Session: The Role of Generative AI in Empowering Female-Founded Startups
Female founders face myriad challenges in the startup space, ranging from access to capital to gender stereotypes. While there have been strides in leveling the playing field in recent years, women founders are still receiving funding at a lower rate than their male counterparts. Moreover, thanks to the tech skills gap, there are a host of barriers to getting a women-led startup off the ground, even if they have an award-winning idea.
However, new Generative AI technologies are giving female founders a reason to be optimistic. Women tend to have less support and resourcing in their founder journeys than their male counterparts. With Generative AI, they can achieve a lot more with less. If women-led startups can embrace all these new technologies have to offer, they’re going to be far better-equipped for success in the challenging and complex startup space, and, as a result, we’ll start to see more equal representation in VC.
1. New software platforms are making it easier for women to move forward with innovative ideas.
The evolution of low-code and no-code platforms are enabling founders with varying levels of coding expertise to capitalize on an idea for new software without needing to rely on another expert or solicit a co-founder to write the code. Low-code software development requires little to no coding to build applications and processes. Instead of using complex programming languages, you can employ visual interfaces with basic logic and drag-and-drop capabilities in a low-code development platform.
One example of this is Philan, a startup founded by Milan Ball, a black woman who graduated with a degree from FIT, and had no previous coding experience. She was able to leverage external resources to accelerate her idea for a consumer shopping tool through a no-code platform. Instead of learning programming languages, she was able to use a drag-and-drop interface in the browser to build her application, resulting in the launch of Philan’s minimum viable product.
Not only is the availability of these platforms enabling women to enter the startup space more independently, it’s also empowering them to enter the male-dominated enterprise space. This will have innumerable effects on female representation in the startup space for enterprise solutions.
2. GenAI is equipping budding startups with unprecedented datasets.
If there’s one thing we have learned about Generative AI over the past few years, it's that those who can build a large and quality customer base can become masters of data. For startups, the more customers you have the more data they will feed into your model and the better it becomes. These exciting new technologies can help female founders access best-in-class data to get access to valuable insights around market trends, customer preferences, and competitor analysis. Female founders can analyze the data to identify opportunities, understand potential risks, and optimize their strategies accordingly.
Initiatives such as World Bank Data and others help female founders get access to a whole corpus of data from which to fine tune their models. Also, GPT and llama models already largely come trained on publicly-available datasets.
Not to mention, all of this data can help them make the case to win funding.
3. AI is helping female-led startups scale and adapt.
In today’s day and age, having a great idea and even being able to get it off the ground isn’t enough. In the saturated startup world, there’s a huge emphasis on rapid scalability. However, according to a study by the Kauffman Foundation, only 1 in 10 startups will scale successfully - an even more disheartening statistic for women who have a harder time securing proper funding to begin with. But there is a glimmer of hope in the form of AI.
One of AI’s most invaluable features is its ability to evolve. In the past, changing platforms or hardware would represent increased costs and efforts if you found yourself in the need of change. Today, AI can adapt if your needs change by using different learning algorithms based on your venture’s unique needs and evolving goals.
Nancy was invited to be a speaker for the US State Department, where she was sent on assignment to India - working with entrepreneurs from top IIT university accelerators on this topic.
Bio
Nancy is a product & engineering executive, advisor, and investor with significant experience in cloud computing, cybersecurity, and SaaS. Nancy advises Fortune 10 companies on accelerating revenue growth, and she advises startups on attracting their first 100K enterprise customers. Until recently, Nancy was the Director of Product & Engineering and General Manager at Amazon Web Services, where she leads P&L, product, engineering, and design for its data protection and data security businesses. Excited to advance more women into technical roles, Nancy is the founder & board chair of Advancing Women in Tech, a global 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has already informed and educated 30,000 Coursera learners worldwide on how to get their first, or next, tech leadership role.