Grand Slam Journey

88. Rani Yadav-Ranjan ︱ AI for Humanity's Sake

• Klara Jagosova • Season 3

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What if we could revolutionize healthcare and other industries by using the untapped computing power that sits idle in hospitals every night? Meet Rani Yadav-Ranjan, Chief AI Officer at Greycloud AI, who's pioneering a breakthrough approach to AI that respects both data privacy and urgency.

After watching her mother's medical journey, Rani had a revelation: doctors function as "databases" of knowledge, but these repositories remain isolated within individual hospitals. Her solution? A patented system that transforms existing computers in closed networks into distributed training devices, operating during off-hours to build sophisticated AI models without compromising sensitive patient data. "From six o'clock till six in the morning, that's twelve hours of computing power we could use," she explains, describing how her technology chunks and chains data through multiple nodes, each with a unique blockchain identifier to ensure validity.

This innovative approach reflects Rani's decades-long career at the intersection of emerging technologies. As one of the most influential women in tech, with over 20 patents, she pioneered mobile payments in the early 2000s, navigated cultural resistance to e-commerce in Japan, and continues to advocate for the ethical development of AI. Through personal anecdotes about balancing leadership with motherhood and observations about gender bias in corporate cultures, Rani offers a master class in resilience and strategic thinking.

Rani's perspective on AI's future is refreshingly nuanced. Rather than fearing job displacement, she sees AI as enhancing human capabilities while emphasizing the irreplaceable value of experience. "What I use AI for is code reviews," she notes. "It's awesome to say, 'here's 3,000 lines of code, tell me where the missing semicolon is." As she prepares to publish her book "Constitutional Democracy in the Algorithmic Age," Rani continues to champion responsible innovation that serves humanity's needs while respecting our rights and privacy.

Connect with Rani on LinkedIn to follow her groundbreaking work at the intersection of AI, healthcare, and ethical technology development.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryadavranjan/

https://yadav-ranjan.com/

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Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

The idea was okay. If we are confined by law and maybe proprietary in society to have already closed data loops, wouldn't it behoove us to try to solve this faster? So in the case of this thing with my mom, because I'm intimate with that knowledge what if I could create a model that uses all public information? So everything from the Mayo, from the CDC, from all the other public availability, train it, and now again the car with a one gallon of gas. Now I'm giving it to you. What if now you take all your cases and you train now to further refine the data? So, using federated learning, we can refine the data and we can move forward. It's exorbitantly expensive.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

So my solution that we have patented, was to break it up into nodes. So every computer, which is always hardwired in a hospital or a bank, by the way, even laptops, I mean, they're in a closed network. So I said, why don't we turn each of them into a training device? Everybody has CPU, GPU. We could put a load balancer in there. We could use it when you're not working. So from, let's just say, six o'clock till six in the morning, that's 12 hours of compute power that we could use. So let's do that. We can use chunking so we can chunk up the data into bite-sized pieces. We can use chaining so we can chain it up the stream and then, if you will a reverse pyramid, get it up many nodes to a single node and then each node has a unique Web3 blockchain identifier on it. So we know the validity and the metrics that were used and we move forward and it's actually worked out so far in trial pretty good.

Klara Jagosova:

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Grand Slam Journey podcast, where we explore the intersection of sports, business, technology and leadership. My today's guest is Rani Yadav-Ranjan. Rani is the Chief AI Officer at Greycloud AI, former Head of Technology and Innovation at Ericsson Analytics. Insight picked Rani as one of the 10 most influential women in technology, with over 20 patents and recognition from the US House of Representatives. Rani offers inspiring perspective on resilience, leadership and innovation. Inspiring perspective on resilience, leadership and innovation. Our conversation covers the future of AI and healthcare, data privacy, e-commerce, mobile payments and the opportunities and challenges women face in tech. We also discuss the importance of mentorship, resilience and balancing career with family. This podcast is fully self-produced, and so I highly appreciate anyone who gives it a listen. If you enjoyed this conversation, please consider subscribing, leaving a review or sharing it with someone who you believe would love it as well. This is your host, klara Egoshova. Thank you for tuning in and enjoy the listen. Hello, rani, welcome to the Grand Slam Journey podcast. How are you Good?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate this, Clara.

Klara Jagosova:

I am thrilled You're one of the women I am for sure, blessed to have in my circle with all that you have achieved and are still building. And we have many topics to dive into at the intersection of leading innovation, technology, entrepreneurship, leadership, you name it. So I'm curious where this Grand Slam journey takes us, talking about your journey of life and what you're building now. But let me pause before we dive into many topics. How are things lately? We haven't talked in a while.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

I know I want to hear all about. Of course you and I want to catch up, but I love the idea of Grand Slam Journey. I think it's awesome. You and I are both tennis players you at a whole different level than I, but there are a lot of analogies we can make with life and tennis, I think. But almost any sport, you know, whether it's the challenge, the training that's required to reach certain levels, the experiences, the coaching, the mentoring those all align with, to me, leadership and, of course, everything done with grace. I think that is really important. I don't know about you, but I have fallen so many times on the court. My knees were so scabbed up at some point that you know now when that happened to me in my journey of entrepreneurship or even enterprise life. It's like, yeah, I've had scab knees before and time to get up and put some slab on there and move on.

Klara Jagosova:

I love that. So true and fun fact. I don't know how I didn't know you play tennis, ronnie. Have we ever talked about it? Tell me about your tennis passion.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Tennis was something I used to bond with my dad as immigrants you're still figuring out the system and my dad would take my brother, my sister and I out on the tennis court to play and we had the old Chrissy Everett wood rackets you know that were like 20 bucks maybe back then and we would go out on the public courts and we would play and we would hit and we were horrible. We had no formal instruction at that time but I really took to it and I loved the strategy, I loved the competitiveness, but yet I was still playing with myself. Right Then the middle school had tennis teams a great public infrastructure in Minnesota where I went to school and joined the tennis teams and I realized that the girls weren't hitting as hard as the boys and so I joined the boys tennis team.

Klara Jagosova:

Of course you did. I wouldn't expect anything else from you.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

But unfortunately, some of the parents objected and so they moved the practice to 6 am. First they moved it to 7 and I still showed up. Then they moved it to 6 am and it was just too much for me to hit it at 6 am and then two hours and then go hit school all day and then hit the girls tennis team in the evenings. It was just too much and so I ended up dropping out.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

But that was my first also memory of how rules can change to favor certain things. But I got what I needed out of it. I learned how to hit really hard, mm-hmm.

Klara Jagosova:

I love that and I love we're diving straight to the sports, but I also want to just dive in a little bit to some of the things you are doing now and that you have been doing, and you're currently the chief AI officer at Grey Cloud, with passion about using AI for good. You have spent decades helping companies and clients navigate a complex intersection of emerging technologies, governance and regulation Over 25 years pioneering this complex technology at the intersection of AI, machine learning and blockchain. We have met at Ericsson, which I have been really privileged to have a leader like you in the Silicon Valley office to look up to. That has been a very man-dominated industry, obviously, and even the leadership team overall. So I've always appreciated your fearlessness and just leading with courage and charge.

Klara Jagosova:

So I want to dive into those topics and I know you have been a big pioneer for women in tech overall women now in AI. I know it's a topic that you're curious about and obviously I am as well. You've also worked at Airbnb and have been specializing in developing innovative AI strategies and governance framework that drive business transformation. So I definitely want to dive into the technology and the AI topic that I've been trying to read up on and I know for sure that I'm not going to know as much as you, so I'm going to be learning here, hopefully as well as most of the audience, but I want to give you an opportunity. Anything else you want to add as an intro that you want listeners to know about you?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Well, you're the first one to know outside my husband, but I just signed a contract to publish a book.

