Steven Tom Of Adtalem On The Future Of Artificial Intelligence
An Interview With David Leichner
AI is still evolving and learning. As quickly as the tools like ChatGPT have been adopted they still are being tuned for accuracy and are subject to hallucinations — an output that is factually incorrect and not logical based on the training data in the large language model. The risk is that people become overly reliant and blindly trust responses from these models. Accuracy will improve over time, but it’s still early.
As part of our series about the future of Artificial Intelligence, I had the pleasure of interviewing Steven Tom.
Steven Tom is Chief Customer Officer at Adtalem Global Education, a national leader in post-secondary education and a leading provider of professional talent to the healthcare industry, committed to addressing critical talent shortages and advancing diversity, equity and access in healthcare. In his role, Steve partners with Adtalem’s institutions to optimize student experiences, develop differentiated learning offerings and solutions, build strategic employer partnerships, and harvest data and analytics to further drive value-added insights across all the company’s institutions. He also oversees information technology including application development, infrastructure operations and enterprise architecture.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you share with us the “backstory” of how you decided to pursue this career path in AI?
When I got my first computer — an Apple II — I found myself enjoying building small apps and programs in Applesoft BASIC more than I was playing the games. What’s been most personally rewarding throughout my career journey has been the opportunity to build things in new frontiers and creating great experiences using emerging technologies. I’ve been fortunate to have developed mobile apps on the first handheld PC/digital PDAs (remember those?) before smartphones really took shape, helped a national wireless carrier be the first to market with 4G, and built an IoT business from scratch. Now at Adtalem, I identify ways we can use technology and innovation to improve the education, experience, and lives of our students. AI will drive a renaissance in education, with the potential to transform nearly every aspect of how we educate and prepare students for the careers of the future.
What lessons can others learn from your story?
Be bold and trust that you’ll figure it out — even if the solve isn’t clearly in front of you. Great teams of curious, fun, and persistent people make it happen.
Can you tell our readers about the most interesting projects you are working on now?
One thing I’m really excited about is our work with AI at Walden University, which provides high-quality online education for working professionals. One of those advances is Linda, our AI-powered digital human.
Many of our students will work in healthcare environments where the human counseling situations challenge them as empathetic human beings. At Walden University we’ve rolled out Linda, a digital human for students to practice emotionally challenging counseling situations, like those involving victims of domestic abuse. While talking to our digital human first blush seems like talking to an animated avatar, AI is driving two powerful dimensions of the experience.
First, as the student talks with Linda with their webcam on, the AI processes the video in real-time for non-verbal cues to generate dynamic reactions from our digital human. For example, Linda reacts negatively if you smile as you ask a tough question or look disinterested as she’s divulging the situation to you. Second, natural language processing enables the student to have more dynamic conversations with Linda. The conversation is less scripted and flows more naturally. This allows our students to practice these tough, emotionally charged situations in a safe, controlled environment. It also allows them to repeat the exercise to try new tactics and approaches with Linda.
Our students are also adult learners, meaning they’re balancing families, jobs and other life priorities. By offering Linda in addition to traditional one-on-one in-person training with another student or professor, we can allow students to build their skills on their own time and their own terms.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
When I went to work in the wireless/hi-tech space, I was privileged to form a relationship with a fabulous mentor, Jerry, who encouraged me to be creative about introducing new ideas and challenging the status quo within the company. He led with infectious conviction, a knack for crunching numbers in real-time, and didn’t waver at the first sign of trouble. It was his willingness to experiment and advocacy for what I was doing that helped me drive impact beyond what I could’ve imagined when I started. Today, we’re still great friends and he continues to be a sounding board for my career.
What are the 5 things that most excite you about the AI industry? Why?
The arrival of large language models and generative AI are as game changing as the introduction of the mobile phone or the advent of the internet. The possibilities for education are especially exciting. AI will finally be the answer to personalized tutoring and adaptive learning that can scale to all corners of the globe. Using AI to accelerate research and data analysis will boost scientific discovery and innovation. And, the ways AI can support students in traversing their journey, from curating advice on what to do next to acting as the student’s digital assistant may finally deliver on the 1:1 student support goal the field has been chasing for years.
We talked about our digital human, “Linda” already that helps our Walden University counseling students practice on demand to build skills they’ll use in real-life sessions with clients after graduation.
Three years ago, we were the first to work with Google to launch a truly dynamic AI-powered personalized learning tutor we call “Julian.” Ingesting content and resources from the classroom, it’s able to index the key concepts of an entire course and build learning activities, tests, and assess student knowledge on its own. Julian’s AI can unlock to the challenges we all face in personalizing mastery and being able to address individual learning gaps at-scale. Students interact with Julian by having a conversation and engaging in dynamically generated learning activities and assessments.
Julian is not a demo — it was real AI based on natural language processing (NLP) advances at the time like BERT and T5 (precursors to today’s large language models) and is being used by the groups of students at Adtalem institutions. It took a special collaboration between our faculty and innovation teams at Adtalem working with the Google team — not knowing how we would get there or whether technology would get there fast enough. With each mountain we overcame, our enthusiasm became absolutely electric that we would succeed in bringing Julian to life.
