Wendy Pfeiffer, CIO, Nutanix & Board Director, Qualys joins Jeff Frick from our coverage of Qualys Security Conference 2019. #theCUBE #qsc19 https://siliconangle.com/2020/01/27/boardroom-diversity-proves-mission-critical-data-security-ai-beyond-qsc19-womenintech/ Boardroom diversity proves mission critical in data security, AI and beyond The past two years have seen a record number of women elected to board positions. According to a report on U.S. Board Diversity Trends posted by Harvard Law School, 46% of newly elected directors in 2019 were female and women now hold 27% of directorships across the S&P 500 companies. One of those newly elected members is Wendy Pfeiffer (pictured), chief information officer of Nutanix Inc. and board director with Qualys Inc. and Girls in Tech Inc. “When I was recruited for the board [of Qualys] … we didn’t talk about the fact that I am female at all. We talked about the fact that I’m an operator, that I’m a technologist,” Pfeiffer told Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio during the Qualys Security Conference in Las Vegas. During the interview, Pfeiffer and Frick discussed how the growth of artificial intelligence is helping data security, making having a diverse workforce more critical than ever. (* Disclosure below.) This week theCUBE spotlights Wendy Pfeiffer in our Women in Tech feature. The diversity quest is far from over While Pfeiffer’s experience with Qualys — which already has a 50-50 gender diverse board — was positive, it is unfortunately not yet the norm. And it is definitely a far cry from the years when she started her career. Although Pfeiffer realized she had a passion for computer science in high school, she couldn’t envision a way forward into the field. It took a circuitous path through accounting, journalism, and business administration for her to finally discover her true calling within the technology industry. Today, Pfeiffer’s list of awards and accolades prove that she landed in the right place. 2018 saw her named number one on Enterprise Management 360’s list of Top 10 Tech CIOs and one of the National Diversity Council’s Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology. In 2019, she was named CIO of the Year by both ORBiE’s Bay Area Enterprise and the Fisher Center for Data and Analytics. Security needs AI … Providing security and compliance solutions is Qualys raison d’etre, and, as with any enterprise cloud company, security is mission critical for Nutanix. Artificial-intelligence and machine-learning tools provide the key to efficiently and quickly detecting potential attacks and stopping them autonomously. “We need to train the systems, and the systems need to be responsive, performant, resilient,” Pfeiffer said. Rather than the sci-fi image of a robot servant, she sees the combination of man and machine creating the real utopian future. “The machine itself, the computer itself, is refining and augmenting the things that human beings are doing and therefore able to be, first of all, more responsive, more performant, but also to do that layer of work that is not unique to human discernment,” she said. … and AI needs diversity While artificial intelligence and machine learning are critical for cybersecurity, diversity is equally as important for accurate model training in AI. “If we think about all of the data that is training these technology tools and systems, and we think about the people who are creating these systems and the leaders who are building these systems and so on, for the most part, the groups of people who are working on these things, technologists, particularly in Silicon Valley, they’re not a diverse set of people,” Pfeiffer said. This adds a new urgency to the need for diversity in the tech industry. “Our training data sets are growing exponentially, year over year, and they’re being built in a way that doesn’t reflect the potential usage,” Pfeiffer said. “And now is the moment, while these tools and technologies are being developed … [that] we need diverse voices in the mix. We need diverse training data. We need folks who have different perspectives and who understand different interaction design.” When voice recognition gets it wrong Pfeiffer herself has experienced this restriction with the voice recognition technology on her iPhone. She told how when she dictates a text including her daughter’s name, Holly, it is always transcribed as H-O-L-I, which is the spelling for the religious celebration. ... Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Qualys Security Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Qualys Security Conference. Neither Qualys Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)