Klara Jagosova:

Congratulations and we have to do another podcast when it comes out. Yes, that'll be December. It'll be out in December Fantastic, what is it about?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

The convergence of exactly what you said.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

AI governance law and also our rights as citizens. You know, my entire career has been about understanding the power of tech, because once you get in it, you understand the power and the dark side and the. The power of tech Because once you get in it, you understand the power and the dark side and the light side of AI. I've always said that AI has been around since 01. It's not new. It's how fast we can do it, and that is thanks to the hardware technology. People don't appreciate that as much as they should. You know, folks, we've been able to do facial recognition since about the 70s, but we could never do it fast enough because the chips were so slow, the hardware was so slow, and so even just to see my face accurately it would probably take six hours in the old IBM days, in the VAX 360 days. But fast forward to today and you could do it almost instantly. It's encouraging where we are.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

What Grey Cloud is doing is actually solving a whole different problem. Just to pause, my background is, of course, dealing with public information. Navigator was a company I founded that had a private acquisition for just the core components of it and that is searching all 42,000 US and a little bit of Europe, a little Canada government databases, because nobody has more information on anyone than a government. They have you from, as I always say, from cradle to death. You know, they know when you're born and they know your whole life in the middle. They know what you've bought, they know what school you've gone to, if you've taken out a student loan, they know what profession you're in, if you've had to be licensed, and they know how much you've earned because of your taxes. So, if you look at the composite, nobody has more data on you, an individual or a business, than a government entity.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

In 2000-ish, I decided that you know, I need to figure this out, we need to tackle this. And back then, all the US government databases were open. You could ask for anything. You know, I started with contractors and licensing boards. People were sending me data, not only for free, but short, small amounts, and sometimes I would get social security numbers and I thought, jiminy Christmas, this is scary. So there was my first foray into privacy, pii. How do we protect the individual? Primarily myself, you know it's very core to that, and I think all innovation starts with you, an individual. What is my problem? And then, how many other people have the same problem I do. And then, of course, because I can solve my problem I just assume I've not solved it for everybody, false or not, but it's a good approach to innovation. So I started doing that and it's evolving.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

I remember talking to members of Congress and saying, in probably 2010s, that look, give me four hours and I could be you. Identity theft is a big deal. And they did not think it was an issue because, you know, social security numbers are unique. And I said, actually, it's not your social security numbers you need to track, it's your cell phone numbers. And they looked at me and most venture capitalists looked at me with shock when I said that is my unique identifier. Because I said, trust me, connectivity it's our whole thing, it's our being, it's who we are, it's who we trust. And this is before, you know, back when there were brick phones, when Ericsson was making those huge phones, and I said, you know, trust me, you can have multiple phones, I can have one for my family. And I was just envisioning out loud. You know, have multiple phones, I can have one for my family. And I was just envisioning out loud. You know, you could have one for your family, one for your work, one for your social network, back when there was a social network, fast forward. Some of that is very true and along the way I filed patents on a lot of this stuff.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

I then figured I was thinking how do you secure all of this? You know it's okay, you can't have it out there in the public domain, and trust is one thing, but is it verified? You know we cannot openly trust. I think the world has changed too much. It's become too small actually, where anybody can look at anything you know. Gone are the anonymity days where you could remake yourself and maybe hide at times, but AI won't let you do that. So public database. So my point is okay.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Now, thanks to the big four, I would say, with ChatGPT, with Claude, with Anthropic, with Mistral and now with what Oracle is trying to do with their AI, people have gotten savvy and most of the data is now locked up. And yet there's a whole nuance in healthcare and banking and so many other field law that require access to the benefits of an LLM. How do you train that? So GreatCloud is actually able to, in a closed network, use all the nodes that are available and help you train model on super sensitive data and, of course, that genesis was Ericsson, where we know. I started a company inside called Snapcode with three other co-founders who are still at Ericsson, and the idea was to use the data from our networks for customer benefit and how to monetize.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Because, again, companies like Verizon, t-mobile, vodafone they all know where you are because of your cell phone tether. They know where you're going because of your cell phone tether, they know what texts are happening and then, for that matter, they even have your voice. They have every conversation if they choose to. Most are very responsible and actually all are responsible. We have government laws to protect our rights, but we don't have rights. We don't have certain rights in AI, like the ability to be forgotten. We don't have that.

Klara Jagosova:

It's interesting how your passion is clear and I love even the initial what you mentioned protecting the problem statement and starting from what is it that I'm struggling with, what is it that I'm passionate about and what do I think I truly feel like I should solve, for that you cannot find anywhere else and especially if you cannot find other people that are solving for it, then it's for sure a problem that is worth tackling. And obviously it's terrifying to know that you're able to even get sample data of people with social security number. That's very scary, and I want to go a little bit deeper into obviously gray cloud AI and your journey, a little bit deeper into obviously Grey Cloud AI and your journey. But I always like to know about my guests where they grew up, what was their upbringing like and what led them to the passions that they have today. So it seems like we already started maybe spoiler alert a little bit with the tennis.

Klara Jagosova:

It seems like sport was part of your background. Tennis that's like sport was part of your background. Obviously, you have deep passion at the intersection of technology and using different types of technologies for the greater good of society. Whether you mentioned data, how do you handle data, communications, blockchain, ai. It all seems to be kind of coming together in some ways, utilizing especially, some of the platforms are building on the blockchain to make it more data privacy centric. But yeah, let me just stop there and go back, sorry, to the original question. What is your upbringing, like Harani, and if you look back, how have you uncovered this passion and journey?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

you have been on my parents immigrated to the United States and we went to Minnesota. My dad was a computer programmer back then and my mom was a homemaker and then they got into import-export business and, through misfortune at times it was hard. We had retail stores and so, as with all, immigrant children, have to support, help support the family, in the sense that we work in the stores and we do this. Working in retail really gave me an idea of how to talk to people and how to communicate. People always think that I'm an extrovert, but I'm actually the happiest with a book and a hot cup of tea and just being at home in my cave, as you can see behind me. I think that we can look at everything in life in two ways. We can look at it as my gosh, you know, we had to work and we had to do this. Or we can look at it and say, wow, what great training. My siblings and I can talk to anybody. When you grow up in retail, you can talk to anybody and you have to learn patience.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

And then I went to school. I mean, most of my life was obviously in Minnesota. I went to school there, met my husband, moved to California where he was at a startup. So that was the first foray into startups. And so then we had our family and we made a deal You'll love this, clara. So I was working, he was working, and so we made a deal that whoever would make the most money in one year, the other one would stay home and raise the kids. You know, because I believe in equality, and so does my husband.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Actually, he was Indian, he is one of six and he has four sisters, and his father in India decided he would never take a dowry. In fact, the dowry was his daughter's education, and they're almost all PhDs. So you know, he said I'm not going to take anything from my daughter-in-law, even though it's very common even in the US Indian community. So I said you know, this is cool, so why don't we make a bet? He said, okay, so of course. But then I had to stop. At nine months. I'm sure he was like, yeah, you don't know. Okay, fine, but by that time, by the time we had met, I had already worked for a consulting house, because, you know, my dad was very traditional and girls don't go out and get jobs and get apartments back then. So I got a job at a consulting house always a workaround to every problem, clara. So my job was to consult in all over, including Texas, where I worked to help automate the grocery supply system. So it was a conversion job between IBM to Vax Simple. They had an Oracle database.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

But every month everybody, from the CEO to all of us, would put on our jeans and go in the warehouse to do inventory. And I just thought that was the silliest way you know to do inventory, because there's so much waste, fraud and abuse happens at grocery stores and people don't realize that grocery store warehouses are end-to-end, so from frozen to produce, and there is waste, fraud and abuse because it's manual inventory. But yet with the Oracle databases we could pull the register. So you knew how much you were making every night. And I thought, well, if you have that much technology in there, how hard would it be to put a scanner on there?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

So we were experimenting. So I took two two-by-fours duct, taped it upside down so it's always on because the handle and I used the UPC code which we were using to buy stock and I coded it and just for fun I thought, well, I'll do some simple math on it so you know how much do you add up to 14 items. How much are you putting in? Here's your change. Just for fun. I thought we would do this for our warehouse, and the technology was rolled out. Unfortunately, I never filed a patent on it, had I done that?

