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Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy
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Mary Davis, CEO of Special Olympics, wants the people she represents to “have a seat at the table” as AI evolves. In this episode of the Me, Myself, and AI podcast, Davis talks about her organization’s mission along with the growing role of AI and how it’s crucial to ensure that people with intellectual disabilities — a group often overlooked in tech discussions — are included in AI development.
Special Olympics helps people with intellectual disabilities through sports, education, and leadership programs. Its Unified Champion Schools program is an inclusive education initiative that benefits all students, both those with and without intellectual disabilities, reduces bullying, and improves academic performance.
Mary also shares the results of a study conducted by the Special Olympics and Harvard University citing strong support from parents, teachers, and the athletes themselves to use AI to support people with intellectual disabilities, especially in educational contexts. She sees AI as a powerful tool for “leveling the playing field” and describes specific applications that the Special Olympics is using for employees and athletes.
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Transcript
Shervin Khodabandeh: Stay tuned after today’s episode to hear Sam and I break down the key points made by our guest.
Sam Ransbotham: Artificial intelligence offers the promise of extreme personalization that may help all of us learn better. But we need to make sure “all of us” really means all of us. On today’s episode, find out how one organization is using AI tools to empower diverse student populations and the emotional benefits that can bring to all of us.
Mary Davis: I’m Mary Davis from Special Olympics, and you’re listening to Me, Myself, and AI.
Sam Ransbotham: Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence in business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I’m Sam Ransbotham, professor of analytics at Boston College. I’m also the AI and business strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.
Shervin Khodabandeh: And I’m Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities, and really transform the way organizations operate.
Sam Ransbotham: Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Today, Shervin and I are talking with Mary Davis. She’s the CEO of the Special Olympics. Thanks for being here today, Mary.
Mary Davis: Great, Sam. I’m delighted to be here.
Sam Ransbotham: What we found interesting about your work is not just the mission of Special Olympics, which maybe we’re all a little bit familiar with, but also the work you’re doing in schools. Before we get into that, let’s get some background.
First, explain what Special Olympics is, what the organization’s mission is, and how that ties to education.
Mary Davis: We’re a global sports movement. We’re a large organization existing around the world. We’re in 200 countries altogether. We have over 4 million athletes involved in our program and over a million volunteers. We offer 30 Olympic-type sports. We have nearly 60,000 games and competition events every year, so you can imagine how much of a grassroots program we are.
And, of course, we have the big events. We have World Games that happen alternately every two years, both Summer Games and Winter Games, similar to the Olympics. But really what differentiates us is the grassroots nature of our program and the programs that we offer in terms of not just sport but education.
Really, we’re here to end discrimination of people with intellectual disability. And we do that through using the power of sport and programming in other areas, like education that you mentioned, health, and leadership. And we use that to foster acceptance of all people.
Basically, what we do is create an environment whereby our athletes, through our sports training and competition events, can be the very best they can be and excel. The other thing we do is [considering there are] 3% of people with intellectual disability in the world, how do we work with the other 97% so that we can live in a world where people with intellectual disability are valued, are accepted, are respected for the skills and talents and abilities that they have, and that they bring to society and that benefit society hugely?
We’re in schools. And we have, again, through the power of sport, an amazing Unified Champion Schools program. It’s an inclusive education program for children and students with and without intellectual disability, so that students without intellectual disability can benefit from those talents and skills that our athletes show.
The other thing we know is that it works across all cultures, all geographies. So, our programming is the same, whether it’s in the U.S., in China, in India, in Kenya, or in Greece. And it benefits the students in exactly the same way.
Sam Ransbotham: Our show, of course, is Me, Myself, and AI, so we’re particularly interested in how that might intersect with artificial intelligence. Those are wonderful objectives and I see the appeal of them. But what I didn’t see was a connection between what you’re doing and artificial intelligence, but I know there’s a connection. Fill us in.
Mary Davis: Absolutely, there’s a connection. While AI is coming down the tracks for all of us, no matter whether we like it or not, we really want to ensure — as it does progress and there are more and more platforms and policies and programs in AI — that people with intellectual disability are included, that we have a seat at the table when it comes to AI.
Is anybody considering the needs or the perspectives of people with intellectual disability? Oftentimes, what we find is attention in these areas are given to physical disability, which is critically important, of course, and it should be. But our intellectual friends are forgotten, are not counted, because they’re not seen. They’re not as visible as, say, people with other disabilities.
