Anne Fuchs: Hello and welcome to Super Insider, a podcast proudly brought to you by Australian Retirement Trust on all things investing, the economy and, now it would appear, technology and artificial intelligence.
Hello, everybody. I'm your host. My name is Anne Fuchs, and I'm so thrilled to have some really cool people on the show today. We're going to be talking about how you can make AI work for you, for your life, for your finances. Before we do that, of course, just remember that this is general advice, general information only, so you'll need to make sure whether this is right for you.
Now let me do some introductions. Dr Nici Sweaney, founder of Ai Her Way, all about ethical AI platforms and an absolute expert in the subject. Welcome to the show.
Nici: Thank you so much for having me.
Anne: And Elicia McDonald, a partner at Airtree Venture capital. Welcome. Proudly supported by ART as well.
Elicia: Great to be here. Thanks, Anne.
Anne: These spectacular women have flown in to the studio today here in Brisbane—we're really appreciative—to have a big conversation about how we can feel empowered. It is the month of International Women's Day. Yes, we are going to show a big bias towards the sisterhood and empowering women all around this country.
Let's start with a bit of your stories, if that's okay. Venture capital—maybe we'll start with you, Elicia, if that's all right, and then we'll go to you, Nici.
Elicia: As Anne mentioned, I'm a venture capitalist at Airtree Ventures. We're an early and growth stage venture fund. We've invested in 115 portfolio companies across also sectors but primarily software, and we're talking a lot about artificial intelligence today and it's a theme that we've been investing in for a very long time. There has been this incredible change in the landscape over the last 24 months in particular. So, really excited to get stuck into that and some practical applications around particularly what some of our women founders are doing in that in that space. My personal journey—I have been with Airtree now for 9 years. Airtree has been around for 10-11 years this year. I've been there for most of the journey and have really seen the growth in the local technology sector and the local venture capital sector in that time. I’m really excited to share some of those very cool stories.
Nici: I'm Dr Nici Sweaney. I came into AI through my PhD. I spent 17 years in academia, and I studied, of all things, conservation ecology as a PhD student. I researched butterflies, which does not immediately scream artificial intelligence, but I had to learn how to code during my PhD. Somebody at dinner about 10 years ago overheard that I could code and then hired me as a consulting data analyst. I spent 10 years doing that. Generative AI came on to the scene, and not being new to algorithms or data but definitely with generative AI being new, I had this moment of, ‘Holy crap! This is going to change humanity for all eternity.’ I started talking about generative AI back in November of 2022. That got me invited on some round tables to participate, and then about 6 months after doing that I had this moment. I've got 4 kids, as I know we all do.
Anne: No. I have 3.
Nici: You’re almost 4.
Anne: 3 and a half.
Nici: We all have an insane amount of humans underneath our roofs. I had this moment, putting my then 2-year-old youngest to bed one night, and thinking through academia and research and the data scientist stuff I was doing and speaking at conferences about AI, and I thought, ‘What do I want to do with this? Where do I want to go?’ I just had this lightbulb moment of thinking, if anyone needs AI, it's women. So, that started AI Her Way. We're almost 2 years old now and we're a full-scale of consultancy. We're going to businesses and organisations, and we help them implement AI. I do lots of PD and lots of speaking events. We've worked with over 60 partners around Australia and also globally.
Anne: By 2030 AI will equate to, I think it's, $16 trillion of the global economy1 or thereabouts, but women only make up about a quarter or just under a quarter of the workforce2. There will be close to a quarter of a million jobs in Australia by 20303. You 2 women have a really massive role in terms of actually closing that gap. There has to be a bias. Let's talk about just what AI is and the construct. It is intimidating for people. People think about robots, around misuse of information, ethics. Can we break down what it is? Nici, you'd be great to start with that, and talk about then how it applies in terms of companies.
Nici: I think the first thing to note with AI is that most often these days when people say AI, they mean generative AI. That's a slight difference. AI has been around for decades. When we think about using things like Spotify or Netflix, they're based on AI and algorithms that say, ‘You've watched all of the Real Housewives of New York, so you might like the Real Housewives of Sydney to watch next.’ They're using algorithms to make predictions about people's behaviour. The difference with generative AI is that it generates new content. If you think about the same analogy, it's like, ‘She's watched all of Real Housewives of New York. Now here’s a completely new show that we've made just for her with AI generated characters that we've never seen before and a script that has never existed before.’
Generative AI is the new thing and it's the thing that we've become really excited about. Most of our generative AI programs are based on large language models. These are tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Meta and –
Anne: Copilot.