Klara Jagosova:

Yeah, so you eventually invented warehouse logistics automation for supply chain Rani.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

And I actually enrolled at Clark to all the grocery store scanners and everywhere. Now right the code. So I wrote it in four languages. I wrote it in COBOL, in BASIC, in B-Tree for the filing system and automation of the scanners and C that's a fantastic example of just you diving in and again solving a problem that you found you had yourself.

Klara Jagosova:

How do I make it easier and better? There must be a faster way to do this.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Makes you wonder if we're just lazy and so we're like solving it with tech.

Klara Jagosova:

Well, yeah, I mean, I love tech for many reasons and one. I truly believe that it allows us to solve some of the hardest challenges in the world. Yeah, I think so too. I think Jensen would for sure agree with it. Obviously, that's a premise of AI and his slogan the more you buy, the more you save, because he is the most advanced computing platform.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Now Jensen also is in Silicon Valley. I don't know him, but a friend of mine does and was one of his first investors and she said to me you know, and that's the whole thing, overnight success is usually 10 or 20 years in the making and when they were looking for revenue models, their whole thing was okay, gaming is not picking up, it's not as widely adopted as we thought, but the chips are fast, the GPUs are awesome I mean, like I said, imagery. So they actually put it all into crypto. So they were putting all their chips into the crypto mining trades on the East Coast. And then, when AI took over the crypto miners who also were still finite, because, as you can tell, there's only so much you can mine, right they actually ended up converting to be AI, then hubs. So how you could train models. That is what the conversion was. And the next thing, you know it's a trillion dollar company.

Klara Jagosova:

Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's fantastic what he has done and built and continue to build, obviously, and Ashley so are you. So back to the warehouse automation invention. That seems like was it one of your first that you didn't patented back then, like was it one of your first that you didn't patent it back then. But I know you now have was it over 20 patents related to data technology and AI. So there was perhaps a learning. I was like why haven't I done this? What?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

was the journey from there. From there, like I said, focused on my social life well, my private life a little bit, primarily. If my mom and dad's begging, okay, it's time. And sometimes I think we need our parents encouraging for that, because it is scary to come out of something you are used to doing and, whether that's work or it's whatever, you know, it is scary to all of a sudden have another life in your life. And you know this. I just thought I'd have a dog. A German shepherd would be forever, yes. But instead I met this wonderful man and we have three children.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

So my husband a side note has over 350 patents. So when you talk impressive, he is impressive. He actually is the father of the one inch hard drive which made Apple what it is today. But what's interesting is and the reason I mentioned that is that during the process he was going to a conference. He's a PhD. He often gave lots of lectures and conferences and we had made a pact that he would only go for as long as was needed None of these extra weekend trips, you know, and extra days to acclimate. So he was going up to the city in San Francisco to give a lecture, and it was a Sunday night and he was leaving, it was evening and he was driving up and he was pulled over and he got a ticket because the tag on his license had fallen off you know, the validation tag had fallen off and so he got to fix a ticket. Then he, when Don, did his conference.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Well, a month later he's on the East Coast and he calls me and says hey, a month ago I got a ticket, can you go in my car? I think I threw it like on the side, can you take care of it? And I said, oh my gosh, you know, pick up preschool, drop off. But I called San Francisco County and I said, hey, I'm so sorry, my husband got this ticket. We need to pay it today. She goes yeah, yeah, no problem, just come up here and pay it. And I thought, wait what? And she goes yeah, yeah, honey, just come on up. I said, look, I've got three kids by the time I pick them up from preschool and school and drive up to the city, which is an hour plus drive, and then park and then get them all in a stroller and then get to you to make this $10 payment. It's going to be, it's a production for me and that you know, I don't know who could watch the kids because my husband's out of town and I'm explaining the facts to her. And she was, yeah, sure, just come on up.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

So then I called him back and I yelled at him and called this woman back who was so kind, and I said, okay, I've got this problem. What can we do to solve it? So then I went through, because I am a software programmer, and I said, okay, what if I go to back? Then we had Western Union. So what if I go to Western Union and wire you the money? She said, sure, but it'll get here tomorrow. Like, okay, what if I go to my bank and wire you the money? And she's like, sure, it'll get here in two days. And I'm like I said, okay, what if I gave you my credit card number and you ran it? And she's like, no, we physically need to have it here. I said, okay, what if you run it and I pay you $20? Like, honey, you're bribing a government official. I'm like, oh, that's my point, that's my point.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

So, as I went through all these challenges that we could not solve, I then called back my husband. I was just so angry. I then called back my husband. I was just so angry. I said, look, I know I could write the code to solve this problem. And I think just to get off the phone with me he's like you know, why don't you write it up? Write up a schedule, write up a model, write up the process on how you would do this and we'll patent it. And then you know, someday later you can write it. I'm like, okay. So then I put my head down as now you know this about me and for two months nobody saw me and I wrote the patent for mobile payments Filed. It started to get a company on it raised money.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

The US government asked me to actually go to Nagasaki, japan, and talk at a conference there about what e-commerce could do for Nagasaki. Oh my God, clara, I mean we could have a whole episode on this. So I get to Nagasaki with the US delegation. There's a press conference and they said you know it's a sleepy conference. A couple of faculty members from the university will come, some of the local press, no big deal. So I'm sitting on this table. They've got maybe 50 chairs in this room. Everybody will get one or two questions and if there's no questions for you, our team will step up and we'll ask you the question Just to make sure everybody's participating.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

So by this time we've had one day of conference in the booth and I thought, guy, you know all our material is in English. So I went to the KFC and I said can you translate this for me? Do you speak Japanese and English? And they're like yeah, and I'm like can you translate this for me? So this guy wrote down exactly underneath my English what is said in Japanese. I had a whole bunch printed off, went back to the booth and my position was very simple. Even today, which is e-commerce, will change the world. And I said if there is a bill due at midnight, you can make it at 1155 pm. It'll be instant. It's a cost saving for any entity that uses it. It's a benefit to you and the bank cannot make money on the float because they can just lock up the funds in your account while a credit has been issued, if you will. The funds do not have to distribute for almost two days, 48 hours so they can make money on the float. It's a win-win for everybody and it's free.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

And at the press conference now next day, the room was full. I was the only person to ask a question and one of the members from the university literally stood up and said you will single-handedly destroy the Japanese culture if we do what you're saying. So I call my husband I don't know what to do or say and he's like what are you saying? I said watch the news. So that was quite interesting. So from there came back, y2k hit, unfortunately, and the crash. While we were able to get credit with Wells Fargo, we had relationships built. We couldn't continue, so we gave back to investors their money.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

The patent went dormant. The reason I mentioned that is because in it I had also put down a secure block, I had put down bio crystals, I had put down all these ways you could secure not only data but how payments could be made, and started another company, like I said, with big data. And then this patent emerged 10 years later. We'd all forgotten about it. We had literally forgotten about it. It had other patents I was focused on and technologies. And then in 2009, this emerged and it was, ironically, a submarine patent. The world attacked it again because mobile payments were very ubiquitous to how we do world. But in 2015, a bunch of banks got together because it. Literally, it was worth a ridiculous amount. But they were like, well, no, this is for the public domain, this is for the public good. They finally took it out, but it was by this time it had been in for a long time.

Klara Jagosova:

I'm curious why did the Japanese say it would destroy their culture? Is it because it was everything so personal? They didn't see the electronic? Or what was the reason behind?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

it. So what was explained? So the way I said is I used again for me it was a ticket. So I said like a utility bill, water bill, electric bill.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

So in Japan back then what they used to do is a man from the electric company would come by your house. He would knock on the door. The wife would open the door, he would give her a ticket and he would leave. He would come back at a short time later. She would give him back the ticket and the amount that was on the ticket in cash. He would then take that ticket along with all the other tickets that he had collected.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

He would go to the utility company, he would take out his portion and he would give it to the clerk. The clerk would then take out his portion and then he would give it to the people who actually make the payments. The payments would then happen manually and the whole process started a month later. The point was, I would be removing those two jobs and you don't have to have as many clerks, because I was saying you can have one person do the job of 10. They're like so we can get rid of 10 clerks, all the middlemen, all the collectors, and that was for everything that was for utility, all utilities, so water, electric telephone. Everybody had their own group of people that did this.

