From hard hats to high tech: Rachel Skaff’s journey to AWS and the importance of DEI

The future of tech isn’t just about speed and innovation—it’s about who gets a seat at the table. 

In this episode of The Catalyst by Softchoice, Rachel Skaff, AWS Managing Director of America’s Channel and Partner Sales, joins Heather Haskin to explore how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) are driving innovation in tech.  

From her unconventional path into the industry to leading DEI initiatives at Amazon, Skaff shares insights on fostering inclusivity and ensuring AI development remains fair and unbiased.  

This episode is brought to you by AWS. Transform your document workflows with AWS Document AI Services. Visit softchoice.com/awsai today!  

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology.

Transcript

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Heather: 0:19

you are listening to the Catalyst by Softchoice, a podcast about unleashing the full potential in people and technology. I'm your host, Heather Haskin. Business leaders have to balance the needs of many different stakeholders, including employees, business partners, and most importantly, their customers. But how do you ensure you meet the disparate needs of all these groups while growing the bottom line? There is no answer to this question, but over the last few years, a set of principles has been helping businesses achieve this exact goal. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or D, E, and I. D, E, and I initiatives are essential in the workplace. They foster innovation, improve decision making, and create an environment that helps everyone thrive. All while driving better business outcomes as well. And when DE& I principles trickle down into the tech we build and use, that's when they really start to have an outsized impact. Rachel Scaff, Amazon Web Services Managing Director of America's Channel and Partner Sales, is focused on doing just that. She believes growing DE& I increases employee and customer satisfaction. strengthens partner relationships, grows the bottom line, and improves the technology that we use every day. Rachel, welcome to The Catalyst.

Rachel: 1:42

Thank you so much. I am thrilled to be here. And I'll tell you, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility are part of The Catalyst for our future.

Heather: 1:55

I am so excited to be able to discuss this with you today. I've done quite a bit of just personal research on you as a fan of yours, and I've seen that you're involved in a lot of amazing DE& I type projects and have a great passion in that area besides just what you do at Amazon. So really excited to hear your perspective. The first thing I'd like to ask leaders is what would you define your purpose statement is as a leader? What drives you?

Rachel: 2:19

Ooh, that is a great question. Quite simply. My purpose statement is three simple things, Heather. It's do better, make better, and be better. And that includes the communities that we live in, the individuals that we impact, the companies that we're part of, and the customers that we influence. It's pretty simple. Do better, be better, make better.

Heather: 2:49

Simplicity is more profound to me because you could think about those words in different ways. Be and do are very different. So do better, make better, and be better. I love it. Thank you for sharing that. Before we get more into some of the work that you've been doing at AWS, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your background and how you got into tech.

Rachel: 3:08

Oh, I, uh, I think we all have unique origin stories. I didn't start out in tech. In fact, I started out in heavy highway construction. Legitimately, my first job in college was hard hat, steel toed boots, out in the field designing bridges and roads. But when I went to college, I was always focused on how do I go build something that has longevity? How do I do better, make better? and be better. And for me, it became about efficiency. Geez, I must've been a sophomore in college. And one of the roles that I had was I had to measure the viscosity of asphalt coming off of trucks. So for those of you who aren't into materials engineering, um, asphalt coming off a truck is about 300 degrees Fahrenheit. I don't know what that is in Celsius, but it's hot. And in the dead of summer. It's really uncomfortable, so you have to make sure that the viscosity coming off the trucks is right, the temperature is right, because otherwise it causes bumps in the road. In the early 90s, we didn't have cell phones and we didn't have a whole variety of things, so you had to do all of this calculation outside. And I thought, geez, there's got to be a better way to do this. Again, be better, do better, make better. So I wrote a, a little computer program that would let me sit in the air conditioning of my truck and do some of those calculations for me. I'd go out, get the measurements, and then I'd come back and just make it efficient. And then I started handing it out on the really big floppies, not the small ones, but the big floppies. And eventually I ended up getting into tech versus doing actual build work out in the fields. And. Then I started implementing technology. I worked for consulting firms. I was an executive at the largest specialty retailer in the world. And then I decided to take another career turn, and I went to work for a semiconductor company designing IoT devices and Eventually, I moved into tech sales and here we are. So that's, that's my origin

Heather: 5:37

story. So with this passion that you have for DE& I in the workplace and with your unique origin story, why is that important to you? Was there some catalyst or event or has it just always been there? I think

