What if AI's most powerful defence application isn't fighting wars, but preventing them?

In this episode of AI for Equity, Jenny Garrett OBE and Leah Garrett are joined by Melanie Garson, Associate Professor at University College London and expert in international security and conflict resolution. Melanie challenges the dominant narrative around AI and defence, making the case for "peace tech": technology designed to stabilise societies, forecast conflict, and rebuild after war.

In this episode:

• Peace tech vs defence tech, and why the distinction matters
• How innovation ecosystems bring governments, industry and civil society together for conflict prevention
• The dual use dilemma: the same drone that surveils can deliver vaccines
• AI's role in post conflict reconstruction, coordinating housing, healthcare and law enforcement data
• The ethical trade offs: privacy, surveillance, and how much we're willing to give up for security

Melanie Garson brings extensive experience in international security and conflict resolution to a conversation that will change how you think about technology's role in peace.

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#AIforEquity #PeaceTech #ArtificialIntelligence #ConflictResolution

Claire Roberts has spent twenty five years in technology strategy and transformation, most of it as one of the only women in the room. She got in without a degree, on the strength of being more useful than anyone else in the building.

In this conversation with Jenny Garrett OBE and Leah Garrett, she talks about what she saw when a major AI engineering company quietly let its diversity commitments slide once the external pressure changed direction, why researcher Sarah Weier's experiment on how models answer questions about women should worry us more than it does, and why the uncomfortable finding is not about the technology at all. The bias is not programmed in. It is in the record we left behind, and the model is reading it back to us.

She also makes the case for AI as a thought partner rather than a replacement, in healthcare, in engineering, and in the ordinary work most of us do every day. Her instruction is simple and harder than it sounds: don't outsource your thinking, use it to improve your thinking.

In this episode:
Getting into tech without a degree, and what usefulness actually buys you
Being the only woman in the room for twenty five years
What happened when diversity commitments met commercial pressure
Sarah Weier's experiment and what the training data revealed
Using AI to sharpen judgement instead of replacing it

The AI for Equity podcast, hosted by Jenny Garrett OBE and Leah Garrett.

What does it mean when an elderly woman calls a plastic device her best friend?

This week, Tracy Fischer and Mary Linberg from the Aging and Disability Resource Center in Dunn County, Wisconsin, join us to talk about their pilot with Ellie Q, an AI companion sitting in the homes of people the care system has quietly left behind. It's a genuinely warm conversation, and an uncomfortable one, because the device works. Users feel less alone. Annie found a friend.

But warmth and indictment can live in the same story. We get into the ethics of putting AI into elder care, the difference between complementing carers and replacing them, and the systemic failure that makes any of this necessary in the first place.

The technology isn't the villain here. The gap it's filling is the point. Loneliness was never a tech problem, and no lamp, however clever, is going to fix a society that stopped showing up.

Listen now.

"Hard to reach" gets treated as a fact about disabled people, when the real story is a research industry that never built the relationships needed to include them properly.

Christine Hemphill joins Leah and Jenny Garrett to unpick that phrase and the industry built around it. She talks through her move out of traditional design roles into disability-inclusive research, why touchscreens and voice interfaces both started as disability-led design before anyone called them mainstream, and why the choice between "innovative" and "inclusive" was never a real one. The conversation also covers positionality, the bias every designer carries into a room without noticing, and what it takes to build genuine empathy with the people research is meant to serve.

AI for Equity is hosted by Leah Garrett and Jenny Garrett OBE.

Can an algorithm tell you what is beautiful? And if it can, whose idea of beauty is it working from?

This week's guest is Hugo, founder of London's first AI consultancy. He has trained foundation models, audited machine vision systems for The Times and Vogue Business, and taught over 5,000 teenagers to build and ship real products through his company Sherpas. He now runs AI Night School, helping leaders understand what this technology actually does.

The conversation runs from his first business at six years old, selling potpourri to golfers, to the project that tried to teach a machine to recognise beauty, and what that project quietly exposed. AI does not fix our instincts. It amplifies them. Every bias we have not questioned gets handed back to us, faster and with a confidence it has not earned.

We also get into creativity, the discipline of protecting your focus, and the ethics of building technology that shapes how people see themselves and their own worth.

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

Swap a woman's name for a man's on the same profile, and the visibility climbs. Amazon's hiring algorithm learned to filter out the word "women's" without anyone telling it to. None of this is a fault in an otherwise fair system. It is the system, running on exactly what it was trained on.