Klara Jagosova:

What year was this? And it is so interesting because you can literally draw parallels to what people are afraid of now. With AI, right, everybody's saying it's going to replace jobs, for example. We're not going to need people like the Uber drivers.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

This was in 2000, 2000, 2001. I don't think AI will replace people. I think AI allows you to do more in a shorter time. And I've used AI. I use Gemini, I use Claw Anthropic, I use the ChatGPT. I've played with Minstrel a little bit. They have a long way to go. It allows you to do more.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

But I mean certainly nobody can sit down and say, develop a neural net-based software system for me If you don't know what the architectures would look like, if you don't know what the components need to do, if you don't know how it should be structured, what are the key lines of code that you need, if you can't just quickly read it and fix it, quickly read it and fix it, it won't do that for you. It will do for you. Write me a simple website for my tennis program or my tennis class or my cooking class Very generic instructions. But what I do see is, for example, prompt engineering is a thing now right, and that's just how to ask questions succinctly. But what I often say to people when they ask me this is look, I've been hearing this my entire career. The next evolution of tech will replace the people, and it doesn't. But what we are doing is generating software programmers who actually cannot code. All they do is ask questions.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Yes, somebody like me who can code in how many languages? Everything from Fortran to Python now, and React, COBOL, BASIC, all the other languages that exist. You know all the different databases that exist. I've used them and I've coded with them. I know we're using FFmpeg with how to really sync the voice and the audio together. I know what language is being done. I could fix the code.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

How many other people today which are software developers can actually tell you that they know how to write raw basic code? And that's going to be less and less. So I don't know if that's going to be a dying breed or AI will replace it. I don't think so. I think that for me, I use it and my team uses it to do code reviews. It's awesome to be able to say here's 3,000 lines of code, Somehow, there's a missing comma somewhere or a semicolon. Tell me where it is and it can do that for you.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

But the other problem is security. Problem is security. Do I really want to put my proprietary code into a Anthropic or a ChatGPT or Gemini? And the answer is no, I don't. I don't want to put my health records into it and say tell me what I think is wrong.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

However, I would be very comfortable putting all of that information in a closed network that I knew nobody else could see, and I see this happening. I see it becoming more of an even personalized therapist, but it's a one-on-one Sure. You have this baseline information Everything about psychotherapy or family therapy that you could put in into a database that is now used to train a model. Perfect. It's like everything else I've said. It's like buying a car with only one gallon in it. Great, At least you have a car, You've got the basics, You've got a gallon gets you going and then after that you put your own right, and that's where I see a great cloud solution. You know, creating a software-based neural network is not easy. I've been working on this really on and off for about a year with this team and we've made headway, and a lot of it is the genesis of Ericsson and the Snapcode, and you know Ericsson did put in almost a million, so it's kind of a shame that we don't continue it and run with it and now raise more money.

Klara Jagosova:

Yeah, so there are so many angles we can dive into, but obviously the AI is at the intersection now of all your focus and what you do. You're writing a book about it, so maybe let's just continue to dive straight in. So Great Cloud AI. What was the premise, or even starting the company? It seems like, again just following up on what you had mentioned before, you saw this problem for yourself that nobody else was solving. How do you now apply it to some of the client challenges and what do you see as? Maybe just help listeners explain the key focus?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Two things happened that were pivotal and critical. First, I was at Ericsson. We had a lot of super sensitive data on people that we couldn't even or explain the key focus. Two things happened that were pivotal and critical. First, I was at Ericsson. We had a lot of super sensitive data on people that we couldn't even share with providers either Verizon, t-mobile Nobody had the base layer data. But what do you do with it? That was the initial problem. If you will, it's like an apple, very basic.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

My mom actually got very sick and she passed, and as I was standing talking to the doctors, I was asking how did you approach her case management? What did you do? Because technically, you are a database. You are the repository of all this information and experiences that you have had and maybe your colleagues have had, but you are the repository of that. So how did you develop this strategy to help her? And I said, how do you approach the next person who is like her? I mean, what did you learn from here that you can use there? And I was trying to just really make peace with everything that had happened and just understand why certain things had happened and certain things they had used for her case management.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

So, as she was explaining to me, I realized that it's a very problematic solution. It's very it's. They're scientists, they just they're exploratory. They're like they're no different in some ways than I am with the software system and developing it, you know. Oh well, this is not working. Maybe if I change the color will that look more appeasing. Right, they're not doing anything different, but the human body is so complex that there's so many random variables. So look at all the code now I'm writing. You know it's complex, random variables, no one solution for any one person. However, the common is it's a human body with blood and the same organs, different sizes, all in the same place. Many commonalities, but the variables are so exponentially huge that you can try and err and when a solution that might work for one doesn't work for somebody else. So you're really rolling the dice in some ways on the luck of the training school of the doctor, of the doctor, of the training mechanisms and the experiences they've had.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

And I asked her what if there was a software? And so what if there was? You know a way for you to type in her metrics? And by this I mean, like her, basics, you know woman, age, ethnicity, overall health. I mean you know what, if there was, you could type, you could get all this data in a system and it gave you impossible ways to approach her issues. I'm just talking about speeding it up, right, how would this help? And he goes yeah, we could, but you know, we're limited to what we have here in this closed hospital care and I thought, okay, that's fair.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

So when I went back, I said to Erickson, I said why don't we look at healthcare? And we were talking to Baylor Hospital of Breast Cancer. I said, okay, that's a very limited group. Women Well, actually not men have it too, but a specific body part and there's a lot of imagery out there of people trying to diagnose it. But there wasn't a solution out there and there still is not where anybody can use it. There isn't something that just for doctors Right now we're limited to every hospital. The same thing with banks we're limited to every hospital. The same thing with banks. We're limited to each like it's city bank california, it's not city bank united states or city bank global.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

So the idea was okay, if we are confined by law and maybe proprietary and and society to have already closed data loops, wouldn't it behoove us to try to solve this faster. So in the case of this thing with my mom, because I'm intimate with that knowledge what if I could create a model that uses all public information, so everything from the Mayo, from the CDC, from all the other public availability? Train it and now again the car with a one gallon of gas. Now I'm giving it to you. What if now you take all your cases and you train now to further refine the data? So, using federated learning, we can refine the data and we can move forward. It's exorbitantly expensive.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

So my solution, that we have patented, was to break it up into nodes. So every computer which is always hardwired in a hospital or a bank, by the way, even laptops, I mean, they're in a closed network. So I said, why don't we turn each of them into a training device? Everybody has CPU, gpu. We could put a load balancer in there. We could use it when you're not working. So from, let's just say, six o'clock till six in the morning, that's 12 hours of compute power that we could use. Let's do that. We can use chunking so we can chunk up the data, and into bite-sized pieces. We can use chaining so we can chain it up the stream, and then, if you will a reverse pyramid, you know, get it up many nodes to a single node and then each node has a unique web3 blockchain identifier on it. So we know the validity and the metrics that were used and we move forward and it's actually worked out so far in trial pretty good. You know it needs more work, as with everything it needs it needs gas.

Klara Jagosova:

Yeah, I mean, I can imagine this work. It will never be sort of done. There's always going to be a way to make it more accurate and iterate and chunk and slice the data in a different way, especially in this use case. Right, I always compare it to, at least for me, creating PowerPoint pages or creating a deck. I created one yesterday. I look at it half an hour later and there are still improvements. Like there's always a way you can make something better, clearer, visual, appealing, and I think it's a simple way to say that applies to all technology. There's always a way to probably evolve, write the code more elegantly, but it's just such a brilliant idea.

Klara Jagosova:

So, just to summarize, kind of, what are you doing now? You're eventually using all the at least closed loop technology available in that setting. In this specific example, it can be a hospital. I don't know if you know the statistics, but I can imagine there are several times, especially in weird hours, where a lot of the compute power is not being utilized in a hospital, right, I don't know, is it maybe up to 50% that there's shifts, so there might be computers when people go in and out of the office that nobody's doing really anything with it, and so you're using that compute power available in the closed loop setting, with privacy and security pretty much around it, to create the smarter model in a way that eventually doesn't cost billions of dollars for a hospital, or any entity for that matter, to use.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Exactly. Not only that, I mean. All you have to do is leave your computer on, Don't even have to do anything else. Our orchestrators do everything and you know it's built in a really sophisticated, intuitive way. You know all you have to do is turn it on, and my vision was I want to be able to do everything in three clicks, which is upload your model, identify a data source and go.