So, we went searching to see [if] anybody [was] considering the inclusion and the perspectives of people with intellectual disability. To be honest, we didn’t find very much information in that regard. We took it upon ourselves then. When we couldn’t identify anything, we decided to do some research ourselves, and we found that [to be] very useful, in terms of our whole community.
For example, we found that our athletes were incredibly excited by the opportunity to be involved in discussions around AI. Our community of parents and teachers recognize the enormous potential that AI can play and how it can help a young person with intellectual disability. And a significant majority of parents — in fact, 84% — and teachers believe that it’s important for young people with intellectual disability to develop AI skills for their future development.
Shervin Khodabandeh: Mary, first of all, I wanted to thank you for taking on this role. Many of us and many of our listeners have people with intellectual or physical disabilities. Your mission is quite inspiring. Thank you for that.
I’ve read the research, which I would say is more optimistic than pessimistic, if I were to summarize it. In other words, it does appear to me that technology in general, over time, has been helpful to people with physical or intellectual disabilities. I would imagine [it’s] the same with AI, but would love to sort of double-click on this a little bit more.
First of all, [I would like to know] whether my characterization that the research was probably a little bit more optimistic than pessimistic is true. And then secondly, where do you see the opportunities and the challenges?
Mary Davis: Thank you, Shervin. Yes, you’re right. The research indeed was pretty optimistic, particularly among parents and teachers and students with intellectual disability or our athletes themselves. When you consider that 77% of parents and 79% of teachers expressed excitement about AI and the possibilities of making it more accessible for people with intellectual disability, that’s a pretty high percentage. And there was also a very high percentage among parents and teachers that [said] AI has the potential to close educational gaps between students with and without intellectual disability by making it easier for people with intellectual disability to learn.
What we did find, though, in terms of not being so optimistic was that only 35% of educators believed that developers — the people developing AI platforms — account for the needs and priorities of students with intellectual disability. So that brings me back to the point at the beginning when I said that our population needs to have a seat at the table.
No matter what seminar or summit or conference you go to these days, there is always talk about AI and how helpful it can be to everybody. I attended the G7 Summit in Italy recently. It was the first time there was a summit for ministers of disability. It was great to see that AI and assistive technology were included in that. What I would say for the future is to ensure that we have people with intellectual disability voicing their opinions and their desires and their needs as well.
Sam Ransbotham: As I think about the way the market tends to work, there’s a parallel here with security: People develop products, and they want features first. And then they’ll make it secure if they have time, and everything works out wonderfully.
As I think about your numbers of 97% and 3%, it’s not surprising to me at all that the market is going to chase the 97% first and [think], “Oh, yeah, we’ll think about the 3% later.” But does that later ever come? I think that’s what you’re trying to push us on a little bit, to say, “Pay attention to that 3% first.” But that seems like a natural market problem. How do we solve that?
Mary Davis: We need to include that 3%. That 3% is roughly about 200 million [people], so when you don’t include that 3%, you’re actually excluding a huge number in terms of the general population.
But the other thing that we have found, and particularly through the work we’re doing in schools and our Unified Schools program, is when you’re involved in working with people with intellectual disability and listening to their views and making adaptations, these are adaptations that help everybody to learn — not just people with intellectual disability but people without intellectual disability. And we have found this in the work that we’ve done in schools.
You may think 3% is not that much. But the knock-on effect [is] that this type of teaching and this type of education benefits all students. And we have found that bullying has been reduced, for example, in schools as a result, and test scores are better. Our students are performing better because they’re working in an inclusive environment.
There’s so much talk about AI now and how it can be used in academic settings that we’ve got to look at how we reimagine teaching in the future. We perhaps need to concentrate a bit more on the emotional learning of the students as well as the academic side. Because you can get so much in terms of knowledge now through AI, but who’s teaching empathy? Who’s teaching young people to be courageous in their actions? Who’s teaching dignity now? More and more, we see division all around us. So how do we heal that? And how do we teach our young people how to do that?
We did a lot of research with Harvard University. What we found was that we can teach all of these things, like empathy, like perspective taking, like courageous action and moral courage. We could teach those through our Unified Schools program so that young people are going out into the workplace with a more inclusive mindset than ever before.
Sam Ransbotham: That’s a beautiful redirect because that 3% is not a clean cut between, oh, it’s only the 3% of the 97%. You’re pointing out that it’s 100%.