Nici: Yes, but they're powered by OpenAI. They are modelled off ChatGPT as well. The way that I explain how these things work—we've all got children. Imagine you've got a 10-month-old at home, and you've got a pet dog. Let's say its name is Max. You're constantly talking to your baby about Max. You're saying, ‘Let's pat Max. Let's take Max for a walk.’ Or ‘Max! Stop barking in the backyard’, right? In humans’ brains over time with this repeated exposure we start to learn that that thing is Max and it's a dog. But because humans are really clever at pattern recognition, we start to recognise that when we walk past other fluffy 4-legged things they might also be a dog. Humans’ brains start to form this map of what a dog is, and all the things related to a dog. When the baby finally says the word ‘Max’ or barks out loud we congratulate it as parents, right? ‘You’re the most advanced baby ever, much better than Shelley's baby next door! You're very clever.’ What that does in humans’ brains is that it’s a dopamine hit, and it helps us lock down and learn that concept.
What machine learning and people in the AI space have done is taught code to behave in the same sort of way. We've taught that when we say something like ‘dog’ to ChatGPT it can grab all these bits of data and code about all the things related to a dog and it can give it back to us. Then we as users tell it if it got it right or not and that helps it to learn what we want from it. That's in a nutshell how generative AI works. We're excited about it because it has no use case. When we think about the Netflix algorithms, they're drawing from a pool of pre-existing shows. Yes, that's cool, but there's nothing extra. People have to go and make extra. When we talk about the potential of generative AI, it's that we have limitless things that it could do or create for us. It's up to us as users to decide.
Anne: Which is what I think scares people. Elicia, what are you seeing in terms of companies that are out there creating all of this new stuff that Nici is talking about?
Elicia: As a sort of technology turnaround, generative AI in particular, if you look back in time, we've seen similar waves with cloud and mobile adoption. Where we are in this technological stage with gen AI is that a lot of the attention to date has been on the foundational layers. So, we're talking about LLMs like ChatGPT.
Anne: What’s an LLM?
Elicia: The large language models.
Anne: Thank you.
Elicia: These are the foundational layer where all of the data is sitting and they're the models generating the outcomes. What comes next, what's the next stage in that evolution, is the application layer. That's where we've started to see the early beginnings of companies, but we're still very much at the beginning of that journey. So, if you think about the mobile evolution as a comparison point, it took 4 years to go from when the mobile trend started to when we got Uber. The first iteration of what an application layer looked like for the mobile generation was the torch and calculator apps on our phone. It's just scratching the surface of what's possible. Then you get to Uber and how much that changed our experience in terms of how we get around the city. That's what's really exciting when we look at companies now in gen AI; we're just scratching the surface around the application layer. You think about potential applications when you think about generating content in the way that we've never been able to do before, and the potential applications across all industries. That's what we're really excited about.
Anne: What would be your advice to our female viewers around this opportunity to advance their own career or make their life better?
Elicia: I would just say that this is transformative; it's going to transform our lives but also our working lives. From a professional perspective, with every task you do today you should be thinking about, ‘How can AI help me do this?’ I've heard of people literally having that sticky note on their desk ‘How can AI help me do this?’ The first couple of times you dabble, and you start to use these tools, it feels really foreign. I think it's just experimenting. If you think about your first interaction with ChatGPT—and some people listening may never have used ChatGPT yet—you start off using it a bit like Google. You might ask it a question and expect an answer. As you start to learn better prompts and ways that it can support you can get more sophisticated. Plus, the technology is constantly improving. So, giving it additional context—say, you've got a challenge, maybe a strategic challenge, you're facing in your work. This is the challenge I'm facing. Here's the context. This is your role. You might say, ‘You're an expert. You're an investment banker with this many years’ experience, with detailed experience in this industry. Ask me 5 additional questions to learn additional context to help me with this challenge and then come up with 3 unique ideas for how I could solve this’ and actually using it as a thought partner. That's the evolution that people go through. I think just dipping your toes in the water and starting to think about how it can help you is the first step. Then there's obviously much more you can do beyond there.
Anne: What are your thoughts, Nici? What I'm thinking about is what if it feeds you the wrong information? But before we go to that maybe, the career elements and where you see it can really advance women's careers.