Klara Jagosova:

I love that and can you share a little bit more? You mentioned the trial and it's going pretty well. Obviously I don't want to go into privacy, but kind of what are you finding now or anything you can share around, how it's working and the impact.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

When I say it's going well. It's a smaller trial, it's only 25 nodes right now, but we're building it for more. I mean, you can imagine, gosh Cara, I was thinking about this and just to go off topic for a sec can you imagine if, on the space shuttle, you could do a model right there using all the compute power in a space shuttle? It's a closed loop, right. Look at military I mean military bases in the sense of healthcare, you know. Look at all our healthcare base, our hospitals, and not just the US military, but any military or anywhere. You have a closed-loop system that you need to further refine and it's super secure data.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

I think the first big thing is it's not just generic information. That does not help. If you're going to do public source information, then any model will do. Any chatbots there's so many chatbots out there now that say just upload your data into this chatbot and you can refine it have the basics of a chatbot. That's great. Except that even chatbots you can get them to, you know, admit that. Yeah, sure, maybe you should put a camera in the bathroom if you want to be secure about your premises. But you know those are generic, right, that's just generic.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

I'm talking about something sophisticated that you need that are maybe even mission critical to what you're doing, whether it is security and how do we encrypt things, or whether it's even in-house training and you want to train somebody to do something specific, but this is proprietary knowledge and so you don't want to have it in that. I find all too often, while every company says don't use the LLMs to build a PowerPoint even but it's so easy and so fast, now, right, you can say build me a PowerPoint how to develop a neural network for super secure data and you know what It'll do that. But is it right, as my husband says, because he's been testing it for material science and he's a semiconductor guy, he says, yeah, it's kind of like a undergraduate. You know it's not quite even a master's level candidate and I have to snap, but I'm like you are such a snob.

Klara Jagosova:

I mean that goes into a little bit the hallucination, right. So I mean everybody talks about that, let's dive into it, and I have many different views actually on it that I've gone back and forth because I totally agree with hallucination. I struggle with it myself, even when I use some of these GPT models you name them, I think I've tried them all. At the same time I also ponder we humans hallucinate too. There's a human bias that there's been.

Klara Jagosova:

Everybody who's lived the corporate world have gone through the human bias, and whether we can truly remove it or not, that's a question I'm still pondering about, because we all have created a view in our mind of the world and our life and how things may or may not be through our own experiences. And I know I'm biased in some ways. Like there are specific things that I have lived through and when A or B happens I get triggered and I know where the triggers come from. I've learned to limit them a little bit and learn how to step away and control them. But I know exactly there's few triggers when I am in those situations. They're very dangerous for me and I need to step away. So I feel to that sense AI again, and even models are created by humans. Absolutely, they're trained on data that are produced by humans, and the data again. The cleanness of data is another topic. I know it's a broad question, I guess, whichever way, Rani, you want to take it, how do you look at this complex world of data analytics, hallucinations between AIs, humans?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

I think you've hit it spot on. It's a human factor and we can never remove the human factor. We really can't. There was a study done by a Princeton professor. He used the data from Amazon. So Amazon had a metric. They said, when we hire, we want to have the best winning person. And so they profiled this individual would be Turned out it was a white man, age 30 to 40. And the Princeton professor showed the bias. That is because it's like, okay, how many do we interview? We interview X amount of people. How many resumes do we get?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Now, all companies I don't know if you know this stop at 3,000 resumes. At 3,000 resumes they shut it off. No human can review 3,000 resumes, so they use a bot to review based on the keywords that the hiring manager has asked. Well, if you don't use the right word, you might be the ideal candidate for the job, but it's gone. So then from there it goes down to 10. From 10, they interview five. From five they hire the one, the one. Then if it's moved up the ranks and it's gotten great reviews, that was the profile. So that's what they wanted to hire. So it came out white male, 40 to 50.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

So what happens now in our world. Well, we have gone to relationships. We've said, hey, I believe I can do this role. I may not have all the keywords, so I'll call my friend Clara. I'm like, hey, clara, you're at HSEC, you know, I think I'd be great for this. You're like, yeah, maybe you would Let me see. Oh, yeah, no, you're right, you would be. So then you push up to the hiring manager and say, hey, I think my friend Ronnie would be great for this job. The hiring manager interviews me and maybe they hire me, maybe they don't, but we are trying to circumvent the AI, if you will right, through human relationships.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

So data is biased, clearly, especially how you weight it, for sure. But the bigger question is then are we forcing ourselves to change? Are we saying, hey, look, there's biases? We're showing it the same thing with the Google picture, with you know, the identification, another huge study. If there's so much bias in data, that means there's bias in leadership, that means there's bias in the teams, there's bias in the company culture, and I think that's what needs to be addressed.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

So I'm also part of the committee of 200. It's called c200.org and that is 450 women, global women, in the C-suite. I was invited to join it when I had my last startup. You have to have rigorous methods and you have to be like 10 pages of thing. I'm also a co-head of their technology and innovation chair and so we help advise or just share information with all the other C-suite members who are CEOs of very large companies actually, on the latest emergence of trends of technology. And my big thing is again this bias in data, bias in their companies, bias in their company cultures that they have to look out for and understanding that they can't hire enough HR people to go through 3,000 resumes. So maybe we need to change our thinking and how we hire. Having the follow the sun mechanism that Oracle started, which is, you know, you have it here, then it goes, the development goes to India or China or somewhere, then it comes back. Follow the sun, right, maybe that works, but how well does all this stuff work? You know we need to look at the bias in our own cultures and I think that's very, very important. With hallucinations, it can be solved.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

The current LLMs are only. They're not analytical. They're designed to give you an answer. If I say I am a Sagittarius, tell me my horoscope today. It'll tell me my horoscope today. That is what I've asked it to do. Give me a recipe how to make the best peach pie. It'll give me that. If I say which peaches are the best, it can probably give me that. But if I get more in the analytical it gets very difficult and until we break that it's going to be hard.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Now we mentioned NVIDIA, and I know they have NEMO, which is built on Minstrel, as their bot. But the problem is how much of our data do we really want? So when my book gets published, am I going to want all these LLMs to be trained on this knowledge? Or am I going to say look, these are my thoughts, right or wrong, they're my thoughts. And do I want you to say give me in Ronnie's voice, do this? I don't.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

But hallucinations can be solved. It's a matter of ranking and weighting the words, for sure, but it's also the conscious of having observability in the bias of the data. It all starts with data, and all data is messy. It's got fat fingers. It's Navigator was acquired for the mapping algorithms of cleaning our data. It was really nothing else. It's the ability to look at the data and sanitize it, clean it and then put it in a labeled manner, and those are huge companies today that do nothing but just that because it's so complex of a system. But there's a lot of growth. I see a lot of industry coming up. I see a lot of changes coming up in how we think.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

I would like to believe that these very weighted questions that you have asked will help society evolve and change. I really hope so. I hope that the gender bias that exists today will erode, but I don't think so. I think it's too ingrained into us as humans. Maybe another hundred years, but it's not going to happen before that.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

We're having a hard enough time having women in leadership hold their positions. You know, I have a friend and I won't mention the names of these companies because they are in the news every day. There's a thinking among the hedge funds and some of the other leaderships that they only invite a woman in to be CEO because it's going to fail and they want to blame her. They give her two years to do something and then it's sad. You know, personally speaking, I will say to you that women are brought in as a warming. You know the role. You're warming it up for a guy to come in. You're creating a foundation, creating an outline, creating a structure that the role will do.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

You've done all the heavy lifting, you've mapped it out. You know you've carved out what you need to carve out. You've laid in a plan, a five-year plan, which everybody asks us. You know that what's a five-year plan. You've carved it out, you've put the infrastructure in place for that plan, you've built the relationships for that plan. And then you know, a lot of times they're like, hey, thanks, because the same problem that is in the venture community is also in the enterprise community, in the corporate cultures, which is, you trust the person across the table from them If they don't always look like you. It's very hard. If they're coming as a reference from somebody who is across the table from you that you trust, it's about 50% in the door but it's not 100% in the door and that's hard.

