Sessions: WomenTech Global Conference

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Session	Speaker	Share to Vote
Barbara Negron SVP Managing Director Embedded Finance & Partnerships at Cogent Bank	From FinTech Vision to Bank-Ready Execution: How Women Leaders Scale Innovation in Regulated Tech Innovation in fintech and emerging technology often slows not because the ideas are weak, but because execution becomes difficult once regulation, scale, and organizational complexity enter the picture. In this session, Barbara J. Negron shares real world lessons from building and scaling embedded finance and technology platforms across banks and fintech ecosystems. She discusses how women leaders can connect vision with execution and governance to turn innovative ideas into solutions that are ready to operate at an enterprise level. The conversation focuses on… read more
Niharika P Pujari Lead Software Engineer at McGraw Hill	Scaling Accessibility: Frontend Architecture, Not a Checklist Most teams approach accessibility through training, audits, or late-stage QA. While these efforts are important, they don’t scale - especially as frontend codebases grow more complex and teams rely on shared components and design systems. In this talk, I’ll reframe accessibility as a frontend architecture concern and a leadership responsibility, not just an individual skill or compliance task. We’ll look at how accessibility outcomes are shaped by architectural decisions - component APIs, state and focus management, and system-level defaults and why fixing issues after implementation… read more
Angella Dagenhart Co-Founder at The BLU Arc Collective	Stop Shipping Change Theater: A Pre-Launch Diagnostic for Real Tech Adoption Most tech transformations look solid on paper: executive sponsorship, clear roadmaps, adequate budgets. Then reality hits. Adoption stalls, workarounds multiply, and teams quietly revert to old ways. The issue usually isn’t the technology or the project plan. It’s that organizations manage change (external rollout) while ignoring transition (the internal human shift) and the conditions that make new behavior possible. In this session, I’ll introduce The Five-Lever Framework, a practical diagnostic that helps leaders and change practitioners identify where adoption will break… read more
Dr. Kim Allen Executive Coach & Leadership Architect \| 2× Author \| Podcast Host \| Founder, The Dr. Kim Approach	The Culture You Tolerate Is the Culture You Lead: How Executive Behavior Shapes Trust, Performance, and Innovation at Scale Company culture is often treated as a set of values, programs, or initiatives. In reality, culture behaves like a system—one that responds directly to executive behavior, decisions, and what leaders choose to tolerate. In this TED-style talk, Dr. Kim Allen challenges technical executives to rethink culture not as a “soft” concept, but as an operational outcome engineered—intentionally or unintentionally—by leadership signals at the top. Drawing from real-world executive experience, she explores how everyday behaviors, decision patterns, and unspoken tolerances quietly shape trust,… read more
Priyanka gunakala Lead Analyst at The Vanguard Group	Your No-Code Career Playbook : No Code Careers in Tech Drawing from personal industry experience, this talk demystifies non-technical roles in tech, highlights in-demand skills, tools, and mindsets, and shows how people can build credibility through projects, problem-solving, and strategic networking. Attendees leave with a clear roadmap to launch tech careers faster, without writing a single line of code. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Brittany Wolfrom Customer Solutions Leader at Amazon Web Services	The Introvert's Edge: Leading with Authenticity in an AI-Powered World As an introvert who regularly speaks to audiences of 500+, I've learned that authenticity—not extroversion—is your superpower in leadership. This session reveals how introverts can leverage AI tools to amplify their strengths while preserving energy for high-impact human connections. You'll discover practical frameworks for "playing extroverted" at conferences and networking events without burning out, including the 70-20-10 energy management model and strategic recovery techniques. We'll explore how AI can handle the mechanics (research, follow-ups,… read more
Hina Gandhi Software Engineering Technical Leader at Cisco	Beyond Manual Tuning: How RL Agents Learned to Optimize Apache Spark Apache Spark's performance depends heavily on configuration parameters like shuffle partitions, memory allocation, and parallelism settings. Data engineering teams typically rely on static defaults (which rarely match workload reality) or time-consuming manual tuning that doesn't adapt as data patterns evolve. A configuration optimized for small daily reports fails catastrophically on massive end-of-month aggregations—yet tuning each workload variant manually is unsustainable as organizations process increasingly diverse datasets. This talk demonstrates how reinforcement… read more
Shalmali Kullkarni Sr. Lead Data Scientist at ADP	Embeddings Everywhere: Not Magic, just Math!! In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vector Databases, embeddings have become the industry’s favorite buzzword. We’re told they “Capture meaning” but for many, they remain a mathematical mystery- as black box where text goes in and magic numbers come out. It's time to pull back the curtain and demystify the magic. This talk strips away the hype to reveal the surprisingly elegant math behind powering modern semantic search, recommendation engines, and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). We will journey from the basics of one-hot encoding to the high-dimensional… read more
Mrunal Gangrade Vice President of Engineering at JPMorgan Chase	Securing Multi-Tenant Clouds via Isolation Multi-tenancy is a core principle of modern cloud computing, allowing multiple customers to share the same physical infrastructure while maintaining logical separation. However, this model introduces significant security concerns—particularly the risk of cross-tenant data leakage, where sensitive information from one tenant may be exposed to another due to misconfigurations, architectural flaws, or sophisticated attacks. This research investigates the effectiveness of various isolation techniques implemented at different layers of the cloud stack. It explores virtualization… read more