Nici: I think, Elicia, that was great advice about how to start using it, and to remember that it's much less like Google and more like hiring an intern. I actually often describe it as an intern mixed with an overfed labrador, because it's always pretty hungry for treats. Thinking about it like how you would onboard somebody new to help you, and that could be in your life as well. I particularly think it's very important for women. We're at this point in our society where we just had the Workplace Gender Equality Agency release their report; we have a gender pay gap. Women are doing $650 billion worth of unpaid labour in the Australian economy.4
Anne: I think it's the equivalent of 44 extra days a year5 we have to work to earn the same amount of money as men, according to the ABS, yes.
Nici: There were some other stats around women spending more than half of their time in unpaid labour versus men that spend more than half the time in paid labour. For me, it is very rare that that is your unique genius. I did a PhD in conservation ecology. My PhD was not in how to pick out birthday presents for my 10-year-old’s friend. That's in very few people's zone of genius. I see the real potential for AI for women in particular is to offload some of that mental load. That can be in your personal life as well as in your professional life. If I could gift everyone a wife, as Annabel Crab says; every wife should have a wife. We don't necessarily have the resources for that, but we do have AI. I see that as a big moment of being able to close the gender gap for women.
Anne: Practically, though, what are you talking about there in terms of what are the tools? What are the practical tools that women with 3-and-a-half and 4 children are using in your lives with full careers and full family lives?
Nici: I think the overwhelm is real. There are about 31,500 generative AI tools on the market. That stops people from starting, because they don't know what's worthwhile. Most of them are all based on the foundation of a large language model. I always tell people the best place to start is just with one of those, and I usually say either ChatGPT or Claude, because they both test comparatively in terms of creativity and intelligence testing. How you can start is, yes, just say, ‘I'm Nici. I’m a 38-year-old Australian with 4 kids. I am an AI strategist. We're working on these sorts of projects. I've got this kind of stuff going on at home. What are 10 ways that you could help me offload some of this work?’ And just work with these tools, right? They've got so much data in them you actually don't really need to know how to use them. You just need to give it context and ask these tools for their advice about how to help you.
Anne: Is this what you're doing, Elicia?
Elicia: Yes, and I think there are really tangible ways. As my children are going to sleep at night and they want you to create a story, I'm involving them in that and saying, ‘What characters do you want in the story?’ I'm putting that into ChatGPT and allowing them to see the power of this. I think it’s finding those sorts of tangible applications and also educating them; I totally agree that the education has completely changed and bringing them into that journey as well. Professionally, I think there are so many tools to get started. The one I think that's really changed the game for me most recently is I'm using Granola for my notetaking.
Anne: Granola?
Elicia: There are a lot of different note-taking AI apps out there. I love this one because it doesn't record the audio or the video if you're on a Zoom call, it just transcribes it. You can type in it just like you were writing normal notes in a meeting. I'm in a lot of meetings, back-to-back most of the day. I want to be as present and engaged as I can be, but I also don't want to forget the takeaways and the key points so I can follow up on that. That allows me to know I've got this assistant that's listening and transcribing. I can still take my normal notes. At the end of the meeting, I can then click ‘enhanced notes’ and it will structure those notes, put them into clear dot points, clear actions, next steps. There are also templates you can use. Also, during a meeting, if for whatever reason you missed a key point, you can click a button that says, ‘what did I just miss?’ and it will summarise it for you in that meeting. It's really changed my game, because I’m in so many back-to-back meetings every day that it's made such a difference.
Anne: My week this week it feels like you've got Teams coming at you, you've got emails coming through. Generally, after 3 pm someone is texting wanting to be picked up from the train station or inquiring about what's for dinner and complaining that they don't like what is being proposed for dinner. There are just so many channels of communication that happen at the one time. To your point, you want to be human and be in a meeting and maintain that personal connection. Trying to create some order in what is just forever hectic days sounds really good.
Elicia: Take out the busy work so you can focus on --
Anne: -- yes, the important work. What are the ethics, Nici, around all of this? What are the tips you would give our listeners and viewers around things to consider as they're going through the 31,000 or whatever --
Nici: 31,500. I checked that a few days ago. It might be 32,500 now!
Anne: How do they know which are the ones that are safer? I’m not sure if that’s the right word.