Klara Jagosova:

Yeah, I mean, the trust is a big aspect in the corporate world for sure, and I think it's even more important as you go up. You know a lot about it, more so than me, but I do want to dive a little bit. Maybe we'll just go a sequence into the women topic and women leadership, because I know you to dive a little bit. Maybe we'll just go a sequence into the women topic and women leadership, because I know you're really passionate about it. I have observed you being the cheerleader, even at Ericsson, sometimes perhaps too voiceful for some of the cultures which I loved and appreciate. Obviously, I'm right behind you, rani. Thank you for doing the heavy lifting and courageous work.

Klara Jagosova:

But going through the different cultures, even myself recently, from Ericsson to Apple, now Accenture, that obviously has Julie as the power women, probably the closest percentage-wise men to women ratio when it comes to leadership. I think its latest numbers I saw was like 49 to 51%. So really making an effort, closing the gap. And now coming back to HDAC, full loop, my view is that leadership is not about the sex. There can be amazing leaders that are men and amazing leaders that are women, and I have to admit myself I think I had a little bit of a statistical bias perhaps in the past. I was just telling somebody actually this morning, throughout my career of 15 plus years I only had one female manager in my whole life.

Klara Jagosova:

All of the managers I've had have been men and through that you can imagine you kind of blame. Oh, you know, men are this way or that way, but I think it's a it's a rule of statistics too. Like we've lived around, especially in the technology just seems to be more of a man dominated world which you know you can make assumptions of, why there's there's like a whole sort of thing going back down through. How do you inspire kids even early in the age to be part of STEM and be part of technology? But yeah, let me just pause there. Turn it back to you. What is your view on it? Closing the gap or inspiring more women to continue to be courageous, step up, have the leadership, no matter what the word on the street is?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Again, spot on and brilliant question. So when I was on the board of trustees of the University of California it's a 10-year span I served my 10 years, made as many changes as I could, but there was a study done that said why do women engineers drop out, or women overall, after sophomore year? They drop out of their engineering classes or math classes, any science classes actually, and the results were that universities inherently have graduate students teaching some of these classes and the graduate students are foreign-born, most of them were foreign-born and they have very little patience for our education system and how some of these women would approach a question. Sorry, inherently it was cultural, so they are merit-based people. They're here graduate students, foreign-born, and their culture and perception of women is very different than what they were seeing in front of them. And it was very shocking for me that they dropped out If they had a foreign-born graduate student teaching their undergraduate class. They never went further. That was it. That was the last science class they took and that was very sad and shocking. So of course, my husband being the benefit of that, I asked him. I said you taught these classes. What did you do? And you know, and along all his friends, I'm like, hey, when you guys all taught these women that would come in, what did you do? Did you take time? Did you give patience? Did you not make them feel like that was a dumb question? When they were asking, I said certainly I was one of those women. To go back to the first thing you said you're right, I also can profile right away. I know when I go in for an interview whether I'm going to get hired or not. Just by the person in the first five seconds of that screen coming on, or that me sitting down in a meeting. I already know there's a profile of people that will hire somebody like me and there's a profile of people that will not. And it is not always gender, but it is there. So that was an interesting study. It made us change a lot of things for the University of California for the good. So now undergraduate classes are taught by faculty and then it isn't until you get to your junior and senior year that you know we let any of the graduate students really come in and teach classes. That's important.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

I think women are our hardest critics for ourselves and that's not fair. I think the idea of a sisterhood is illusionary at times. There's no such things. You know you mentioned your bosses were always men. But I have found, especially in the venture community, when I have gone for venture you know, rounds and such men can play golf. Then they go into the men's room and they continue in the men's locker room. They continue their conversations and I'm locked outside, and that is a great analogy as to where the world needs to go.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

It has been proven that women who are in leadership roles help lift the bottom line of companies for many ways. It's just the way we are also wired. But I think for women to be lifted up you need a little bit of that glass ceiling to be cracked even further. I think one or two token and I call them token there's too much weight on their shoulders. You know, all of a sudden you have all this responsibility like hey, look, we lifted you up to be head of this country or we did this. There's a lot of expectations there, and that's what I mean by women in the C-suite.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

And I was talking to you about my friend. She was a VP of a very large company here and wanted to be CEO desperately because she felt she had the qualifications and the experience. And she did. But she made the strategic jump. She went from SVP here to a VP. She went from SVP here to a VP, to a SVP, to a CEO role, got crushed and started her own company after seven years.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Because that should not be the default. It should be that the value, that, okay, your approach is different, but it doesn't have to be bad, and we should not continue our conversations into the men's locker rooms or the rooms where women are excluded. So that comes down to as society, do we ask too much, or are we really asking other cultures to rise up to let that happen? Are we asking for a cultural change at the atomic level, or subatomic level, if you will? You know, at such a nuanced level that it's not possible, right?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

You look at India. That has the largest workforce under 30. Most of the educated women. Women have a higher illiteracy rate in certain states than men do in India, and that is because it is cultural. But given an opportunity, women do much better than men in the classes.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

But yet when they come on, there's that perception that, oh, you will stay home and have family, and so that brings you to a better question of health care and child care. And you know what are we doing to support these women? I mean, there was a time, before Jack Welch was at GEE, where corporate cultures did have the worker as a central figure of the things that Silicon Valley was so successful at, everything they could do to help employees stay at the office and work. It was cheaper for us than letting you go out for lunch for an hour. Even so, supply lunch If you don't have to leave to pick up your child at school. Let's have daycare in-house, let's have tutoring in-house, so you don't have to worry, you can focus on your job that we have hired you for. Until some of those benefits. If you will come back into play, it'll be very hard, but of course, yes, it does cut into the bottom line.

Klara Jagosova:

But again, it's the long game and not everybody thinks of the long game and I think you really should. I love that. What comes to mind is a little bit of the balance, and I don't know if that's the best word, but you can't be a leader and still have the expectations, I think, to be primary person, to bring up the family, to take care of the household, kind of do everything right. So some of the really amazing leaders that come to our mind have been really great in finding partners that take on some of that load or share it equally to kind of help support them in their career growth.

Klara Jagosova:

Also had one conversation Abby Davison, who actually wrote a book about this, and on a previous podcast we talked quite a bit about that perception, even as women and you mentioned like we sometimes are hardest judge and she navigated that through even her role in organization in Gap Inc. And how might some of the women even there that was still quite female heavy leadership had challenges kind of with that doing the raising family and having successful careers. And how do you feel that you're doing both things equally right, I guess, or sort of balanced I don't know if equally right, if you can ever do it right, but sort of to, in a loose term, any view on that, because I do think it also feels really lonely when you get up top and you have a view in Rani like any sort of tips or maybe even as women, could implement ourselves when it comes to losing some of that judgment about how we are doing in our own lives.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

You have to remember you can't have it all. It's a piece I made a long time ago, but I can have it at that moment. We have three children, as I mentioned, and my husband and I decided that he would do the breakfast. So if he made breakfast, we packed lunches together and then we dropped off the kids at school. We actually put them in private school because our public school system is a little broken in the United States In Minnesota even, it was a better, but that was an older time. We had nurses, we had librarians in the schools. Hot lunch was literally a hot lunch.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