Beth Leonard Chief Operating Officer at R3, LLC	Emotional Intelligence at Work: the Real Leadership Advantage IQ might get you the job—but EQ keeps your team engaged. In this powerful session, we explore how emotional intelligence can be taught, measured, and used to build stronger teams, better leaders, and healthier workplace dynamics. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Raniesa Gray-Johnson Senior Cloud Engineer, FIS \| Founder, RAMIX Tech Consulting	From Operator to Owner: The Quiet Career Shift Women in Tech Are Making—Without Burning It All Down For many women in tech, the next step isn’t another promotion—it’s a redefinition. Yet most of us were never taught how to transition from being excellent operators inside organizations to strategic owners of our expertise. In this talk, Raniesa shares her personal journey from long-time technologist to consultant and founder, including the quiet doubts, imposter syndrome, and invisible mindset shifts that accompanied the transition. Through real stories and practical frameworks, she explores why women often wait for permission to step into ownership, how “readiness” is… read more
Amee Gil Business Intelligence Consultant at Analytixx	Generative BI in Practice: How Leaders Turn AI Into Business Value As organizations accelerate AI adoption, many struggle to translate experimentation into measurable business value. This session explores how Generative Business Intelligence bridges the gap between data and decision-making by embedding AI directly into trusted BI workflows. Drawing on real-world experience across healthcare, startups, and large enterprises, the talk demonstrates how integrating generative AI into BI improves insight quality, shortens decision cycles, and increases stakeholder adoption. Rather than treating AI as a standalone initiative, attendees will see how… read more
Swati Tyagi Applied AI/ML Lead at Tredence, Inc	Model Calibration: The Hidden Key to Trustworthy AI In high-stakes domains like finance and healthcare, getting the right answer isn't enough—your AI system needs to know how confident it should be. This presentation explores model calibration, the critical but often overlooked bridge between statistical predictions and real-world decision-making. We'll examine why a model with 95% accuracy can still cause catastrophic harm when its probability estimates are unreliable. Through concrete examples from credit risk management, fraud detection, clinical decision support, and cancer screening, attendees will understand how… read more
Naomi Kent CEO at The Boardroom Co	How to land a corporate board in 2026 5 steps to landing a board seat Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Jane Connell SVP Strategy Transformation & CIO Enterprise Systems at Verizon	Transformation & Cultural Divide or Women & Career Planning Learnings from driving enterprise transformation through technology. The opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Debbie Millin CEO / Founder at UpperLevel Solutions	The Fractional Future: Building the Elastic C-Suite Linear growth is too slow for 2026. This talk explores how CEOs can use a combination of fractional leadership and AI agents to build a high-impact, low-overhead executive layer that scales up or down instantly. Perfect for growth-stage companies that need senior expertise without the "fixed-cost" burden of traditional hiring. Validates flexible, project-based leadership models that promote diverse talent. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Kimberly Susko Principal at RSM	SaaS PE playbook - Best Practices for operating a PE backed Saas Company Scaling up your tech company - business systems, data & reporting, common challenges, ARR and reporting to investors. Deal structure and deal terms. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Sabrina Macpherson Senior Director, ESG Methodology at Morningstar	Meaningful Support from Leaders During Difficult Change Many companies in the broader "Tech" sphere are going through difficult times, and workers are consistently seeing organizational restructurings and layoffs. In these situations, employees need more than ever to feel like they are able to balance work and life - both for their own mental well-being, and for their ability to demonstrate resilience in their changing workplace. In this talk, I will provide practical examples of ways that leaders can support work-life balance, mental wellness, and resilience, during the most difficult periods of change in the lives of their teams. I… read more
Anushka Sancheti Product Manager Lead at FIS	Influencing Without Authority, How Women in Tech Build Trust, Drive Decisions, and Get Things Done Influencing without authority is a skill many women in tech are expected to master early, often without being taught how to do it. This session breaks down what influence actually looks like when you do not control headcount, budgets, or final decisions. Drawing from real scenarios across product and cross functional teams, this talk focuses on how women build credibility, earn trust, and move work forward through clarity, relationships, and strategic communication. We will talk about navigating pushback, aligning stakeholders with competing incentives, and advocating for ideas… read more
Leah Ruehlicke VP, Creators & Community at Skillshare	Getting buy-in is the real career unlock - and most leaders are never taught how to get it To be an effective leader, getting buy-in is the job. You need it from your team, your peers, and your leadership - and if even one of those is missing, growth stalls. If you have buy-in from below but not above, your team is blocked. If you have buy-in from above but not below, you won’t sustain impact. Yet this reality is rarely addressed in management training - especially for women, who are often expected to be both endlessly empathetic and immediately credible. The mistake most leaders make is assuming buy-in looks the same everywhere. It doesn’t. - From your team:… read more