Nici: Safety is a really big concern for a lot of people. I think a lot of people are overzealous about their concern around safety. We already give away lots of information about ourselves. I just think it's the fact that AI is new, so we feel extra hesitant about how we engage with it. That being said, there are models that don't share data. If you've got access to Copilot or Claude, by default they don't share your data. With ChatGPT, you have a setting that you can turn that off. If you are talking about private things, I would advise turning data sharing off. Personally, I turn data sharing on, on purpose because part of how ChatGPT evolves is taking all of that data that you've shared with it and training the next model on it. I think as women it's really important that we have our voices and what we talk about heard within these models. But that's a personal choice. Data, yes, think about that. If you wouldn't post it on a Reddit forum, maybe don't put it into one of these AI tools. Or think about data sharing. But the ethics behind it I think is a whole other piece. The biggest thing I think for listeners to keep in mind is AI never tells you that you're doing something a bit shonky. I have a story about how I used to have a process with ChatGPT as it happened where I would put in a few pieces from thought leaders on LinkedIn and I'd say, ‘What resonates with my audience? What do you think I should pull out from this and talk about?’ I followed that process, normally always checking. One morning it was my daughter's birthday. I promised that I wouldn't be on my phone for the morning and that I'd make her pancakes. Before she came into my room, I though I'll just quickly do my LinkedIn post and then I'll get up and do the pancakes. Did that, whipping up this batter and get this text from a person I really admired in my space who said, ‘Hey, Nici, I just saw your post on LinkedIn. Would you mind either crediting me or taking it down?’
Anne: You poor thing!
Nici: I died! I saw this and I went back and read her posts. It had pulled very specific examples that she had shared and reposted it. I felt so betrayed because I thought, ‘Why didn't you tell me that I just plagiarized someone?’ The point is that this is just a product that's designed to keep you using it as a user. It's never going to say, ‘Maybe that's not a great idea’, right? Or ‘Maybe you should have thought about X, Y, Z.’ Unless you say to it, ‘Is this the best? Have I missed anything?’ Again, it's an overfed labrador. It's going to do all its tricks for you before you even prompt it to do something cool. It's really designed to please you. It's a product that wants you to come back and keep engaging with it. As a user, making sure that you're always the leader and that you know you're the boss and you have to check whatever is happening and make sure it's a good reflection of who you are as a brand—I think that's the number one thing to sort of keep in mind. There are lots of ethics and bias issues around where the data comes from, how it's processed and how these models behave. But as a user, just knowing that it doesn't always have your best intentions at heart.
Anne: What are you seeing, Elicia? I guess the final component of our chat is just thinking about finances and money and the world of AI, as it relates to that, whether it's personal or investment. What are your reflections?
Elicia: If we think about the ethics around this—and I totally agree with Nici that the underlying data is also a problem—I'm sure many listeners have heard of invisible women, and this is not the first time that we've seen data drive poorer outcomes for women. You think about crash test dummies. Cars are less safe for women because all of the safety tests were done on male bodies and male crash test dummies. Similarly with a lot of drugs, they have worse side-effects on women because all of the dosages were done on largely male driven clinical trials. If you're getting data from the internet and scraping all these sites for a large language model, but that data is primarily driven by male driven data, you're going to have bias in the underlying answers that come through. Plus, then, from a capital perspective, only 15 per cent of founders globally are women6. If we're trying to get representation in both how these tools are built, and then the underlying data, there are a lot of factors there that are leading to underrepresentation. I think this human in the loop and the idea that you should be questioning what's going to be produced from these tools. It’s not like any of us is free of bias as well but just don't take what these tools say as gospel.
Nici: I think at a society level we have lots of different messaging that means that women don't engage with tech as quickly or as early as men do. We have straight from school age, where we get a huge drop-off in STEM involvement from girls from about Year 4 onwards, we don't teach them that anybody in that space are women or that there are current things happening. So, if you can't see yourself, you can't beat that. But then we also teach women to be more risk averse and more cautious. I've trained thousands of people at this point, and I would say that, stereotypically, it's the women who worry about the ethics around it, and so they're more hesitant to use it. It's the women who also worry that it won't represent themselves, and they'll be seen as cheating or cutting corners. I think that reflects this whole kind of we have to do twice as much to be seen as doing the base standard --
Anne: Be twice as smart to get the job.
Nici: Exactly! There is lots of different messaging that means women are more hesitant when it comes to new tech and adoption of tech and using AI. You were saying that women are invisible. That's another component of it. We've built AI that reflects what men talk about. So, then women engage with these tools, and they don't see themselves in it, and then they further pull back from engaging. It's like, ‘This isn't made with me in mind. It's not useful for me.’ I think that's a huge risk. Part of why I do what I do is that I don't want us to wake up in 5 years’ time and realise we live in the Handmaid's Tale and that we don't have access to power anymore.
Anne: Crickey, sister! That is a hell of a call to action there. None of us wants to live in the Handmaid’s Tale. Let's go out on a happy, practical, action-oriented note for our listeners and viewers in terms of a call to action on AI.
