Better with Humans

AI for Equity: Jenny Garrett OBE on the Good News

• Episode 10

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0:00 | 39:26

I still haven't heard anyone say AI freed up their day, so they spent it in the garden. That line came from Jenny Garrett OBE, CEO of Jenny Garrett Global, author of Equality vs Equity, and co-host of the AI for Equity podcast with her daughter Leah. Their book, AI for Equity, is out in October. What struck me most was how she got there. She was tired of the doom, so she asked her daughter to go looking for good news stories instead. What came back was a podcast, and then a book deal. A loan algorithm that predicts a refugee doctor's future earnings so they can requalify, over three million pounds lent out with a 98.6% payback rate. A tutor that lives on a phone and keeps working for a week without internet, for kids who can't get to school. Those stories exist. They just don't trend. Jenny made a point I keep coming back to. Trying to compete with AI is a race we lose before we start. I'm never going to out-calculate a large language model. But I can read a room. I can sit in a conversation like this one without knowing where it ends up. She described someone as fiercely compassionate, and I don't think a machine gets to be that. Not fiercely. We got into what this means for leaders, and she reframed it in a way I hadn't quite heard before. If your team's biggest conversation of the day is with a chatbot, whose job is it to make them feel like they belong? Not efficiency. Belonging. She talked about creating sandboxes, letting people run with ideas you privately think won't work, and being honest about whether you're rejecting an idea because it's wrong or because it wasn't yours. That one landed. Then there's the other side. AI escaping its container. Models going rogue. Prompts turning up in places they shouldn't. Jenny's read is that we're being gently socialised into accepting all of it. Get used to leaks. Get used to things going wrong. Get used to nobody quite being in control. I don't have evidence either way, but I've stopped assuming these are accidents. We didn't ask for any of this. We got it anyway. The question now is what we point it at. If the only AI news reaching you has been bad news, this one might rebalance things a little.

Connect with Jenny Garrett OBE:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennygarrettreflexion
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coachjennygarrett
Website: https://jennygarrett.global/

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Original logo illustration and in video podcast graphics by Jesse Rist - https://instagram.com/jesse_rist


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