Rachel: 5:50

it's always been there, Heather. And I think part of it is my background of growing up. I grew up in. rural America on a cattle ranch. Growing up, there was no delineation between who you were, what you were born into, what race you were, what gender you were, any of those things. Work just had to be done. And whether it was mucking out stalls in the barn or working in my dad's grocery store or going to engineering school, it all just became do the job and make sure that the people that are around you, you set a good example for and you help them become something better. My dad was a first generation American. His parents migrated over from Lebanon. My grandpa was put on a boat when he was nine years old, Heather, out of Beirut, Lebanon. Without his parents, it was he and his brother, a nine year old and 11 year old with an address to get to in America. A lot of that grit and a lot of that ambition to figure it out is frankly part of my DNA.

Heather: 7:10

So let's look at Amazon a little bit, DE& I and Amazon. So you came to Amazon a few years ago. What was it about Amazon that felt like it was a good fit for you? And at the time, what were they doing around DE& I that was attractive to you?

Rachel: 7:24

I have been at Amazon for four years. That seems like a lifetime ago, and the amazing thing about AWS is we live in this time of huge potential, cloud technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, generative AI, all of these have provided us with this unlimited horizon of opportunity, and how we can use these technologies to create solutions and solutions. And frankly, making sure that everyone is included in that is a darn good start for what we need to go do. It's a vital role that every single leader plays in helping grow all types of employees. And when you work at a company like Amazon, where there's 1. 5 million employees, There's a tremendous opportunity for us to build and scale all of those technology efforts and do better, make better, and be better. And the reason that this is so important, Heather, a company the size of Amazon has the scale and impact. Frankly, it also has significant responsibility and influence across the world because there's such a huge opportunity. To make it better. So when I think about Amazon and what makes it super unique is our 16 leadership principles and how they truly guide Amazon and how we approach our business decisions and shape our day to day. So for example. One of the things that we hinge on and one of our key leadership principles is all around success and scale bring broad responsibility. And what I mean by that leadership principle is It is our job to think about how we are impacting and delivering value for all of our customers, not just for our individuals. It's not just about bias for action or delivering results, but working at Amazon. And their focus on diversity, inclusion, and equity is about the impact that we have on the world and the communities that we live in. Frankly, that's part of what attracted me to Amazon in the first place. And it's also what continues to attract me.

Heather: 10:21

Amazon is such an inspiring company to me. And I love some of the origin story of Jeff Bezos and Day One. And I love some of those aspects of the startup feel. And then you bring it to this vast scale of so many employees. And how do you Build changes with such a large group. It's amazing to me to think about bringing that down to just one person, creating an impact and making change. So when you look at what you're doing DE and I wise at AWS, how are you building that strategy with the AWS business?

Rachel: 10:53

I think for me, in order to truly scale, whether it's through our partners or it's through our employees or it's through our customers, I always think about four key elements. And the first one is, how do you drive high quality, high velocity decision making? by your teams when you are not in the room. That's a key thing for any company. That means empowering and teaching those around you how to do that. So that's number one. Number two. Everything that you do, you have to build an engine or at Amazon, we call them mechanisms and those mechanisms are built to allow you to scale and allow you to run faster. It allows you to audit and inspect your business and helps your team ensure that they are looking at the right things at scale, right? Because when you're running large organizations or large initiatives. You can focus on everything, which in turn, you focus on nothing. The third key thing around scale, whether it's diversity, inclusion, equity, and accessibility, or it's a large scale partner event or sales event, is you have to be able to communicate a bold vision and key messages at scale. And lastly, you've got to build an organization of owners. And for me, that means owner multipliers. And I'll give you a couple of examples. So I think it was two years ago ish, I had this idea of how do we put together some type of women in the cloud? And by women in the cloud, I thought it was super important that a company of our size do something more around how we share those. Stories and it ended up so we incubated it at in North America at reinvent in 2022 and the whole purpose of women of the cloud was to provide an opportunity to empower and uplift women in tech, particularly in the cloud across our customers and our partner community, and it served as a platform for women to connect to share their experiences. and to learn from one another. And over the last two years, I've seen this particular mechanism scale so much, Heather, that I just sit back and I'm so proud of I now see women of the cloud going out and talking to university students about inspiring the next generation of female leaders in tech. That's exactly what scale looks like here at Amazon. You have an idea, you create it. You build a mechanism, you inspire others to take it further than you ever thought you could, and then you step out and let them run with it, right? Again, can't always be in the room, so how do you build those owners? If you go look up on LinkedIn, AWS Women of the Cloud, I couldn't be more proud of what that team has done. That's just one example.

