Indiana Women in Tech Week 3 - Data Still Needs People | Toni Holcombe on AI and Data

Hey, welcome back to the AGI podcast. Episode three of Indiana's Women in Tech Week, which I am just so honored to be interviewing somebody every day of the week because I've said a million times if we're going to develop nuclear level technology like artificial intelligence, we better not just have a bunch of testosterone Silicon Valley bros at the table. And second, I have three daughters. And so empowering women in STEM and tech has always been something that I was that I've been passionate about. I go to an AI and coffee meeting in Fishers. That's been a pretty big gathering. And this last week, I got to meet Tony Holcomb, who is a woman in data. Is that even more rare than a woman in the dev world? Introduce yourself and give us a little bit of your story, Tony.

Well, hi, my name is Toni and I am very honored to be here. When you asked me to be on the show, I was like, what, me? Really? And then, so I find it really weird that you think it is odd for a woman to be in data because that has been like very normal for me.

Well, when I go to the chief data officer's meeting, I don't see a large portion of. So I'm kind of an outlander when it comes to data. That I will definitely admit. So I could definitely be wrong. I was lucky enough to ask about something that you and I were talking about off camera when they started the chief data officer's meeting. I was working for a community paramedicine company and trying to basically, for a small business, create an AI native environment. in a HIPAA-safe environment. And I went and asked some questions at a booth they had for the chief data officer, and they're like, you should just come to our group. And so I do, and I just sit there and learn all the time. But yeah, I have a much better finger on the pulse of the developer's world than I do the data world. So it sounds like I'm wrong on that, and that it is highly infused with women.

I don't know if I'd be highly abused. I know that there are a lot of women that I am connected with that do do data. So I guess we'll start at the beginning. I started my career in tech, and I'm going to date myself here, working as tech support for Gateway. You remember Gateway Computers, the Cal computers? I was at Gateway, yes. Yes. I did tech support way back in the day. And after that, we moved, we did some moving and I ended up being a paralegal for a number of years. And that was a really rewarding career. I got to work with families dealing with high emotional, high value conflicts. And I found myself at a crossroads. It was either go to law school, which I wanted to do. and become a lawyer, which I did not want to do, or pivot. And I ended up in a role at a construction company. It was called Data Specialist, which was basically just data entry. And about a year into that, I was like, this is ridiculous. This is so hard to do it this way. There has to be a better way. So I started teaching myself Python. And I looked through the programming at WGU and decided that what I needed to do was complete my bachelor's degrees to get that foundational technical background. I got my A+, my network+, all of those fun certificates. And then that's when I moved on to the