The Women Driving AI: Why Team Design Is the Real Competitive Edge

Your AI Pilot Didn’t Fail. Your Culture Did. It’s a Team Design Challenge.

Most execs blame tools when the real blocker is internal alignment, legacy KPIs, or political landmines.
According to BCG, 70% of digital transformations fail—and AI is proving to be no different. If you’re serious about building responsible, high-performing AI systems, start by looking at who’s in the room.

Because the data keeps saying what many leaders already know:

• Gender-diverse teams build better software

• They catch more blind spots

• They design more trustworthy systems

But those outcomes don’t happen by accident. They’re not a natural byproduct of “good culture.”
They happen when women have authority, influence, and a voice at every stage: from architecture to deployment.

They are not a byproduct of good PR.
They happen through actual inclusion, when its operationalized; when women have authority, influence, and a voice at every stage of the process, from architecture to deployment.

So no, this is not a “women in tech” blog or puff piece.
It is a spotlight on the builders, ethicists, regulators, and funders who are actively shaping the future of AI, not from the sidelines but from the front lines.

Because when you build AI with only half the perspective, you do not just miss the mark.

You manufacture risk.

Who are the Women Driving AI?

Fei-Fei Li

Professor at Stanford, Co-Director of the Human-Centered AI Institute

Fei-Fei’s work in computer vision helped lay the groundwork for modern AI models—but her lasting influence may be the movement she’s helped spark: AI that serves people, not just outputs. She champions interdisciplinary, human-first research that bridges ethics, education, and enterprise. In other words, she doesn’t just build models. She shapes the teams that build them.

Rumman Chowdhury

Founder of Humane Intelligence, former Director of ML Ethics at Twitter

Rumman doesn’t just talk about fairness, she operationalizes it. She develops audit frameworks that hold algorithms accountable in the wild. Her leadership style is equal parts systems engineer and watchdog. She’s showing teams how to interrogate their models with the same rigor they use to build them.

Joy Buolamwini

Founder of the Algorithmic Justice League

Joy didn’t wait for the academic world to catch up; she exposed the racial and gender bias baked into facial recognition systems, and then turned that research into policy-shifting momentum. Her team’s work challenges the status quo, not just in code, but in who’s considered “default” in datasets. Inclusion, for her, is not a side benefit. That's the point.

Camille Stewart Gloster

Deputy National Cyber Director, The White House

Camille operates at the intersection of national security, cybersecurity, and emerging tech. She’s bringing a multidisciplinary, team-centered approach to AI risk because patchwork innovation doesn’t cut it when the stakes are this high. Her voice represents the type of leadership needed to build AI policy that actually functions across teams and institutions.

Sarah Guo

Founder of Conviction VC, former partner at Greylock

Sarah is betting on the infrastructure layer of AI and on the founders thinking three moves ahead. Her thesis isn’t just about tech. It’s about team construction, founder psychology, and long-term alignment. She’s helping build not just what AI can do, but what it should do.

Suchi Saria

Founder of Bayesian Health, Professor at Johns Hopkins

Suchi is proving that AI can save lives without sidelining doctors, nurses, or patients. Her predictive models help medical teams respond earlier in critical situations, using AI as a real-time partner, not a decision-maker. It’s a blueprint for how technical excellence and human-centered implementation can (and must) coexist.

Latanya Sweeney

Harvard Professor, former CTO of the FTC

Before “data privacy” was part of every product roadmap, Latanya was sounding the alarm on re-identification risks and the false promise of anonymized data. Her work changed the way teams technical and legal think about data ethics. She doesn’t just analyze bias. She helps teams build safeguards into their workflow.

Summer Crenshaw

Co-Founder & CEO, Enterprise Technology Association (JoinETA.org)

Before most cities had an AI roadmap, Summer was building a national one. As a 4x founder and former CMO/COO, she knows firsthand how hard it is for companies to cut through hype and actually operationalize new tech. That’s why she and her co-founders launched AI Week—the fastest-growing AI series in cities like Atlanta, Columbus, and Nashville—and built JoinETA.org, the U.S.’s first trusted network for tech leaders exploring AI.

Today, Summer is leading the United States in AI education and enablement. Through ETA, she’s connecting thousands of operators, policymakers, and solution providers—not just to talk about responsible AI, but to implement it. Her approach is unapologetically execution-first: inclusive ecosystems, cross-sector collisions, and the infrastructure to move from idea to impact.

She’s not just sparking the AI conversation—she’s scaling the room where it happens.

What Does This Mean for Your Team?

If you're integrating AI into your workflows or building it yourself the question isn’t just “what tool are we using?” It’s “who was at the table when it was built?” and “who's helping us implement it now?”

Well-rounded teams don’t happen by accident. They’re engineered just like the systems they create. And right now, these women are expanding the boundaries of what strong AI leadership looks like.

The smartest move you can make? Learn from them. Build with them. Hire like your product’s integrity depends on it because it does.

Why Does This Matters Now?

Our CEO, Summer Crenshaw, didn’t launch the Women in AI & Tech Breakfast to check a DEI box.

She started it because too many AI conversations were happening in rooms that didn’t reflect the world they were meant to serve.

We believe inclusion isn’t a theme. It’s a strategy.
And leadership isn’t just about who gets invited to speak. It’s about who gets invited to build.

So if you’re serious about AI that works in the real world, join us in the room at our AI Weeks.

The Women in AI & Tech Breakfast isn’t just an event.
It’s a rally point for the women in tech shaping AI from the inside out.

Pull up a chair. Bring your team. The future’s being built—don’t sit it out.