Shervin Khodabandeh: The 3% is massive, right? I know, Sam, you didn’t imply that 3% is too small. Many big business opportunities have been built on 3% or 1% or 50 basis points. So, 3% is massive, but the network effects, as Mary talked about, are actually probably even bigger. When you are designing with diversity in mind, there will be the products that you design, and the kinds of interactions and features that come out of that kind of a design objective are going to benefit the society at large. That’s a very important point.
I want to talk about some of the emotional aspects that you talked about — empathy for example. What do you see as the role of technology there? There’s an argument that technology is actually counterproductive to that. I’m curious, what do you think the role of technology would be on some of these emotional or interpersonal attributes?
Mary Davis: I think that it can help level the playing field in many ways, particularly for people with intellectual disability. And I’ll give you some examples in terms of the work that we are doing ourselves here at [our] headquarters.
We introduced [Microsoft’s] Copilot right across the board for our staff, including the number of staff that we have with intellectual disability. They saw greater benefit and impact from AI than our average users. For example, they felt they saved, I think, twice as many hours as opposed to their coworkers. So, I think making it easier for everyone to do certain tasks can help toward some of the areas that I mentioned in terms of the emotional side of somebody’s learning.
Also, we’re going to be using Copilot as a coach assistant. So, we have a registration program where all of our athletes register, and their parents can register. Their coaches can register. They can register themselves, but sometimes it can be complex. And we are now introducing this … easy-read chat agent who’s going to be able to navigate them through filling in forms. It empowers them to do it themselves rather than depending on their parents or depending on a coach, etc. And we’re also looking at virtual coaching support, and rolling that out toward the end of 2025/2026, to help improve the reach and the scalability of our coach-education efforts.
Shervin Khodabandeh: We see that in the world of people without disabilities, too, right? We see this in the creative domains, as well, where photography is one of the greatest examples. To be a good photographer, you not only had to be creative and have a good vision for your subject and light and all the artistic factors, you also had to be a very good technician and know what to do.
You still do, but there are many photographers who would not have made a name for themselves, for example, because they did not have either access to the best technical tools or the training required.
Mary Davis: Exactly. I agree 100%. By simplifying the complexity of technology, I think that’s going to speed up adoption for everybody. It’s not everything, of course, because human connection is so important. In the same way as the general population, our athletes are dealing with loneliness, depression, and navigating their health rights, their health needs. All of us share in those struggles. AI can help, of course. It can be a huge asset. But AI must operate in the service of human connection as well and never be a replacement for us.
Shervin Khodabandeh: Honestly, one of my biggest fears is the ability and the accessibility of AI to be a replacement. Even today, ChatGPT is sometimes a replacement. You see 12-year-olds having conversations with [AI tools] that they should be having with their parents, with their friends.
Mary Davis: Of course, you do, in the same way though as we did with the internet. But the more educated people are in relation to them, the better it is, and the more everybody is involved in creating equity. If used incorrectly or if people with intellectual disability aren’t included in the conversations and their needs and their thoughts and their desires aren’t taken into account, you can just automate ableism. And that’s certainly something that we do not want to do.
Shervin Khodabandeh: In many ways, AI is the greatest equalizer to date, right? Both in terms of physical and intellectual disabilities in many, many use cases.
Mary Davis: It can be and that’s exactly what we’ve noticed among our population in all of the areas that we’re trying. Of course, we are including them. We are asking them and finding out what their needs are. But many of them have said their lives have changed as a result of the rollout of Copilot. Now, they feel equal in terms of being able to write an email and express themselves in a way that’s similar to everybody else, which may have been somewhat of a challenge for them prior to that.
Through the easy-read [chat agent], they can understand an awful lot better and they can have a lot more input. And also, when you get long emails, for any of us, sometimes they’re difficult to decipher. But you can imagine for a person with intellectual disability [who] doesn’t have a support system in place, it can be very challenging. But Copilot can help to synthesize that information for them. So, it’s very, very useful in those terms.
Sam Ransbotham: A theme that I like about what you’re saying is this idea of empowerment, and I hadn’t quite connected those until we had this conversation today. … [When] we think about assistance, helping people, I have to say the mental model is having workers do things faster than they could before, but you’re offering a vision of empowerment in general that is, I think, refreshing, and it’s pretty exciting. Tomorrow morning, if I’m the wishgiver and I give you wishes, and you wake up tomorrow morning, what would developers be doing differently than they’re doing right now?