The accommodations I made certainly not everybody can afford to make either. I have to preface that you know if you can afford a charter school or private school, you should, because you don't have to worry about certain things in an education system. Plus, they had had daycare afterwards so they could stay there and they called it study hall, which literally meant they could get their homework done and they had a snack. So we picked them up at 6. We both took turns cooking dinner and then we had family time and then, when they went to see, we worked until about 11. And we started again the next day. Now, as the kids got older, it got harder. Our and then started again the next day. Now, as the kids got older, it got harder. Our careers were climbing, so my mom moved in with us to help buffer some of that. It does not change the fact that you have to be there for your kids. You know, my husband and I we still laugh that when they had a, you know, halloween parade or whatever, we would literally put it in our calendar and we would block out the time to be there for that, because it doesn't matter if you're there for some of the bigger stuff, if you're not there for the little stuff and that's what they remember is that feeling of embarrassment. You know, as I said, I'm a child of an immigrant and my parents were never there and I know that feeling and I didn't want my kids to have that feeling. So it's remembering that it's also great having a boss. Unfortunately, all the men bosses.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

I had never understood why I would have to take off time for this. So I just started blocking it as doctor visits, because you can't question it Dentist visit, doctor visit, physical therapist visit. But my boss I was honest with. I would tell him like, look, my child's got a pumpkin thing and you know I got to go. Or they've got a Halloween parade or they've got you know Easter parade or whatever. I would always be honest with my boss but in the calendar, where everybody else couldn't look, it was not blocked as personal time, it was blocked as a doctor or some visit. So you know, you have to have that relationship with your boss. I think is important. Most people are very supportive now, and I did this at Airbnb and I did this at Ericsson, which is look, get your work done. I don't care if you work regular hours or not, you just have to get the work done. And as long as nothing slipped, it was cool if you took four hours to do versus eight hours, because everybody works differently.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

From a woman's perspective right now, coming into the age, I would say to you don't buy into the notion that you can push off certain biological tasks, because that's not factual. Like I said, our biologies are different. Some people sure can choose to have children later, some people cannot. So if that's a priority in your life, share it with your boss and tell them you're going to be doing it, that's it. But then you have to figure out the daycare and that's a priority in your life. Share it with your boss and tell them you're going to be doing it, that's it. But then you have to figure out the daycare and that's where I think corporations have to step in as part of the success of this individual. Do share the task, don't sacrifice that. I took off five years. It's cost me 15 years to get back to where I should have been, but it's a choice I made. I'm happy with my choice.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

My kids had to understand that there were evenings that you know I had work events that I had to go to, or you know they came with me. I mean, we had a lot of functions at our home that we had to host because it was my turn to host, so we did. It afforded them an opportunity also to walk into any world and have conversations at any level. So a friend of mine, dan Gordon, who is CEO of Gordon Beerspear, we met and you know you're chatting like this, and I have three kids. Yeah, he has three kids, and we're like what do you do for New Year's?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

I said I have three kids, we do nothing for New Year's. And so we decided when his youngest was five no, sorry, his youngest was younger than five. We decided that every year on New Year's Eve we would host each other's families. So one year their home, one year our home. We would cook dinner, we would play games, and we did that for years, for years and years until the kids our youngest ones were in high school. Now you know it's ironic that the three kids have followed almost the same career trajectories. You know where? Both our youngest are attorneys, both our middle ones were in education, they're public school teachers, and both our eldest kids are in the corporate culture.

Klara Jagosova:

So I love diving into these courageous topics with you because I know you are courageous and one of the other topics I saw recently on your LinkedIn is actually from your 99-year-old uncle, who also posted a study that's related to aging and how, as we age, we actually continue to grow smarter in many ways through reflection and meaning and purpose, and continue to develop reasoning, obviously if we continue to invest our time in the problem solving.

Klara Jagosova:

So I saw that post and I know several people who are actually struggling with that, and that's also the intersection of now AI. Some people are stating that, oh, now, if we have the young kids and we have AI, you know, will we need to start retiring sooner? Or you know what might be happening, although there's still the gap when it comes to the amount of kids that are being born. So I think overall in the world we still have a gap when it comes to kind of the workforce overall. So perhaps AI is a natural contributor to that productivity. But I want to throw this topic in because I know many people maybe would not have the courage to talk about it. You do what's your view.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

His name is Dr Sid Soti. He's in Halifax, nova Scotia. His grandson is a Formula One driver Can you imagine that? But look at this 99 and he sends me this thing. You know about how God changes your mind Because we believe, and it's false that AI will replace theology or replace the concept of a divine being, and that's absolutely false.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

What I took out of his thing and I read the paper that this was based on I haven't read the book yet. It goes back to the faith. I believe you need to have faith in something, in theology. In this paper he cites the Judean culture right where they value the elders. And that's what I was saying here that at my age and like I said, I mean my children are adults and married, my children are adults and Mary, I'm still learning. If I can write a book at my age, and so my book is going to be called Constitutional Democracy in the Algorithmic Age. If I can write that, doesn't it behoove us to put our knowledge down so other people can take two sentences out of it and build something fabulous? Or what happened to the 16, 70-year-olds and even 80-year-olds, you know, just because our machines break down, and that I mean my hearing or my eyesight or my knees, or I don't hit as hard as I used to, you know, because my shoulders just because the machine wears down doesn't mean the CPU GPU wears down. In fact, it retains it. It's all retained forever and it compounds it. It's doing exactly what you're saying with hallucinations. The more knowledge I get, the finer my ideas formulate and they're articulating much more clearly.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Now, you know. I'll give you an example. So we have a grandson and my daughter was saying to me he has a diaper rash. It's a really bad diaper rash and my son-in-law has mentioned that he had a diaper rash for like two, three weeks and my instant thing was oh, have you been feeding him cantaloupe or peaches? And he's like peaches. I said, ah well, his mom would get diaper rashes from having cantaloupe and peaches, like instantly. There you go. So there's the data. Now they could have continued or they could have just made that passing comment and the wisdom or the knowledge that I've had could be passed on. And now the best cure for that is another whole thing, but you know, that's there.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

The other thing people have to remember, that I think is really important, and it's really important to emphasize Clara is all these apps. Everything is based on human knowledge, everything is human knowledge. If you're looking at a parenting app, it is based on aggregate human knowledge, based on a bunch of moms like this. You know what can give for the data that I have, which is my three kids. This would be actual data, would give you that knowledge, and you need to remember and take that with the intent that it's given to you. This is advice.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

60 and 70-year-olds can look back and say, no, maybe you're right, but we're learning because we have the time. We're building on a career that is already done. We don't have those stresses anymore. You know, we don't have to worry about making the plays. We don't have to worry about if I want to work 12-hour days, I can work 12-hour days. We have those freedoms.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

The question is can society accept that? Can you have somebody come in? And you know, in India the forced retirement is 55. Now, that's a different culture. They have a massive 100 plus million people that are under 30. I get it, but yet even there, like I mentioned with Japan, there's a mandatory thing, but yet you can't. I have a neighbor who is a nuclear scientist, but well, close by, he's 89, and they keep asking him to come back because nobody can do the job based on the experience that he has and he's 89 years old. So if you're given an opportunity, what you will get is an individual who has got decades of knowledge and experience, who can handle very complex tasks easily. If you will. If you're worried about the salary because you don't want to pay them these salaries that you think that this person should make, offer them something. Offer them something that works.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

A lot of times my colleagues and I, or my cohort, we just want to work because we're not done yet. Yes, we would like to be paid what we're worth, but there's always creative ways to hire people. You can give options. You can do other things. You can do things that impact your bottom line, or you can bring them in to shadow and train somebody who's just coming up just from nothing else in societal good and ethical development. And, like I said, I learned a program back when you would mount a tape. You know, in COBOL you have to mount the tape, run the code, then dismount it. These kids don't even understand what that means. So imagine having to program something raw. That's why these scientists are valuable, the people who understand how to code and can code devices. They're the ones who are valuable. Prompt engineering is great. That's just asking smart questions. Any 60, 70, 80-year-old can be a prompt engineer in my world because they know how to ask questions.

Klara Jagosova:

Yes, yeah, I love that. Obviously I'm biased towards that because I always think my grandparents were the best thing that ever happened to me when I was a kid, like growing up Just even with their passion and patience, like there's both of these things like inspiring your passion and giving you the freedom to sort of do things you want and having the right patience with you when I was doing my homework and kind of helping me solve through the problems Exactly when I was doing my homework and kind of helping me solve through the problems Exactly. And I hope one day I will be as smart as my grandma was and I actually just see it also like my mom and she's like fantastic human, just everything she had gone through in her life. I one day hope I will be as courageous and brave as she is. I have just a line of strong women to look up to Impressive.

