Not Your Father’s Data Center - Neurodiversity, Data Labeling, and AI

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

In 2022, nearly 21% of persons with a disability were employed, but were much less likely to be employed than a person with no disability. For one company, however, people with disabilities are an untapped talent pool with lots of potential. Growing their data labeling and AI business, Enabled Intelligence looks to build an inclusive environment for those with neurodivergence, as they see what others might not be able to. On this episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center Podcast, CRO and host Raymond Hawkins, chats with Chief People Officer of Enabled Intelligence, Lauren Bacon Smith, about neurodiversity, data labeling, and AI. The two discuss: How tapping into the talent pool of neurodivergent people led Enabled Intelligence to success How Enabled Intelligence is growing their core business How AI modeling helps label the dataset faster   “Yeah, so we actually have a data science team in-house now where we are actually creating some of our own models, so we are kind of having that full life-cycle where we have also done data curation, so clients coming to us, a lot of times have their data already, but we have the ability…to actually go out, get the data, prepare it, annotate it, and then we also are able to create and test our own models,” explained Bacon Smith. Lauren Bacon Smith holds over a decade of experience in program management, human resources, and recruitment. Starting her career in the hospitality and service industry, Bacon Smith spent eight years with Hilton Worldwide as the Senior Manager for Military Programs before joining Enabled Intelligence as the Chief People Officer to help continue fostering a culture of inclusion.

Welcome again to another edition of Not Your Father's Data Center. I think we're like episode 54 or 55 now. I lose track. They'll probably yell at me for naming the number of episodes, but we're in the mid-50s. Today we are joined by Chief People Officer, one of the coolest titles you can have in corporate America, Lauren Bacon-Smith, who is with our friends at Enable Intelligence. Laura, thank you for joining us today. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

So I'm in Dallas, Texas, as always, not always, but almost always when I record. Lauren, where are you? I am in the Washington, D.C. area in Northern Virginia, Falls Church, more specifically. All right. All right. You can see the Capitol from there, can you? Yeah, probably over the tree line. Yeah, not too far away. All right. Very cool. Well, love getting to hang out in D.C. Does frustrate me occasionally. We won't get into politics. We'll just focus on business here today. So give us, before we get into what Enable Intelligence does and how you guys serve your customers and our government,

we'd love to hear a little bit about you. How did you get in the business? How did it get started? Give us a little bit of background on you personally, and then we'll transition into Enable Intelligence. So I, prior to coming to Enable Intelligence, I actually worked for Hilton Hotels for almost nine years, and I helped start up and run their military hiring program there. And we, you know, really just kind of had a really big focus on culture and people and inclusion in general at Hilton. But my main focus was in that military space. So really kind of having a strategic specialized hiring program, hiring and retention program. So when I had the opportunity to be introduced to Peter and find out about Enabled Intelligence and company that he was looking to start up, I was really intrigued with the idea of making a switch from a, you know, 100-year-old massive international company to a brand new startup that really didn't exist yet. So, but, you know, the biggest kind of pull for me was the people side of things.

And the fact that Peter was looking at starting a technology company, but the first person he was looking to hire was a people-focused position. So to me, that really told me that, you know, that that was the type of organization that I was interested in joining. So, you know, Northern Virginia native, grew up in this area, so I've been here most of my whole life and was kind of excited to do something totally different. Gotcha. Yeah, what a switch, a 100-year-old real estate slash hospitality business to an idea. That's a bit of a risk. Would love to hear a little bit of how you decided to take that plunge from a just personal risk perspective. Probably pretty established, pretty stable trajectory of what you would look for in Hilton going to what was nothing more than a concept at the time. That's kind of crazy. It's worked out.

It's still probably a little scary. Yeah, Yeah. Well, I will be totally transparent that I did have the, the push of, uh, COVID and, and the hospitality industry taking a massive hit, but, um, you know, people kept asking me, you know, when I was looking for new opportunities, like, what are you, what industry do you want to work in? What, which companies are you targeting? You know, um, I was very established in the military space. So, um, you know, I think a lot of people were kind of pushing me towards staying in that, the, the military realm. Um, but the, really the biggest things I, when I was sitting there trying to think about what, what it was that I wanted to do next was that I wanted something that I had the ability to build and collaborate on without other leaders that were on the same page about the impact that focusing on people has on your bottom line and on your business.