You get to decide right now. We have massive reach and we have huge influence here. What are you going to change just through this podcast? What will people do differently based on this?
Mary Davis: Please listen and involve. We have a [tagline] that’s called “Choose to Include.” And just everybody, in everything they do every day, can choose to include the thoughts, the feelings, the desires, the needs of people with intellectual disability. Just think about this population, because failure to listen to them and [understand] their needs results in locking out that 3% — those 200 million people are locked out of what’s the most revolutionary technology since the internet or since the computer. That’s one big message that I would have for people.
Shervin Khodabandeh: If I may build on that message, I also feel like the motivation to do it should be not just to include, but there’s a lot to be gained from this, right? This is 3% with unique and differentiated perspectives and very diverse experiences and thoughts and ideas that it’s not only the right thing to do to include them, but it’s also accretive to even the economic goals of our product managers and developers.
Mary Davis: There’s a very strong economic case for this in terms of return on investment. Investing in AI and assistive technology for people with intellectual disabilities has something like a nine-times economic return. We gain $9 on every $1 spent. So, that should certainly be a very strong incentive from an economic perspective, as well as from a social perspective and the impact that has in creating equity, which is so incredibly important.
Sam Ransbotham: I see in classrooms that there’s a dispersion of people’s backgrounds coming into the classroom, and they’re not two groups that we can cleanly separate or that we should cleanly separate.
The theme that Shervin and I’ve had on the show is the idea of personalized education. We started with Duolingo and with others. The idea is we don’t have to deliver the same educational component to every single person. And what you’re saying is, make that as broad as possible, but there’s also a huge push or benefit to granularity in this. I think that feels pretty exciting, too.
Mary Davis: I think it is. I think we’re all more alike than we’re different. And it’s only when you put those together that you actually see that we’re more alike. People with intellectual disability have exactly the same desires, the same interests, the same need for education, yet they’re denied a lot of those because, for some reason, they’re seen as, you know, not able or not capable. It’s when you have situations of inclusive education in schools that you see the socialization happening.
We always say we’re an organization from which our athletes teach us so much. They’re the greatest teachers in the world if we just include them and let them express themselves in the way that they do, by providing those supports for them so that they can do that and do it in a very confident way — that they’re not feeling less than somebody else, because they shouldn’t. We see through our sports program that they have so much talent — the grit, the determination, the courage, the joy that they bring as well are all things that are evident when you have young people with and without intellectual disability playing together on the same playing field.
Shervin Khodabandeh: The joy was the word that I was looking for you to say, because I also feel, in addition to all of the moral imperative to be inclusive, I actually think the perspectives and the experiences bring so much to the group, whether that’s a classroom or whether that’s a working environment, or whatever it is. We’d be remiss not to know those perspectives or not collaborate or cooperate or work with a group that brings very diverse and differentiated perspectives.
Mary, the program is called Me, Myself, and AI. I feel we didn’t really get to know much about you. So, maybe you tell us a bit about your background and how you ended up where you are today.
Mary Davis: I’m a teacher by profession. The day I left college, I started to work in a special school and I got involved in Special Olympics. As a result of that, I worked as a volunteer in Special Olympics for about 10 years. You probably know by my accent that I’m from Ireland. I got involved in the Irish program as the first national director, having spent 10 years being a volunteer in the program. Then I just progressed, stayed involved with Special Olympics as a staff member with Special Olympics Ireland. During that time, we bid to host the first World Games to be held outside the United States. That was in 2003. We had a very successful event. I moved over to be the CEO of those games.
Then I moved on to work with Europe/Eurasia for nine or 10 years. And then I got a call to come to headquarters and be the global CEO. It was really interesting coming here and seeing the perspectives from where I sit now as the global CEO and where I was in terms of either working with one program or working in a region.
And you know what? The challenges are the same the world over, but it’s, of course, how we surmount those, how we overcome them, how we work with that cooperative spirit and joy [that] spring us forward.
Sam Ransbotham: What made you think that artificial intelligence might have a role in this? How did you make that connection?
Mary Davis: Because I’m passionate about finding out more about it. I really do believe that it can be transformational for our population. I’ve seen it in action through the number of steps that we’ve taken ourselves. I want to learn more about how we can provide more opportunities through AI because I’m on the optimistic side of the value of AI rather than on the pessimistic side.
