This past week, I dropped into the Women and AI Futures Conference for four days of learning and fellowship, online and in-person in Atlanta.

On Wednesday, we gathered in the Community Center at Atlanta Tech Village Buckhead for panels and lightning talks. On Thursday, we worked from The Lola for fireside chats and workshops.

Events like this are so difficult to pull together but I am hugely grateful for the organizers who made this happen. The content provided a fresh perspective and the energy of the community is uplifting. I especially appreciated the hands-on workshops which gave me a chance to play with new tools and prompt frameworks.

In this post, I’ll break down what I’m feeling in the post-conference glow, some thoughts the content stirred up, and a bullet list of topics and takeaways.

Liberty lining up the afternoon panel on AI-first leadership at ATV.

Breakfast and networking at The Lola.

Francine Marquis, Google, kicks off her talk on prompts for profit and strategy.

Women-led professional events are life giving

Fifteen years into my career in tech, I appreciate the specific energy of a woman-led, woman-dominated professional space more than ever.

From the moment I was greeted at ATV on Wednesday to the last sip of bubbles at The Lola on Thursday, I felt a sense of support and safety and freedom that I rarely feel in a professional setting. It’s different from being in a male-dominated space with a handful of women at the table.

It’s the culture and hospitality. The neck hugs. The natural flow and flexibility. The rest that’s built into the schedule. The spoken and unspoken understanding. The ‘fits and the fashion of it all.

(If you were the woman from Reddit wearing the black and white graphic print midi dress on Wednesday, I loved your outfit!)

(Also, Edie Kirkman if you’re reading this I need to know where you got that flowy printed maxi dress because I know it wasn’t Temu!)

And it’s not just that the room is full of women. Baby showers are full of women but they don’t feel uplifting to me like a women in tech event. At a baby shower, women are mostly competitively performing a male-gaze version of femininity for one another. The conversation is as shallow as the petit fours are sweet. It’s draining.

But when you bring women together to talk about their work, their interests, the businesses they’re building, what lights them up, what challenges them? That’s this ball of joyful energy that builds as it rolls and then unfurls to make the rest of feminine life more fun.

Even as an introvert who needs a lot of time away from crowds to recharge, I woke up the morning after this conference with more momentum than I felt going into it.

If you’re a woman or identifying and you haven’t been to a woman-led event recently, I’d encourage you to seek one out. See if you don’t immediately feel the weight lift off your shoulders.

AI is a threat and an opportunity for women in knowledge work

One of the sharp questions that stuck with me during the conference came from a young woman who was asking about how performance evaluations will be affected by AI adoption in her workplace.

Specifically, she expressed frustration because a member of her team, an otherwise mediocre performer, was copying and pasting from ChatGPT. She sees herself as a high-performing employee who’s applying knowledge, expertise, and a significant amount of effort. Is it fair to compare her work to that of her colleague who’s cutting corners?

The sentiment from the speakers on the panel, one that I share to a certain degree, is that the “mediocre” employee isn’t really mediocre if the results they’re getting from AI are sufficient to accomplish the job. Although, it stands to reason that if she’s a more knowledgeable and more productive employee, she may be able to get even better outcomes if she adopted AI into her workflow. Now, is that delta in work quality meaningfully important to the business and its goals in a way any manager will recognize? Maybe. Maybe not.

The trend in recent years has been: women are more highly educated than men. 39% of women in the United States hold a Bachelor’s Degree, compared to 36.2% of men. Women hold 68% of all Master’s Degrees and 56% of Doctoral Degrees.

Women work harder to be recognized as experts in their fields with the expectation they should be rewarded with some amount of respect and financial success. The knowledge they bring about a topic is the value they bring to an organization. But if industries no longer value research and expertise because a good enough answer is readily available through a chat with an LLM? This feels like a rug pull.

At the same time, the culture around AI is fraught with ethical concerns. It looks toxic. Women are aware of the dangers of the biases present in the systems and how this technology can be used against them for abuse. Women may have heightened concerns about the weaponization of AI, sustainability, and what this means for intellectual property.

Whether it’s related to moral reasons or not, the gender gap for AI adoption is real. By the numbers:

• A survey by the New York Federal Reserve reported that 50% of men used generative AI in the past year, compared to about one-third of women.
• Only 42% of ChatGPT’s active users are women.
• Google’s research indicates that 45% of men report using AI tools at work, whereas only 27% of women do, highlighting a substantial disparity in workplace AI adoption.
• Globally, women constitute only 22% of AI professionals, with representation dropping to less than 15% at senior executive levels.