So I never had considered working for a startup or even probably a company, you know, as small as Enable Intelligence even is now. But once I got introduced to Peter and kind of learned about his vision and, you know, learned about his tenured career and successful career he had had, you know, this is not a startup being run by a 23-year-old, you know, recent grad in Silicon Valley. You know, this is not a startup being run by a 23 year old, you know, recent grad in a, in Silicon Valley, you know, he, you know, has the experience to back this up. So, you know, learning about this opportunity was something that just, you know, really actually aligned with what it was that I was looking for in the opportunity, regardless of the type of company or industry that it was in.

So, you know, I decided to go for it. Very cool. Well, before we get too far down the path of getting into enabled intelligence, let me first say, as a Marine vet myself, I want to say thank you for being concerned with helping my brothers and sisters in arms find out what's next. It is a tough transition. And for our military that's been engaged in armed conflict now for 20 years, I know we wrap things up in Afghanistan, but that was tough. That was tough on the services. And it's difficult to transition from military life to civilian life.

It's even more difficult to transition from combat to corporate life, right? Civilian life that's not involved in combat. And we've got a generation of our military that have been in combat for 20 years. And that transition is hard. And I appreciate you being part of the ecosystem to help them make that transition and that you did that for so long. And that transition is hard. And I appreciate you being part of the ecosystem to help them make that transition and that you did that for so long. Appreciate that. As a vet myself and as the brother to two other Afghan and Iraqi war vets, it's tough to watch them transition. It's hard. Oh, yeah, it is. It was an honor to work in that space and, and, um, you know,

assist such a deserving group of people and, um, definitely, you know, appreciate and grateful for, uh, you and your family service as well. So. Yeah. I think people struggle to understand how, um, how much war impacts the psyche of our fighting forces and how tough it is to transition back. And I think we look and see their struggles and don't understand what's underneath and how hard it is. So your heart for that is important to us, me and to us on this podcast and at Compass. Like you mentioned briefly, you wanted to be focused on people. We're a land development and data center construction business, but we start with our people. We're big focus on culture. We believe culture and people are how the business grows. And that's important to us and would love to transition and let you start to talk about

Peter's vision and what enabled intelligence, what made him have the idea? Why do y'all go about it the way you do? What it is you're doing? Let's start there and we'll build from that point. Yeah, sure. So, you know, I shared with you earlier, I am not a technical person. Obviously, I'm on the people side of things. So the way that I explain what we do here at Enabled Intelligence is definitely more in plain terms. So I guess I'll start there just to kind of, you know, set the stage for what it is that we do here at Enable Intelligence. So we do data labeling and data annotation. Well, that's what we started with and still is the bulk of our business. But the example I always

use is, you know, when you're signing onto a website and you are asked to prove that you are not a robot and, you know, most people use Captcha as the tool to do that. And you're given, you know, the images to select. Which ones have sidewalks? Which one has mountains? Motorcycles or whatever. Right, right, right. Exactly. I've seen it. Yep. Yeah. And they are these to us, like, you know, pretty blurry images that you're looking at. But they're all street level, eye view images. They, someone has had to sit there and label thousands of images of crosswalks or stop signs or, you know, cars or whatever the object is to be able to train the computer to be able to automatically identify those through AI technology. Those images are actually very clear compared to the type of images that we work on. Most of our client base is federal government. So we work a lot within DOD, a lot within the IC community. And we are working more on geospatial imagery, satellite imagery, so aerial imagery, where the objects that we are looking for are much, much harder to identify. And getting into very specifics of not just a car or a plane, but we're looking at, that's a MiG-29, that's a, you know, a very specific type of ship. We're, you know, looking for lots of different types of objects.

Most of what we do is imagery, but we work on full motion video, we work on text, handwriting projects, audio, you know, kind of a wide variety of different types of data. So our annotators are going through and being trained to become experts in identifying these different objects or ontologies and then going through and actually labeling these images to be sent back or labeling the data to be sent back to our clients so they can use that towards creating an AI model to be able to have technology to automatically identify and alert for these different things that they're looking for. idea years prior through working at different technology companies where this kept coming up as an issue where they, to move forward with projects they were given, they needed their data labeled and there wasn't anyone to do it within the U.S. because most of this work tends to be outsourced to overseas where we cannot send, you know, DOD and IC data and information.

So, you know, the kind of concept for the actual technology piece started years ago. You don't want the Russians confirming that's their MiG in the picture? Hey, can you let us know? It looks like your MiG on the – It might be really good at it. Yes, that is a MiG-29. Yeah, exactly. Here you go, United States military.