Heather: 14:39

I am absolutely glad that you shared that example because I was going to ask you about it anyway. I myself have enjoyed some of those events, particularly this year at reInvent and a couple of other events previous to that. And I so appreciate. As a woman in the cloud, having the opportunity to meet those that I would not normally get to meet and connect with and find common ground with and inspire each other. I love how you talked about, you just did it small. You just made it simple. You just started it. Like, let's just do it.

Rachel: 15:09

Here's the thing about that. I think the tricky part for a lot of leaders is how do you take an idea and activate it? and then let it grow. I equate it a little bit to, for those of you who have children, right? How do you raise something and then slowly let it go and become its own thing? Here's the vision and here's the message. You start it, you provide guardrails for others to come in and make it better. And then you stand on the sidelines and cheer. That's your job as you further your career is you've got to build that next generation of leaders and you can't always hold on to. Everything that you've given birth to, right? You gotta let it grow.

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Heather: 16:49

What I really wanna get into with De and I is, I know as you manage these partnerships and you're a part of the the partner world with AWS, we've also gotta talk about ai. It's an incredible part of technology today. So as we think about like, how does DE& I and AI kind of mesh, the thought of like, okay, you've got all these different stakeholders when it comes to AI, you've got people designing products and designing solutions, you've got women in the cloud events, you've got all of these different parts of both Amazon, the customer and the partner that come into play, and you've got this new tool. And so how does DE& I, that perspective of creating a strong, an engaging partnership while also increasing DE& I and then bringing in a solution like AI. How does that all mesh together? Can that increasing DE& I eventually Increase the bottom line when it comes to these AI solutions.

Rachel: 17:44

I absolutely believe it does. So think about it this way. We are living in a world of change. And if generative AI were a movie, Heather, I'd argue that we are in the absolute opening credits. Think about that. We're clearly living in this period of incredible change, which is Anything but business as usual, disruption is on the rise, and reinvention is becoming the default strategy for success, whether it's your personal success or your company's success. And here's some interesting statistics that, that just blew my mind when I looked at earlier this week. It might actually be really tempting for us to think that the pace of change with generative AI is eventually going to slow. You know? But that isn't the case. In fact, I think this is the least amount of change that any of us will ever see. Here's the statistics. Eighty five percent of the jobs that will exist in 2030 have not even been invented yet. That's in five years. That's not that long. So when we think about diversity, inclusion, and equity. It's everywhere, it's all around us and we've got to figure out how do we continue to leverage generative AI to drive businesses, to transform what we're doing. In fact, Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, recently said. Generative AI may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud, which itself is still in the early stages, and perhaps since the internet. Think about that. So when you think about what that means to all of us, it's important to understand that none of these technologies will be. able to be part of us without thinking about diversity, inclusion, and equity. We realize that incorporating diversity, equity, inclusion, And accessibility principles into all of the AI technologies that we build are absolutely essential to creating solutions that are fair, that are unbiased, and that are accessible to everyone. In fact, our approach involves several key strategies to ensure that DE& I is at the forefront of our AI development. So I want to talk to you about one specific area, and it's our focus on inclusive design. Data sets. So everybody understands that A. I. Systems are only as good as the data they're trained on. So at Amazon, we are committed to ensuring that our data sets reflect diverse perspectives and backgrounds. And this includes actively seeking out underrepresented groups in our data collection process to minimize our bias and ensure that our AI technologies can serve a wide range of users effectively. So let me give you a couple examples just to make it real. So when we develop services like Amazon Recognition, which provides image and video analysis, we worked to ensure that the facial recognition technology is trained on diverse data sets. This helps in reducing bias in facial recognition outcomes, which is Absolutely crucial for applications in security and identification. Another example is we integrate fairness And bias detection tools directly into our machine learning platforms such as Amazon SageMaker. These tools allow developers to evaluate their models for potential biases and make the necessary adjustments. And these are just a couple examples of the proactive approach. That Amazon is using to help organizations build AI applications that are not only powerful, but also ethical and focused on diversity, inclusion, and equity.