Shervin Khodabandeh: Mary, I’m going to transition us now to a segment called five questions. I’m going to ask you five questions in rapid-fire style, and you tell us the first thing that comes to your mind. We’re looking for sort of short and impromptu responses from you. Ready?
Mary Davis: OK.
Shervin Khodabandeh: What do you see as the biggest opportunities for AI right now?
Mary Davis: How it empowers people to learn faster, to do their work better and more efficiently, and I think that it’s going to help collaboration as well.
Shervin Khodabandeh: What is the biggest misconception about AI? What do people get wrong?
Mary Davis: That it’s not a benefit to teach AI, that there are issues around it. I think it’s like everything, if it’s taught with the right meaning and the right attitude, then it can be transformational.
Shervin Khodabandeh: What was the first career you wanted? What did you want to be when you grew up?
Mary Davis: A teacher.
Shervin Khodabandeh: No pause there.
Mary Davis: No pause there, no.
Shervin Khodabandeh: When is there too much AI?
Mary Davis: Well, too much of anything isn’t good. If we start substituting AI for human connection, I think that can be problematic. Nothing really can replace that human touch, but it can be enhanced by AI.
Shervin Khodabandeh: What is the one thing you wish AI could do right now that it cannot?
Mary Davis: I look forward to the time when we can use AI to improve the lives of our most disadvantaged population. I talk particularly about people with both very severe intellectual and physical capacity. I think if we have the proper tools and robotics, that can be transformative for that population.
Shervin Khodabandeh: Well said.
Sam Ransbotham: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. What’s interesting is you’ve pointed out that these potential benefits transcend the particular focal population. I think that’s a really powerful message, including the idea that it empowers all of us to be better. That’s across the spectrum. Those are some great points from today’s discussion. And I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. Thanks for stopping by.
Mary Davis: Thank you, Sam. It was a pleasure to speak to both of you.
Shervin Khodabandeh: It was a real pleasure. Thank you.
Sam Ransbotham: Often Shervin and I talk to people who are doing incredibly interesting and fascinating technical things. We pull people from companies doing complicated things. Today’s episode was refreshing, for sure. We felt like we picked up on a perspective that we’re not usually exposed to, and I think we both enjoyed it.
Shervin Khodabandeh: One of the beautiful things about what she’s doing is seeing a need, and she’s seeing an opportunity. And she’s making connections and going after it with a curious mind. She’s an educator, she’s a teacher, she always wanted to be a teacher. There was no pause when we were doing the five questions. “What did you want to be when you grow up?” “Teacher.” A defining attribute of a good teacher is a person who’s curious at heart and wants to learn. And kudos to her for doing so much and bringing so much to the Special Olympics and its mission with AI.
Sam Ransbotham: This is certainly a different perspective, and it is synchronous with her message of empowerment.
Shervin Khodabandeh: That’s right.
Sam Ransbotham: She’s a teaching-first person.
Shervin Khodabandeh: I also feel like that’s where the real opportunity is. I mean, the opportunity is on the usage and on the adoption and on the design. That is often the missing perspective, right? We keep talking about GPUs and processors and more data, and various types of learning and inference systems and all that, which is all exciting and interesting. But at the end of the day, the rubber meets the road at the use case, and that’s what she’s doing. I would say that’s really brilliant.
The other thing I find in her message, which resonates probably the most with me, is that a conversation about inclusion is often an ethical conversation, a moral conversation. There’s an imperative, the right thing to do, to be inclusive of whatever group that you’re talking about, right?
So, we talk about the 3% and the 97%. We’d be well served to be inclusive, but I think the big message here is actually quite accretive to the rest of us. The perspectives and the values and the points of view of that 3% is incredibly helpful and accretive and illuminating to the 97%. I think that’s where I see people benefiting tremendously from it.
I think that we gain a lot from opening up our minds, and we grow that way. And I think that’s a huge opportunity. This was, I would say, of all of the podcasts we’ve done, one of the most positive and inspiring ones for me.
Sam Ransbotham: Thanks for joining us. Next time, we will feature conversations with Microsoft, Meta, the Partnership on AI, NASA, and GitHub. It is an episode chock-full of goodness. Join us as we learn about the state of generative AI, past and present.
Allison Ryder: Thanks for listening to Me, Myself, and AI. Our show is able to continue, in large part, due to listener support. Your streams and downloads make a big difference. If you have a moment, please consider leaving us an Apple podcasts review or a rating on Spotify. And share our show with others you think might find it interesting and helpful.