We're glad to tell you. I get it. Yeah, yeah. So we then started thinking about, okay, you know, what is the workforce going to look like that we're going to hire to do this? And Peter had heard about a program that the Israeli Defense Forces had where in Israel there is two years of mandatory military service for for everyone. And one of the previous disqualifiers were people that were neurodiverse. There's a lot of different things included in neurodiversity, but, you know, one of the more well-known diagnoses within neurodiversity is being on the autism spectrum. So just, you know, for one of the examples, but so, but they created a program, two different programs, but one of them was in their

cybersecurity sector where they started aligning some of their neurodivergent population into this, into this program and started putting them into these programs that they were just really, really excelling at. And some of the characteristics that, you know, they were listing off was, you know, extremely detail-oriented, process-oriented, being able to recognize patterns and, you know, analytical thinking, Not always, but sometimes, you know, more asocial and hyper-focused. So, you know, we started looking at some of the work that we were going to be doing and a lot of these things aligned. And in the U.S., this population also, unfortunately, is a lot of times overlooked. You know, they're either unemployed or underemployed.

So it's also a readily available talent pool to pull from and kind of untapped talent pool to pull from. So we decided that we were going to have a mission to have a focus on hiring people with disabilities and a big focus on that neurodiversity piece. So we set out with a goal to stay at at least 30% people with disabilities. Originally, we had actually planned to have most of our team members with people with disabilities, but after consulting with some different partners in this, in the specialized in this space, we actually were advised to create integrated employment opportunities. So, um, you know, just having, you know, it be a normal job opportunity

and not a specialized program like, program like some other companies are out there doing. So, you know, it's not a different job opportunity. It's not a different set of expectations. It's not a different training program. Everything is the same for everyone, regardless of disability or not. But we have really built our company with all of this in mind on creating a very inclusive environment from our job requirements, the way that we do our screening process to the way that we do training and communicate different things within the company. We have done all of this to try to set up our diverse workforce for success. So Lauren, you said that there's data labeling and data annotating is the core business. What other things have grown from there? What other things are you guys doing? Yeah, so we actually have a data science team in-house now where we are actually creating some of our own models.

So we are kind of having that full lifecycle where we have also done data curation. So clients coming to us a lot of times have their data already, but we have the ability and have had clients that have come to us and asked us to actually go out, get the data, prepare it, annotate it. And then we also are able to create and test our own models, which has, you know, a lot of benefits because we're able to do things a lot more quickly. For example, we have a client that was working on a project that they had been working on for about five years. And we were able to do the amount of work that they had done in six months with a much, much, much lower cost than they had experienced. So now they've just handed all of that over to us because we're able to do it better,

quicker, cheaper than them. So, you know, it's that was always kind of in our plans to continue to grow and then move more into the full life cycle, AI life cycle. But that's happened a little bit quicker, I think, than we had originally planned, which is awesome. Yeah, growing faster than you expected or finding new lines of business sooner than you expected is pretty cool stuff. All right, so help me. I'm going to ask a question, and if I sound dumb, you can tell me I sound dumb. But I get the data labeling. I get annotating, looking at images, helping an AI engine know what they're looking at. How far

into that part of the process? How far into, because I think about this as all a front end or inputs for AI, how far into the AI modeling? I know you said you started doing your own data science group. How far into AI modeling do you guys get? Are you really just providing the inputs? Yeah, it depends. I mean, most of what we're doing is providing the client back that fully labeled and QC'd data, and then they take that and put it into a model that they've built. But on the projects where we are doing actually building the model for them, testing the model, it's, you know, we are doing that full piece for them and then handing them back that full model with the annotated data in it and actually a trained model. So it's not just built, tested, but then it's also the model has been trained. And is most of this stuff, you mentioned DOD and IC, is most of what you do tented? Is most of it SCIF-related work? It's a mix. So we actually just moved into

brand new office space that we built out, including the secure space. Well, it was in the fall. So we are, you know, kind of ramping up on the secured work. And because, you know, there's very limited resources besides us in that area, I think, you know, that could quickly take over the unclassed work. Gotcha. So let's tie this back. So you, Chief People Officer, which, by the way, love the fact that you were hire number one, employee number two. So as you staff up this work, and I hear it when you talk about, hey, we're not going to have unique job descriptions for neurodiverse

