This week Ms. Valérie Pisano, CEO of MILA (the artificial intelligence research institute founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal and bringing together more than 500 researchers specializing in “machine learning”), joined our EMBA class as part of its CEO speaker series.

During a one-hour discussion with our participants, Valérie addressed many relevant  topics relating to artificial intelligence, which, she argued affect all businesses. In particular, she touched on AI as an industrial revolution and a new resource to be exploited for our times, the challenges and approaches to help our businesses adopt AI, the opportunities generated for businesses by AI and how AI impacts the performance of businesses large and small. She also, provided an overview of ethical issues and the importance of the participation of the global community and Mila in the organization of governments for building an ethical framework for AI for future generations.

We thank Ms. Pisano for her generosity and candor in this most enriching conversation.

 

About Valérie

Valérie Pisano has over 10 years of experience in talent, leadership, diversity and organizational dynamics. She is currently President and CEO of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. She was previously Chief Talent Officer at Cirque du Soleil and cofounded The Mobïus Bias Project, an initiative focused accelerating the dialogue on female leadership roles by exploring unconscious bias. She began her career at McKinsey & Company after a Master Degree in Economics at HEC Montreal, and is the proud mother of three girls.

 

About Mila

Founded in 1993 by Professor Yoshua Bengio of the Université de Montréal, Mila is a research institute in artificial intelligence which rallies 500 researchers specializing in the field of machine learning. Based in Montréal, Mila’s mission is to be a global pole for scientific advances that inspires innovation and the development of AI for the benefit of all. Since 2017, Mila is the result of a partnership between the Université de Montréal and McGill University, closely linked with Polytechnique Montréal and HEC Montréal, and gathers in its offices a community of professors, students, industrial partners and startups working in AI, making the institute the world’s largest academic research center in machine learning. Mila, a non-profit organization, is recognized globally for its significant contributions to the field of machine learning, Mila has distinguished itself in the areas of language modelling, machine translation, object recognition and generative models.

Photo credit for header image: Maryse Boyce