AI inherits the same gender gap that exists within the field of data science where only 20.4% of professionals are women and there’s a sizable pay gap, with women data scientists making 32% less than men in the field.

At the same time, PwC is saying AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030.

We need women to get involved with AI, to steer it, improve it, and help remove biases from the models.

We also need women to get a piece of that economic windfall. When money flows through the power of women, good things happen. Women are smart, generous investors. They make their communities stronger through business ventures, donations, and mutual aid.

Whenever there’s a new movement in technology, the vacuum of expertise in early phases creates a platform where women can choose to step up and grab opportunity. It’s a risk. If the longevity of the tech is overestimated or the cycle goes bust, you may lose credibility and find yourself back at square one.

But women are good at taking risks. We are good at doing more with less and we’re also good at sensing bullshit where it exists.

We need to trust ourselves, our knowledge, and our intuition. We can be agents of empathy, efficiency, and imagination in this wave of change.

Topics, takeaways, nuggets, and “the sauce”

Over the course of the conference, there were so many meaty topics covered. Here’s a disorganized list of notes, topics, observations, and a few nuggets of insight:

• We suspect Art and Humanities will become more valued and we crave the chance to bring people with these backgrounds into places where AI is being developed
• People are very afraid of AI and job displacement
• Leaders in corporations are super excited to get access to pilot programs for tools like Microsoft Copilot but they’re finding it takes a lot of hands-on education and exposure before their teams will even try the new tech
• Enterprises have more opportunity for AI than they can prioritize; they’re trying to determine ROI upfront
• Some of the best opportunities for AI are “behind the scenes” in operations and not customer-facing AI products or widgets
• Marketing agencies are using AI workflows to produce larger packages for clients on constrained budgets
• People are stringing together AI workflows and agents with blocks of code to execute complex tasks that you can’t get done with an LLM alone
• You can use LLMs to simulate your ideal customer persona (ICP) and “A/B” test marketing messages before running tests in the wild
• In the finance sector, people are worried all of the robo-investors will merge into a single strategy and it’s too hard to know which ones will win to produce good results
• Professors are teaching AI for filmmaking, which is sort of wild
• For image generation, using a tool like Imagen in Google Gemini, it’s pretty bad at tweaking an image with progressive instructions; but if you give it VERY specific and thorough instructions upfront, you’ll get better results than trying to progressively adjust one image to the next
• We’ve figured out you can overcome an exhausted context window if you ask the LLM to summarize everything you’ve done so far
• Frameworks help when you’re using LLMs for strategic decisions; be P-R-E-C-I-S-E; give the LLM a purpose, role, environment, constraints, instructions, success criteria, and expectations
• We love vibe coding for prototyping but we’re scared about security issues in production
• Marketers and researchers are dramatically cutting down the amount of time it takes to conduct and synthesize insights for projects, using AI to summarize interviews and gather voice of customer at scale
• Nobody is ready to provide a definitive answer about how the shift from traditional SEO to AI as a search engine is impacting performance metrics and KPIs
• New, affordable AI opens up new ideas for product Founders who can pitch and validate concepts that wouldn’t have been feasible before
• We are all overwhelmed with the sheer number of tools available and trying to keep up with which tools are best for which tasks
• We really are NOT shopping at Target right now!
• Everybody is struggling with burnout, gaslighting, layoffs, work-life balance and the general state of things
• Women are holding entire worlds together—working multiple jobs, coordinating care, processing grief, showing up for their families and communities
• There are SO many women working for themselves as a way to regain control over their lives, whether that’s 1099, LLCs, founding agencies or companies
• Business partnerships are hard even when the people are great
• The “I’m crashing out” to “I’m taking a sabbatical” to “I’m working part-time” to “I’m raising my hand to be the CEO” career track is real
• DEI may be a bad word to scrub out in certain spaces but not here; we care about effective diversity and equity and inclusion and accessibility beyond face value and nobody is being quiet about it here in the City of Atlanta
• Everybody in Atlanta really wants us to be a Top Five Tech Hub; the talk track is sticking
• An Atlanta-based pound cake business makes a lemon-blueberry slice that’s out of this world
• People recognize the difference between celebrity thought leaders brought on stage as “experts” and the people who are really doing the work; that authenticity and credibility is the sauce

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Liberty, Sarah, Dana; everybody who prepared content to share at this conference and everybody who showed up this week.

The grass is greener where we water it, and the future looks beautiful for women in tech here in Atlanta.