‘Black Women in Artificial Intelligence’ Founder Talks AI Education and Empowerment - Ep. 251

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. In 2020, Angel Busch founded Black Women in Artificial Intelligence with a mission to educate, engage, embrace, and empower black women in AI. Under her leadership, Black Women in AI has grown into a global force, uniting members across five continents and forging partnerships with industry leaders such as Amazon, Microsoft, Capital One, and NVIDIA. Angel's dedication to creating spaces where black women thrive is not just a mission. It's a movement. Here with us to talk about Black Women in AI, the organization, the movement, and the power of inclusivity and innovation is Angel Busch, founder and CEO of Black Women in Artificial Intelligence. Angel, welcome. Thank you so much for taking the time to join the AI podcast. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm so excited about this conversation. Me too. Why don't we start with the beginning? What inspired you to start Black Women in AI? In the beginning, well, this all happened because of Usher. And I don't know Usher. Usher does not know me. So let's clear that up right up front. But what I was doing, I was trying to build a robot, and that robot's name was going to be Usher. Mhmm. And all Usher's job was to do was to simply bring me hot cocoa. And so in trying to develop this robot, I went down this rabbit hole called YouTube University. Sure. Trying to figure out what are the dynamics of this robot. How do I build this robot? And as I'm doing this research, I'm hearing more and more about artificial intelligence. Now this was 2019. Okay. So before the big AI explosion. Right. And so as I'm doing this research, I'm finding more about artificial intelligence, and I'm hearing it's the fourth industrial revolution. And so I started to attend different events. And as I'm at these events, I'm not quite seeing a full reflection of myself. Right. But as they continue to say, it's the fourth industrial revolution. You know, in those moments, I said to myself, well, surely you can have a revolution without black women. And so that was the genesis of black women in artificial intelligence. Got it. And so this was 2019 Yes. Started the organization the next year officially? Mhmm. We officially, got all of our assets, social media assets in in 2020. Gotcha. And so what's the growth? Growth is a funny word, but what's the journey of the organization been like since then? You know, it's been an interesting journey. I think when you start anything that's new Mhmm. The first portion of it is learning, learning where you fit in the space, understanding the space of AI, because, again, this was 2019, August 2020 is when we officially became an organization. And I think that artificial intelligence wasn't where it is now in 2020, you know, global pandemic, all of these things happening at …