employees versus other employees. We're going to have a job description and we're going to mix the teams. I think that's a super healthy way to look at it. Can you talk to me as the chief people officer? This is human capital you're deploying, right? You're having to have someone look at and label that you're doing this with human beings. What's it been like to lead the development of that team and the makeup of that team? Because employee number two, you've been in the primary chair from day one. So talk about it from a people perspective. Yeah. So we really tried to look at what was actually going to be needed for success

in this role and success as a team and pull back everything else. You know, and a lot of those things that we're pulling back are barriers for people that have not just neuro, not just neurodiversity, but, you know, people with other disabilities or just other, you know, I don't even want to call them limitations, but just diverse backgrounds in the sense of, you know, I don't even want to call them limitations, but just diverse backgrounds in the sense of, you know, like college degrees. We do not require college degrees. We do not require previous IT experience, annotation experience. To be totally honest, we really don't require like any previous working experience at all, because there was, I mean, of course, there are certain types of experience and certain degrees or certain certifications

that definitely will be beneficial and, and can make a stronger candidate for us. But we were pretty confident in the fact of that all of the training that we, we give to our team members is in-house. So when you do that and you kind of take somebody that's more green and you're able to really mold them and build them with how we do things and our, um, you know, technical view on things and, and the knowledge that we want them to have and, and strategy that we want them to use versus maybe even some of our competitors. We've seen that some of our most successful and highest performing team members are people that have no working experience or no relative working experience or degrees. So we've really just tried to strip away those things we've stripped away.

You know, every job description says strong verbal and written communication skills required. It's like, why? You know, for certain jobs, sure, of course. But, um, for a lot of them, is that actually something that the person needs to be successful. And, you know, in the neurodiversity space, you know, not everyone, but a lot of people, you know, they might struggle making eye contact, they might not be big verbal communicators. So we have, you know, really taken away these requirements and expectations and kind of the way that we view and evaluate candidates on like what, how they're actually going to be successful. And we really just look at

what their potential is to be successful in the role versus what their past was. So, you know, it's looking at, are they able to follow directions? Are they able to absorb the type of training that we're going to be doing? Are they able to have kind of that analytical thinking and focus that it takes to do this type of work. And the way that we evaluate that is that we've kind of reversed our recruiting process where the first thing that we do is a technical assessment versus a lot of people having assessments at the end of a recruiting process. Because for us, like a resume, there's not really much on a resume that matters, you know, that tells us if they're going to be a good fit for us or not. That assessment also is kind of two-sided where it lets the candidate see,

is this the type of work that I could see myself doing every day for, you know, 40 hours a week, because our jobs are full-time and it's not for everyone, you know, it is it can be definitely straining. It can be repetitive. So, you know, depending on the type of data, like it's you know, it's definitely not not for everyone. So that's you know, we want to give them an opportunity to to test out the type of work that they would be doing as well. Have you seen the series Severance on streaming? I think it's on Apple Plus. No, but I have heard of it.

Yeah, there's a group in that building that does data analysis. And you're talking about all-day repetitiveness. It makes me think of that show, that department in Severance, where they're looking at computer screens eight hours a day, five days a week, just moving data around. It reminds me of what you're describing. So if you've not seen severance or audience has, it may not resonate, but that's team members can avoid burnout and, you know, keeping themselves healthy with, you know, getting up and encouraging them to take, you know, at least 10

minutes an hour, you know, moving around. We got them all stand up desks in our new office space. And we have different like kind of decompression rooms that they utilize a lot throughout the day where they can go in and it's just a private space where they can sit. And, you know, a lot of them have started taking power naps, which, you know, we are totally supportive of whatever, you know, people need to be productive,

which we know is different for everyone um and we really try to um you know enable them to do that so um we have very flexible schedules we have some people that come in as early as 5 6 a.m and they're leaving you know in the afternoon to 2 p.m we have people come in at 9 30 and stay till 7 um. We also put in place a four-day work week for people that want it. So some of our team members work 10-hour days and Monday through Thursday, and they don't come in on Fridays. So, you know, we tried a few different things with scheduling. And then we said, you know, let's just pull it all back and give them basically as much flexibility as we can. They can come and go whenever they want. They don't have to tell us when they're coming and going. And it's been amazing for them. It's

worked really well. It's, you know, a few of them that were struggling with their schedules before, it just kind of resolved all that. So, you know, that's one of those things that I think it's like you have to sometimes take a little bit of a risk and try something different too that can make a big impact for your team instead of being so stuck in like this is how we've always done it. So, you know, we can't even think about doing something different. So, Lauren, I love thinking about it from the people angle. I'm going to ask you one more people question.

