Three experts on artificial intelligence (AI) recently spoke about how Black businesses can harness the innovative technology to their advantage at a panel discussion at the Brookings Institution in northwest D.C.
“AI is now defining what business is,” said Renee Cummings, a scholar at the University of Virginia and a nonresident fellow at the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. “AI has the power to define for business its customers, whether a business is profitable or not and whether a business has the opportunity to get more resources to operate.”
“Artificial intelligence can help Black businesses look for customers and generate leads for business,” said Mutale Nkonde, a visiting policy fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and president of AI for the People, a public sector AI organization. “When businesses use social media, they are using AI.”
Nkonde said AI is being used against African Americans, such as when Black future homeowners are discouraged by the systems not to look at neighborhoods that aren’t predominantly minority.
“These decisions which guide AI are not made by people who have the best interests of Blacks,” she said. “The technology will see that a business is owned by a Black person and will treat it a certain way and that should stop.”
Fay Cobb Payton is professor emerita and was a full professor of information technology and analytics at North Carolina State University. Payton said AI can affect a business’s bottom line in unique ways.
“Let’s say you have a business in the Anacostia section of Washington, D.C.,” she said. “AI is driving gentrification. It is affecting your customer base because more of your customers are not people of color due to gentrification. Business owners, especially Black business owners, need to know about things like that.”