Klara Jagosova:

But I feel like something happened when my grandma passed away. My mom is continuing to switch even more into this wealth of wisdom and just very different temperament and I wonder if it's kind of what you mentioned, this lift experience as you continue to go through life and you see that full evolution and even just the history, too, of technology or the world for that matter. I think that's something that often now is being forgotten, like what can history teach us? And if you kind of track back to some of the human choices or technology choices that went good or poorly, there's a lot of lessons that we can lean on and apply to and to your point, like what are the deep questions that we should ask as we think about deploying this new technology that's coming up? That may be grounded in the learnings from deploying the past technology in the right or wrong way?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

You're absolutely right. People, I think, inherently understand when there is a shift that occurs in our society. You know, when my mom and dad both passed away, I said to my siblings I said now we're the elders. Yikes, it's time for us to grow up and be elders now and that's important. You know, we need those. Society needs those. Ai needs those. Society needs those, ai needs those.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Actually, if you want to get rid of hallucinations, you get all these seniors who have any kind of a common sense and you have them start labeling yes or no. You have them start validating because, based on everything we know, the stories we've heard. And if you haven't heard stories, ask your parents, ask your aunts and uncles, ask them questions. Because, because even some of the questions that I'm asking now I wish I'd asked back then, but I was so busy.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

What people don't realize, and if I can give you one piece of wisdom, is life is very fast. It's short but it's very fast. From the time you're zero to 20, you're just waiting to grow up, you're just waiting to do that and guess what it happens. Then it's 20 to 40. You're just building your career, you're having your family, you're setting your foundation and I'm telling you. It happens like this 40 to 60, you're like coasting. You're still getting those kids out the door or whatever. You've got a balancing act. You're still being sandwiched between parents, siblings, children, life. You're still sandwiched, but you'll hit your 60s and 70s and you're no longer sandwiched and you have nothing but time and opportunity to learn and be curious.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

But if you get blessed like it sounds like your grandparents work hard with you and your sister you are allowed to share that back because you're not in a hurry anymore. You know now you're in a hurry to share your knowledge that you've accumulated all this time. I love to read, I love to code still, there's a lot of stuff I love to do but like your grandparents, that kindness and gentleness and love and nurturing they gave you, they're forever in your heart and so are they not immortal. Is that not what immortality really means? And isn't that how we feel we should be remembered With kindness and grace, not the humans that we were? And so to me, you know, folks, if you want to be immortal, give back. That's it.

Klara Jagosova:

I love that. It beautifully ties into a few closing questions that I have. So, if you have time, but I want to insert one more in, because it's again this age of AI that you continue to shape Before we go to closing, anything else that you want to share with the listeners, the audience, about great cloud AI, the book, what are you launching, or even just things to keep top of mind as we continue to explore and navigate this new technology.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

I think what you have to realize is that we are going to become more siloed. Companies are going to start locking up their data. They're going to finally realize that it is gold and it has been gold. I'm more concerned with the vast amount of data that every government in the world has access to, whether it's still in paper or it's been digitized. At this point, it can be used for good. It can also be used not, so I think guardrails are critical to have in AI. The GDPR has sent out with their EU AI Act did a lot of great work that needs to be built up on yet, and if we can start creating maybe a world organization for AI, that would be great governance Whether it's AI governance with guardrails, you know, then you can do your sub stacks. I was a part of NIST AI here, in fact, through C200, I helped with the White House back in I think it was a Biden or maybe Obama administration helped write their AI policies some of them, but certainly moving forward.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Ai can enhance if it's done correctly. Ai can enhance, if it's done correctly, autonomous vehicles and things like that. They need AI. You cannot drive. If you can have sensors and somebody can be a second pair of eyes, why not? If we can do surgery robotic surgery across the world, because the expert happens to live in Ukraine or the United States, why not do that, share that knowledge and do the surgery? However, I don't believe that every role will be applied that way. I don't believe that's possible. Certainly, I cannot get a robot to come and do my plumbing. It would be great, but I can't, so that's never going to happen.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

With GrayCloud, hopefully our solution solves a critical thing of super sensitive data. If not us, it'll be somebody else, because you have silos now, and data silos are really bad. But if we can evolve around that, we should. We should do it, as society needs to evolve. We need to do that. There used to be the arms race, then there was a technology race, now it's an AI race. What you have to remember is NVIDIA is not the only company that has GPU and CPUs out there. Theirs are fast, very fast, but they're not the only ones, and so our solution is if you don't have millions to drop in a, what's it? Blackwell, yeah.

Klara Jagosova:

The new chip, yeah, if you don't have 10 million to drop into that. You don't have to you.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

If you don't have $10 million to drop into that, you don't have to. You can use GreyCloud and it'll manage and do the load balancing for you. And you know your computer's on anyways. Just plug it in, leave it on for or still the wars that's going on. You can take it whichever way.

Klara Jagosova:

Always curious what do you think people can be doing more of or less of as we navigate? Kind of. This seems like turbulent times that I now have been saying that I realized for several years and just is not getting any calmer. Really, maybe that's just the new reality. What's your viewer inspiration? For the listeners I would say don't get triggered from fear.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

That's the biggest thing. Fear, just it just kills your mind. Like I tell my kids, you gotta face it, you gotta walk through it, and then it becomes a nothing burger. Don't wait to have difficult conversations, because they become complicated conversations from a nothing conversation. Ai is going to be here because we're showing how easy it is to do things. Corporations are gravitating towards it because they believe they can replace a workforce with computer knowledge. What they don't realize is that for every server rack, every cloud storage company, there's super drain on power grid. So resources are going to be expended, and that includes water. Water is a resource that is going to be in short supply very fast, very soon. I remember 20 years ago telling our mayor here in San Jose that if you really want to cripple society, just kill the water grid and the electric grid. Well then you have to remember that that all these technologies we depend on depend on power, and so you can kill anything, just unplug it. Yeah.

Klara Jagosova:

That's it. Turn the grid off and we'll learn really quickly.

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Yes, yeah, you're back to pencils, so keep your knowledge. Don't stop learning about why and how these evolve.

Klara Jagosova:

I love that. It reminds me I now and then do these trips to remote places without any connectivity and I feel like they give you so much more clarity and you also realize how insignificant we are, because the mother nature is just so powerful that if you actually get yourself into the mother nature, if it gets angry at us, we're just going to be like ants rolling down. So, yeah, how do we keep it healthy to not make it angry? It should be actually our focus as well. And then with that, I know your book is coming out, so maybe we can have a round two when it does. I'm really excited to read it and thank you for that announcement. I know you're very active on LinkedIn, which, with your permission, I'll add your LinkedIn to the podcast so people can easily find you. But anything else, what's the best way to keep in touch for listeners who want to reach out, have a conversation about what you're building, how to scale it or any other topics?

Rani Yadav-Ranjan:

Absolutely no, please, I mean definitely through you. Thank you for having me on this podcast. This is just brilliant. I'm so proud of you. I'm so excited to know you Like oh my God, I have a friend who's a podcaster. Thank you, which is cool. Please, yeah, contact me through LinkedIn, always available. You can DM me any which way you like. I'm always available to converse.

Klara Jagosova:

Excellent, and I'll add that so people can easily click and find you. And thank you so much, ronnie. I know we could be going for hours, but maybe that would be our series too. I'm sure when your book will come out, they'll be full of wealth and interesting thoughts and information, so I look forward to that. Thank you, cara, for everything. I really appreciate it. Talk to you soon, thank you, have a good day. Bye-bye, you too Bye. If you enjoyed this episode, I want to ask you to please do two things that would help me greatly. One, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, spotify or any other podcasting platform that you use to listen to this episode. Two, please share this podcast with a friend who you believe might enjoy it as well. It is a great way to remind someone you care about them by sharing a conversation they might be interested in. Thank you for listening.