Ayanna Howard

Ayanna Howard (born 1972) has built AI systems across nearly every setting the field offers: navigation intelligence for Mars rovers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, robotics research as a professor and school chair at Georgia Tech, and Zyrobotics, the company she founded to make AI-powered therapy and learning robots for children with special needs. In 2021 she became dean of Ohio State’s College of Engineering — the first woman to hold the job — and in 2026 was named the next president of Spelman College.

Building AI, and studying why we trust it

Howard’s signature research finding is “overtrust”: in her simulated-emergency experiments, people followed a guide robot even when it led them away from clearly marked exits. Her book “Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI” (2020) traces how bias enters AI “in the data and the human developers and in the outcomes.” She led the “How to Trust Technology” session at Davos in January 2024.

Her stance is builder’s optimism with engineer’s discipline: she tells interviewers AI can upskill displaced workers, advance sustainable agriculture, and personalize medicine — while insisting workers be retrained so “they’re the discipline experts, and AI becomes the tool.” Her warnings about bias and overtrust are design requirements, not reasons to stop building.