze

images or create them.

That's how innovative that technology was

that she created. So I invite you to have

conversations about AI in your workplaces,

your schools, your communities,

your governing bodies,

and more. You could even set up an informal

AI council where you work or at your

children's school to bring people together to

talk about what their ideas are around AI,

what are their questions, their concern to

share resources.

Now, this Christmas break,

hopefully I will not be at my laptop working

on things. Instead, I'm busily having.

I helped me to automate much of what I do on

my computer in my business,

so I can get back to the work that I want to

do, which is being human and interacting with

other humans. And I invite you all to do the

same, because when future generations read

the history books of this AI era,

I want them to find plenty of women in them.

Thank you.

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What is Speaking Your Brand: Public Speaking Tips and Strategies?