Fast forward to 2023 and the euphoria of ChatGPT. I’m excited that we can take what we learned in building Julian years before and combine it with the latest large language model technologies like ChatGPT to leap personalized tutoring forward.
What are the 5 things that concern you about the AI industry? Why?
First, AI is still evolving and learning. As quickly as the tools like ChatGPT have been adopted they still are being tuned for accuracy and are subject to hallucinations — an output that is factually incorrect and not logical based on the training data in the large language model. The risk is that people become overly reliant and blindly trust responses from these models. Accuracy will improve over time, but it’s still early.
Second, another well-documented challenge we face in education is the use of AI as a substitute for original student work. This is not a new challenge, as there have been illicit methods for cheating in academia well before AI. So the emphasis has been and needs to continue to be from educators an upfront focus on emphasizing academic integrity and ethics. Humans make the decision on whether to act ethically. Additionally, on the backend, tools are already emerging to detect and counter work composed by AI versus the student and institutions should be actively exploring and implementing these tools now. At Adtalem, we’re scanning student assignment submissions today for AI-composed work.
Third, is the amount of data, computing power and training required to tune large language models today. Although this seems to be quickly changing as organizations work improve algorithms’ accuracy with less training data. As companies look to create private large language models, the responsibility will be on developers and data engineers to ensure they’ve used the right and requisite amounts of data to generate the right results.
As you know, there is an ongoing debate between prominent scientists, (personified as a debate between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg,) about whether advanced AI has the future potential to pose a danger to humanity. What is your position about this?
It’s understandable that some may feel that way if concerns go unchecked and issues are magnified. My takeaway is that we should not be fearful, but we should as a community, hold ourselves and each other accountable for using the technology carefully and in the right way. Any technology can pose an issue if it’s not handled responsibly or ethically. You cannot suppress or pause technology advances like AI; there’s too much society can benefit from to hold it back.
What can be done to prevent such concerns from materializing? And what can be done to assure the public that there is nothing to be concerned about?
We need to be responsible and ensure our motives are for the greater good. And, we need to continue adding protections inside of these tools that detect and defend against bad actors. When we communicate in public, it’s important to remember that many technological advances in the past may have been met with uncertainty at first, but are now ubiquitous in our lives.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world? Can you share a story?
The work we’re doing at Adtalem to create opportunities for underserved populations and underrepresented students that may be overlooked by the traditional university system makes a real difference in large numbers. Watching our students graduate with families and children cheering them on as they enter the next steps in their careers is incredibly rewarding. By doing this, we’re also helping serve our communities by providing graduates for the healthcare industry and rebuilding a workforce that has been struggling in recent years. In addition to my day job, I also currently serve on the board of several nonprofit organizations, including the International Youth Foundation, the World Trade Center Institute, and the Public Library of Science, as these organizations bolster their technology capabilities to deliver global youth development, regional trade, and open science.
As you know, there are not that many women in your industry. Can you advise what is needed to engage more women into the AI industry?
At Adtalem, bringing in people who are underrepresented and empowering them to grow their skills in their selected field is what we do every day. As an educator providing graduates to the pipeline of healthcare professionals, it’s essential to make sure no student is being overlooked. We see this from a race and culture perspective, but also from a gender perspective, as women are often underrepresented in tech and especially in artificial intelligence. In fact, research has found that women comprise only about a quarter of the tech workforce. When you look specifically at roles in AI, another study found that that it drops down to just 16%.
To bring more women to the table, we need to step up and see where we might have missed opportunities to help those underrepresented in technology and create pathways into the field. We need to further amplify and celebrate female role models in STEM that young women and girls, like my daughter, can aspire to become. As with any team, having a multitude of perspectives on board is key to success — and pioneering new products and experiences with AI is no exception.
What is your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story of how that had relevance to your own life?
My grandfather would always say “you make your own luck.” It was his way of saying that hard work, resilience, and taking risk would tilt the odds in your favor and create the right environment for success. I think that’s what guided me over my career to jump into those white space opportunities where we were building new teams, new businesses, and new products from the ground up.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Access to a quality, personalized education regardless of background, geography, or economic standing where the only limits are one’s own ambition.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can visit the Adtalem Global Education website at www.adtalem.com, and on LinkedIn at @adtalemglobaleducation.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About The Interviewer: David Leichner is a veteran of the Israeli high-tech industry with significant experience in the areas of cyber and security, enterprise software and communications. At Cybellum, a leading provider of Product Security Lifecycle Management, David is responsible for creating and executing the marketing strategy and managing the global marketing team that forms the foundation for Cybellum’s product and market penetration. Prior to Cybellum, David was CMO at SQream and VP Sales and Marketing at endpoint protection vendor, Cynet. David is the Chairman of the Friends of Israel and Member of the Board of Trustees of the Jerusalem Technology College. He holds a BA in Information Systems Management and an MBA in International Business from the City University of New York.