This week Leah Garrett and Jenny Garrett OBE are joined by Cecilia Jastrzembska, a senior policy advisor and one of the clearest voices on algorithmic accountability in the UK. Cecilia has campaigned to make misogyny a hate crime and works where political journalism, public policy and advocacy meet. Her argument runs against the comfortable version of this conversation: bias in AI is structural, not a series of unlucky accidents, and designing for accountability has become a strategic necessity rather than a moral footnote. We get into the recruitment tools quietly deciding who gets hired, the LinkedIn experiment that exposed how visibility shifts with gender, and why so many government consultations fail the people they are meant to serve. Underneath all of it sits one idea: legibility. Making these systems readable enough that the people they fail can challenge them.

AI for Equity is hosted by Leah Garrett and Jenny Garrett OBE, exploring how technology deepens inequality and how it can be built to do the opposite.

Cecilia Jastrzembska is a UK Government Senior Policy Advisor at Director Level. She founded European Movement Women and is a Co-Founding member of of Women In AI, UKAI, an Advocate for 50:50 Parliament, and nominee for the Outstanding Award for Tech Regulation by CogX as well as the UN Women UK Campaigner of the Year Award. A longstanding gender equality campaigner, Cecilia is an award winning global speaker and political journalist (LinkTree) published in over 25 international newspapers. Through these positions as well as central government, she has worked with, spoken alongside, organised and chaired panel events and roundtables with over 200 MPs, MEPs, diplomats, NGO representatives and international legal experts on ending (M)VAWG, mitigating the climate crisis and ethical AI.

We tend to treat toxic workplaces as accidents. Jody, founder of Gentia, argues they are closer to design, and that the psychosocial hazards doing the most damage are the ones organisations are least willing to name.

In this episode we talk about what psychosocial hazards actually are, from crushing workloads and bullying to poor leadership and the slow loss of autonomy, and why they so rarely show up in standard engagement data. Jodie shares what she learned across more than a decade in workplace wellbeing, how helping build one of Australia's largest early education providers shaped her understanding of who pays the price for bad culture, and how Gentia uses AI to make hidden risk measurable, and therefore actionable.

A conversation about leadership, accountability, and the difference between saying you care about wellbeing and being willing to look at the evidence.

AI for Equity is hosted by Leah Garrett and Jenny Garrett OBE.

Jody Warren – Bio

Jody is the Co-Founder of Gentia and a long-time advocate for workplaces that help people thrive, not just survive. She believes work should leave people better off, not depleted, and has spent her career designing the systems that make that possible.

Before Gentia, Jody co-founded Australia's largest corporate early education group, driven by a mission to help more women return to the workforce. Running that business revealed a powerful truth: how people experience work shapes how they show up everywhere else.

That insight led her into psychological safety at work, the conditions that determine whether people are protected from harm like burnout, bullying, and chronic stress, or quietly damaged by them. She spent more than a decade learning what actually keeps people safe and well at work, and who pays the price when organisations get it wrong.

Now she's encoding that expertise into AI. Gentia is a platform that helps organisations protect their people from the hidden risks at work that quietly cause harm, things like burnout, bullying, and chronic stress. Most AI in this space guesses from survey data. Gentia is built the other way around, with deep human expertise encoded in first, so it can see these risks precisely, explain them clearly, and help organisations act on them before people get hurt.

What does it take to bring AI into a team without losing the people inside it?

In this episode of AI for Equity, we're joined by Richard De Villiers, a facilitator and consultant who helps organisations rethink collaboration in remote and hybrid settings. With a background spanning IT and HR, Richard works at the meeting point of people, process, and technology, and he has strong views on getting that order right.

We talk through his mindset, method, and means framework: building a culture that can absorb change, designing clear processes for how AI actually gets used, and making sure the tools are accessible enough that nobody feels left behind. Richard also makes the case for reframing AI as IA, the intelligent assistant, a shift that moves the technology from threat to support and changes who feels in control of it.

Along the way we get into employee fear and why it deserves to be taken seriously rather than managed away, the difference between AI working in isolation and AI genuinely complementing human judgement, and why intentional design beats enthusiastic adoption every time.

If you lead a team, sit on one, or are trying to work out what AI should and shouldn't touch in your organisation, this one is for you.

Listen now, and let us know where you land on AI versus IA.