Maintaining Human Intelligence in an AI World

Elise Houlik is the Chief Privacy Officer at Intuit, where she leads the company's global privacy and responsible data innovation and protection strategy, ensuring data is used to safely power innovation across Intuit's ecosystem of financial technology products. Her team is deeply engaged with the business on all matters related to product development, data innovation and governance, and information security.

In this episode…

Legal and privacy professionals are using AI more often to save time and accomplish more in their day-to-day work. While these tools offer clear advantages, they also generate convincing outputs that are incomplete, generic, or factually wrong. Using AI responsibly requires professionals to apply human judgment and review the output closely to ensure it is accurate and supported before relying on it. As AI becomes more embedded in legal and privacy work, critical thinking skills remain just as important as knowing how to use the technology. 

Professionals get the most value from AI when they view it as a collaborator, rather than an authority. As privacy and legal teams use AI to kickstart analysis, pull facts together, and hunt for nuances across fragmented laws, they need to compare its answers against actual laws and reputable sources and challenge the tool when an output misses the mark instead of accepting it at face value. Being mindful about the personal information they put into public models is equally important. Professionals should also be comfortable using a variety of different tools and learning which ones fit different purposes. And as companies hire the next generation of tech-savvy professionals, they need to ensure they don't become overly reliant on AI and provide them with hands-on experience and exposure to real conversations that strengthen analytical skills.

In this episode of She Said Privacy/He Said Security, Jodi and Justin Daniels speak with Elise Houlik, Chief Privacy Officer at Intuit, about the importance of maintaining human intelligence in the age of AI. Elise shares how AI is changing the skills employers value in legal and privacy professionals and explains why human judgment, curiosity, and a willingness to challenge AI-generated answers are essential as these tools become a standard part of workflows. She highlights why junior professionals still need practical experience and peer-to-peer learning opportunities and shares her perspective on keeping human intelligence at the center of how professionals use AI. Elise also offers tips for building AI skills and experimenting with different tools.