Elicia: I think it's to get started. Don't be intimidated by it. Dip your toe in the waters. Don't get left behind. As Nici mentioned, in 5 years’ time we don't want to be looking back. I'm very passionate about getting more diversity in entrepreneurship. I would hate to see the gender gap in AI adoption lead to deteriorating numbers in more female founders leaning in to create world-changing companies. We do have some amazing stories in our portfolio in terms of not being able to be what you can't see.
Anne: Could I look up Airtree on Copilot or ChatGPT?
Elicia: Yes. We have Annie, who's building Build Club, which is an AI training campus --
Nici: I love her.
Elicia: -- to help people lean into AI. It's a really non-intimidating format. If you want to learn to build in that space, go to Build Club. Check it out. It’s a female founded company. We have Siobhan at Reejig. She's building an AI workforce intelligence platform to help the biggest companies in the world think about how they should be harnessing the opportunities of AI and thinking about their workforce in that context. Even Mel from Canva talks about how she does AI walks and talks. She'll talk and brainstorm live. Canva has led the way in terms of a very large accessible company integrating AI products into their design workflow. Very quickly acquiring companies to scale that growth even quicker. There are amazing women doing really incredible things out there.
Anne: It’s very exciting.
Elicia: And I think it’s just not being intimidated or thinking this is not for you. The world is heading in this direction. I really would hate for people to get left behind. It is really powerful to take out some of that busy work and allow you to lean in to where your superpowers are. Please don't hesitate to get --
Anne: I love it, Elicia. Nici?
Nici: To reiterate that point, start and know that you just became the CEO of a limitless company with a limitless number of employees and it's up to you to decide what they would do for you. I often tell people, get out of piece of pen and paper. I know it's old school now that we have AI, but I can't escape it. I'm a big fan of highlighters. Write down all of the things that you do at least on a weekly basis. If you think that you could explain that to somebody else, put a little star next to it. If you also hate doing it or if it doesn't bring you joy, put 2 stars next to it. That's the thing that you start explaining to one of these models. You say, ‘I'm this sort of person. This is the thing that you're going to help me with. This is how I usually do it. I want you to do it for me from now on.’ This is our moment in history. We have these gender gaps. We maybe didn't manage social media completely correctly. We're in the midst of a huge transformation in how we operate and how we spend our time. It actually is a massive opportunity and a challenge but a huge opportunity for every individual to contribute to what this all looks like. I think women have a really important role to play. It's the great equaliser. Women so often have not had money, resources or time to launch ideas. In an entrepreneurial space, I've had side hustles for 14 years. By using AI, I actually scaled it to a point where I could step away from my 9 to 5. I see that as a huge opportunity for so many women. Women have brilliant ideas. They just often don't have access to the things they need to launch. AI is your thing to launch.
Elicia: The technological barriers are coming down. You talked about learning to code. There is underrepresentation—I don't want to generalise too much—in women being able to code and get an MVP off the ground and prove that they've got an interesting idea. Now with tools like Cursor and Lovable you can code something with natural language. That's incredible. That's really breaking down the barriers if you know how to harness it.
Anne: I will finish by saying that Australian Retirement Trust is all about empowering our members and Australians to have a really bright future; that they're awakened. There's that big blue monster. If you've seen that ad, there's Barb sitting on top of the monster. We're all about Australians taking control of this big, lovable monster called superannuation so you can have this amazing life, which is why we wanted you both on the show. AI is something that we also want women to get on top of, hold the horns, take control and you drive this thing wherever you want to go so that you can have an awesome retirement. Thank you so much for being on the show. I'm going to go back after this and find all of these different tools that you've both spoken about. To our listeners and viewers, I hope you have loved this episode and that you're inspired, that you've got some really practical calls to action. Buy those little stars from Officeworks. Start writing your list and download Granola. Give us a rating wherever you consume your podcast, and we'll look forward to your joining us again soon.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
[footnotes]
1. PwC's Global Artificial Intelligence Study, accessed 19 March 2025 at www.pwc.com
2. AI's Missing Link: The Gender Gap in the Talent Pool, 2024, accessed 19 March 2025 at www.interface-eu.org
3. Meeting the AI Skills Boom, 2024, accessed 19 March 2025 at www.techcouncil.com.au
4. Average weekly earnings, Australia, November 2023, accessed 25 March 2025 at www.abs.gov.au
5. Status of women report card, 2024, accessed 25 March 2025 at www.genderequality.gov.au
6. Narrowing the gender gap in venture capital, 2023, accessed 25 March 2025 at www.weforum.org