You've brought up autism. You use the phrase neurodiverse. I'm going to admit that in my data center business, we don't use that term. I don't know technically probably what it means really well. But I think about people that are ADHD. For me, I'm severely dyslexic. You know, talking on the podcast. No one would ever know. Yeah, yeah. No one would know talking on a podcast. But if you see me try to write something

on a whiteboard and people look at it and they go, Raymond, I don't think all those letters are in the right place. Right. And it'll take me two or three times to, you know, so is that does it does it include that is the circle that big? That's what I was trying to spit out. Disorders. But yeah, all of that, there's a lot more included are neurodivergent with different coaching, therapy, and kind of life skills and job placement. She always talks about we're all neurodiverse. Like we all think differently. Our brains all work differently. And that's really the kind of outlook that we take here is that we just try to create a very inclusive space

and not focus on a disability or neurodiversity. We are just trying to make it as much space as possible for people to be themselves and be comfortable being themselves and have different ways of doing things, different ways of communicating, different ways of learning, different schedules. You know, and I think that's something that everyone should be looking at applying to the space for them to really be themselves, you are going to get so much more out of them. And you are going to create a place where people want to stay and you're not going to have that high turnover where it's just another place for them to work. If you treat them like just another employee and just one of the many, then that's, for them, they could get that anywhere. Well, I'll say this, Lauren. I needed you guys in my corner when I was in school because every time I'd get a bad grade, I'd explain to my teacher, hey, I just think differently. And they would generally say, Raymond, it's because you

didn't do your homework, which there was probably some truth to that, too. But it could have been. I thought differently. It could have been a little of both. So we definitely have a technology audience. I know you and I both said up front, you know, we're not we're not this is not necessarily a tech conversation. But but AI is a is a big technology buzzword. It's something everybody's thinking about. You know, we talk about the chips and the computers.

And, you know, I think it's in the news today. You see, I want to make sure I say, right, chat, GPT, right? And these engines that can help have conversations and help writing and write poems and write music, right? AI is certainly, I think, in the news. So tell me what you guys at Enabled Intelligence do. Let's not get lost too much in widgets and flux capacitors, but what is it that you guys do? How are you helping enable this AI influence on our world today? Yeah, you're right. It is definitely,

and that chat GBT thing is every day I see some new headline about something that it's doing. It's definitely, you know, an exciting world to be in. And we, I really think are just at the tip of the iceberg of how this technology is going to be used. Every day we're hearing from different potential clients, even in the commercial space and like the medical field, looking at different types of x-rays, looking at insurance companies and paperwork and verifying things using, you know, everyone's looking at how we can do things quicker and more efficiently and, you know, cheaper. So, and AI is going to enable that in a lot of different fields. Can we get the IRS to use AI to get our returns process faster? Just a suggestion. Honestly, probably eventually.

I mean, you're in D.C. If you know somebody, if you could run by and mention it, I mean, just a suggestion. Yeah. You know, we should talk to our CFO about that and see if maybe you can do some business development and just go ahead and reach out. Yeah, that'd be a good suggestion. I'm just thinking out the box here. Yeah, but, you know, like with the built bulk of our business being on the federal, you know, national security side of things, that really is, you know, one of our, you know, that's part of our mission statement is improving national security and enabling our clients to be able to

mobilize these AI tools with the data that we are providing back to them, that often we're learning projects that have been sitting for years and years because they have not been able to move forward without this first step in the piece. So, you know, that's something that our team members take a lot of pride in as well, um, is, you know, the, the work that they're doing and, you know, as much as we can, we share with them about what, you know, what the client is doing with this and what the mission is, um, so that they, you know, they're not just sitting there drawing boxes around images. They know that this work is very impactful in the space we're in. Very cool stuff.

Well, Lauren, this has been awesome. I appreciate you chatting with us about it and helping us understand a little bit about how people are the most important thing and we all think differently and how this can help keep our nation secure and keeping our secrets where they need to be. We really, really appreciate you chatting with us and we'll remind everybody all this stuff eventually happens in a data center somewhere, which is why we like talking about it. So Lauren, excited to see the future of Enable Intelligence and as you guys grow and serve not only our country, but your your people and your pretty cool stuff and

appreciate how you all think about it thank you for having uh joining us today we appreciate it