UNLEASH America 2025: An insight to the future of AI

As the dust settles from the International Festival of HR and we reflect on the three-day event, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content and knowledge that was shared.

Of course, one of the key topics that everyone was talking about was AI.

Whether you love it, loath it, or fear it, there’s no escaping the fact that it’s shaping the world of HR – and it’s here to stay. 

So to condense just some of the insights shared from our phenomenal line up of speakers, UNLEASH took a deep dive into three keynotes from three outstanding individuals: Doug Fisher, Chief Security and AI Officer at Lenovo; Dr. Joy Buolamwini, Artificial Intelligence Expert, Artist, Founder, Algorithmic Justice League; and Max Tegmark, Professor at MIT. 

Transparency, accountability and ethics: AI’s recipe for success

Lenovo’s Doug Fisher starts his session on AI by introducing himself as the company’s Chief Security and AI Officer – but stating that for him, he views himself more as the Chief Trust Officer.

To support this, he added: “My role is to build organizations where security is paramount. Where customers – whether they’re a large financial institution, using big data to look at fraud detection, universities conducting pioneering research, or teams running mission critical operations – they need to be able to trust the technology we’re using.”

Continuing, he expressed the importance of governance, while adding: “Trust is the cornerstone of any successful AI mission without its users, no matter how amazing that technology is, no matter how advanced it is, they will not deploy it. They will not use it.” 

That’s why Lenovo is built on transparency, accountability and a deep commitment to ethics. 

To ensure this resonates with the audience, Fisher discusses AI’s impact on healthcare conditions, such as ALS and Alzheimer’s disease, while highlighting how AI can be used as a tool for good.

He then pivots to discuss how Lenovo’s HR team has crafted a framework of four responsible AI commitments: do no harm, be transparent, protect privacy and stay secure.  

As an example as to why this is important, Fisher shares the anecdote of how, while on vacation in Mexico last year, he was able to create a deep fake of his keynote – which he described as “not just a novelty,” but “a growing threat”.

Bringing this back to HR, Fisher draws upon Gartner research, which highlights that by 2028, one in four candidate applications will be fake.

The idea of AI creating fake or biased outputs is later expanded upon by Dr Joy Buolamwini.

Can AI recognize bias?

 With the integral job opening up UNLEASH America 2025, Dr Joy Buolamwini welcomed the audience into her keynote by stating that she wears a lot of hats: AI expert, Artist, Founder at Algorithmic Justice League – but on the day, she was a poet.

Sharing AI, ain’t I a woman?, Dr Buolamwini highlighted that there is a power imbalance within AI, shaping the “preferences, priorities, and, yes, at times, the prejudices that are baked into the technologies that shape our lives”.

What prompted Dr Buolamwini to explore the topic of bias in AI, was when she realized that facial recognition technology worked on her friend, but it needed a “little assist” when it came to her own.

“How neutral are machines?” she asked, before reminding the audience that AI can – and has – been used to generate deep fake images of celebrities, such as Taylor Swift and Tom Hanks. These are what Dr Buolamwini calls the ‘X-Coded’.

“The X-Coded are those who’ve been exploited, harmed, condemned, and convicted by AI systems,” she explained.

“When we think about this in the context of employment, it reminds us of the ways in which AI discrimination can show up in the workplace.”

Relating this to HR, she explains that this could appear in the form of certain candidates never getting the call back. 

But even for those who do get offered jobs when AI is used as a hiring assistant, they may still fall victim to bias during evaluations – meaning they could even lose their jobs. 

We are in a world where we have to contend with algorithms of discrimination while also exploring the possibilities of what AI can do,” she noted.

As he keynote came to an end, Dr Buolamwini was keen to pivot to the positive, asking: What are ways we can use AI in the workplace that can be useful?

To answer this for the audience, she suggests that AI can be tailored to help us recognize our own bias, or to create more inclusive policies. 

However, one key takeaway from Dr Buolamwini’s session just so happened to resonate with that of Tegmark – which is the necessity for regulated AI, with humans in the loop.

AI vs AGI – a tool for good or bad?

“AI is a double-edged sword,” Tegmark began, before referencing American icon Homer Simpson, by explaining that AI is the “cause and solution to all of life’s problems.”

By this, Tegmark means AI brings both powerful benefits and serious risks – depending on how it’s developed and used.

Feeding into his argument, he references artificial general intelligence (AGI) and how its powerful capabilities could cause a dystopian outlook on AI.

He questioned: “You may ask, isn’t AGI the necessary tool to get all the upside? 

“Well, no, it’s not,” he answered. 

In Tegmark’s opinion, “virtually nothing” that’s calling to the industry or academia today requires only AGI. 

To support this, he suggested: “We can save over 1 million lives each year on the right roads with tool AI without AGI, we can save more lives by eliminating stupid mistakes in hospitals with tool AI without AGI, and so on.”

Continuing, he explains that although AGI is predicted to surface well into the future, he expects its arrival within Trump’s presidency.

“It’s pretty clear now that the first AGI is not going to be just a large language model like ChatGPT scaled up, it’s going to be a much more complicated hybrid system that uses tools of various sorts.” 

After outlining the key pros and cons of AI and AGI, Tegmark’s message is clear: We need regulation.

Summarizing, he said: “My optimistic vision is that for most powerful people in the US, China, and elsewhere, the penny will drop and they will start to realize that we are actually closer to building this very powerful superhuman AI that we thought. And that we can’t control it.”

He then likens the AI revolution to the myth of Icarus – who “had amazing wings which he could have done great things with but he blew it all by going too close to the sun.”

AI is humanity’s “incredible intellectual wings”, which will allow us to “do things beyond our wildest dreams, if we don’t get over obsessed about trying to race to AGI”.

Want to know more about AI? Make sure you grab your tickets to UNLEASH World!