Heather: 22:24

Well, that kind of goes back to what you were talking about earlier of being aware of the greater impact that you can create. And we're doing that by being inclusive, by creating equity. by creating diversity. But let's bring it down to the more personal level for you and your role. Do you see that trickle down effect of DE& I impacting partnerships and the solutions that they offer with AI.

Rachel: 22:48

So I'll share with you two examples that I think really are helping our partners such as SoftChoice. So when we sit down with SoftChoice and we talk about how do we help our customers or how do we go build a platform that will Solve some different business problem when we sit down and we talk with our partners or we talk with the engineers at soft choice, all of the AI systems that we're talking about are developed and infused with diverse data sets that reflect a wide range of cultures, languages, experiences, and they become more representative of the global user base. You think about soft choice and all the different customers and all of the global reach that you all have. Leveraging this technology is leading us to more accurate and relevant outcomes for our users. And then the second thing when we think about how we're leveraging our partners for scale is really around innovation and creativity. How do you take the perspectives as others to really foster innovation? And I think that diverse teams working on AI development help bring that variety of viewpoints and ideas to the table. And lastly, social good, right? When we think about AI that is infused and built on the foundation of diversity, inclusion, equity, and accessibility principles. It is driving social change by addressing systematic inequalities. For example, the AI tools that we've developed together. are used in education to provide personalized learning experiences to cater to different learning styles that help bridge gaps and support some of the underserved communities that both of us are part of. So I'm super thankful for the work that we get to do with SoftChoice on a regular basis around making the world a better place.

Heather: 25:08

I like to think about it like we're in the dial up era of AI. Like it's just brand new, there's so much on the horizon. So as we look at incorporating DE& I being a necessity to making sure that our solutions are impacting everyone in an equal way and creating the best outcomes, is there anything you're excited about? What do you see the future being like?

Rachel: 25:26

I think for me, when we think about the future, I equate it to a tipping point. That's exactly where we're at with generative AI. We're on the precipice of a new tipping point, and that tipping point Is the start of the next wave of our customers, cloud adoption, digital transformation, reinvention. It's the tipping point for our education systems. It's a tipping point for us personally, for the worlds that we live in. And frankly, all of our partners around the globe are critical to help everything thrive. Let me talk a little bit about why I believe we're at this tipping point. So if you think about industrial revolutions, for example, in the 1760s, coal and steam really changed how the world started to industrialize themselves. About a hundred years later, we had electrification. And then a hundred years later, We saw compute and communications and these last 300 years of revolution caused huge disruption, but it also represented huge opportunity for companies and individuals who are ready to take that advantage. And with each of these technological innovations comes decades of invention and new ideas that would have never been possible. And they're the things that AWS pioneers. It's that change. And generative AI is really that tipping point of yet another tectonic change. And an industrial shakeup. So I think for us, we've got to start really thinking about the fact that generative AI is going to fundamentally transform how we build products, how we build businesses, how we develop upcoming talent, how our kids. Go to school, how our kids learn, all of these inventions and breakthroughs are going to transform our lives and the world around us only in the opening credits of what's possible.

Heather: 27:54

Rachel, just before we kind of wrap things up here, I'd love to hear from you, any parting words, anything you'd like to add to this discussion that we weren't able to cover today.

Rachel: 28:04

I think if I have a set of requests from you, it's simply this. Go all in, all the time. Talk about the hard things, even if they're personal. Commit to big goals. Believe that you have the power to make any change. I truly believe that what can happen when we all come together and support each other and have authentic conversations is going to be what changes the world, Heather. Companies don't, people do. So let's go create something epic together and frankly change the world while we do it.

Heather: 28:44

I love that. Thank you so much, Rachel. Thank you for being here. I appreciate it so much. Thank you. DE& I initiatives. benefit all corporate stakeholders. Employees thrive in inclusive cultures. Customers receive services designed for their diverse needs, and business partners drive better innovation in more collaborative environments. In technology, DE& I ensures solutions are fair, accessible, and free from bias. And with the proliferation of AI tools in recent years, that's become more important than ever. A big thank you to Rachel Scaff. For coming on the show and thank you for tuning in for the Catalyst. I'm Heather Haskin. See you again in two weeks. The Catalyst is brought to you by SoftChoice, a leading North American technology solutions provider. It is written and produced by Angela Cope, Philippe Dimas, and Brayden Banks in partnership with Pilgrim Content Marketing.

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