To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. Amba Kak is the executive director of the AI Now Institute, where she helps create policy recommendations to address AI concerns. It's not a straightforward question because "AI" is a term that's in vogue to describe practices and systems that have been evolving for a long time now; I've been working on technology policy for over a decade and in multiple parts of the world and witnessed when everything was about "big data," and then everything became about "AI".