Sessions: WomenTech Global Conference

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Session	Speaker	Share to Vote
Raluca Apostol Chief Product Officer at Nestor	The Day Skills Became Strategic: Agentic AI and the Future of Talent Efficiency As innovation cycles accelerate and cost pressures intensify, organizations can no longer afford underutilized skills or fragmented talent decisions. This talk explores how agentic AI elevates skills into a strategic operating layer - continuously optimizing how talent is deployed, developed, and scaled across the organization. Moving beyond skills visibility and task automation, agentic AI actively aligns workforce capabilities with business priorities, unlocking faster innovation, higher talent utilization, and measurable cost efficiency. For C-level leaders, this marks a… read more
Dunia Alsaffar Software Engineer Lead at Bank of America	AI Doesn't Fail. Bad Delivery Does. Let Us Fix It. Blame the technology all you want—95% of AI failures come down to execution, not innovation. Poor planning. Weak leadership. Broken processes. This session arms you with the hybrid agile frameworks that eliminate excuses and drive results. Together, we'll explore how to lead AI delivery with clarity and confidence, and become known as leaders who ship when others stumble. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Hemang Upadhyay Senior Product Manager at LG Electronics USA	From Signals to Decisions: Designing AI-Driven Fraud Detection and Real-Time Risk Forecasting Systems Real-time financial transactions demand decisions in milliseconds, yet most fraud systems still rely on static rules, delayed batch models, or opaque scoring mechanisms that struggle to adapt to evolving threats. This session presents a practical, production-grade AI framework for fraud detection and risk forecasting built for real-time transaction flows. We will break down how machine learning, streaming architectures, and behavioral signals can be orchestrated to move from reactive fraud prevention to predictive, risk-aware decisioning. Attendees will learn how… read more
Amelia Newbury Founder & CEO at Kaleidocent	From Vision to Scale: Making Innovation Operational and Fundable Innovation does not fail because of weak ideas. It fails when strategy, execution, and capital readiness are misaligned. This session explores how founders and ecosystem leaders can bridge the gap between bold vision and operational reality. Drawing from hands-on work with startups and growth-stage companies, I will share practical insights on translating strategy into scalable infrastructure, leading change during rapid growth, and strengthening investor narratives to improve funding outcomes. Attendees will walk away with a clearer framework for making… read more
Pimmi Malhotra Head of Cloud Office at IBM CIO	Agentic AI applied to real enterprise systems at scale AI is no longer a future capability. It is a leadership test. While many organizations experiment with generative and agentic AI, few succeed in turning innovation into sustained enterprise impact. The difference is rarely the technology itself. It is how leaders guide people, decisions, and accountability in an AI enabled world. In this session, I share lessons from leading AI first cloud operations across complex, multi cloud enterprise environments, where AI was embedded into daily work rather than treated as a side experiment. Today, agentic AI supports and automates about 20% of… read more
Panagiota Dafniotis Chief Legal & Intellectual Property Officer at Strix Aero	Courage to Reinvent: Leading, Growing, and Thriving Through Transformation in Tech In the technology sector, disruption is constant — and so is opportunity. The most resilient and impactful leaders are those who have the courage to reinvent themselves. Drawing on decades of experience at the intersection of innovation, intellectual property, and emerging technologies, this session explores how women can: • Leading and navigating through industry transformation • Strategically reposition your career • Reinventing from subject-matter expert to enterprise leader • Leading through AI disruption, digital transformation, and regulatory shifts… read more
Ramona Cedeno Founder & CEO at FiBrick	The Capital Readiness Framework: How Founders Build Businesses That Attract Capital Technology founders are building products that are changing how we live and work. What often trips them up is not the product or the market, it is the financial infrastructure underneath. This session introduces the Capital Readiness Framework, a set of financial operating standards that founders can build into their companies from day one, long before any raise. Drawing on 20+ years in finance and executive leadership, Ramona Cedeño will walk founders through what capital evaluators actually look for beyond the pitch, the financial blind spots that most commonly stall growth, and how to… read more
Mireia Torello Co-founder and CEO at Aikreate	The Next Generation of AI Creators: Why AI Literacy Must Start Before College AI is rapidly reshaping every industry, yet most students are only learning how to use AI tools—not understand how AI works or how to build responsibly with it. This talk explores why AI literacy must start during middle and high school, not in college or the workforce. Drawing on nearly a decade of experience teaching AI literacy to students worldwide and building Aikreate, a Boston-based AI education company, Mireia Torello will share: • Why teaching prompt tools alone is not enough • The key foundations students need: data, models, ethics, and critical… read more
Mallika Shah Engineering Leader at Warner Bros. Discovery	Creative AI-Native Leadership: Scaling Innovation, Shaping Culture AI is rapidly transforming how we build software, collaborate, and make decisions. From code generation to AI agents and automated workflows, intelligent systems are reshaping the modern engineering landscape. As the tools become more capable, leaders shaping the future of engineering organizations have an opportunity to design how humans and AI collaborate and innovate. They can define how AI is adopted responsibly and effectively while helping their teams build the skills and confidence needed to participate in this transformation and integrate AI into their daily workflows. … read more
Vidya Wadkar Distinguished Engineer at Verizon	Why Memory Is the Missing Layer in Conversational AI Conversational AI has advanced rapidly, yet many systems still struggle to maintain continuity, retain meaningful context, and adapt intelligently across interactions. As a result, even capable systems can feel repetitive, disconnected, or limited in their ability to support complex user journeys. This lightning talk explores why memory is emerging as a foundational layer in next-generation conversational AI. It introduces memory not as a single feature, but as a structured capability spanning short-term, episodic, semantic, and procedural memory, each contributing differently to continuity,… read more
Mary Kotch CISO \| Professor	The AI Arms Race: How Today's CISOs Are Using Machine Intelligence to Out-Think the Adversary The threat landscape has fundamentally changed. Adversaries are no longer waiting for vulnerabilities to be discovered they are deploying artificial intelligence to find them, exploit them, and weaponize them at machine speed. The question is no longer whether AI will be used against your organization. It already is. The only question is whether your defense is smarter. In this high-impact session, CDTO, CISO, and AI strategist Mary Kotch draws on two decades of frontline technology leadership from architecting AI-native cyber programs at scale to deploying real-time dark web… read more
Mansi Bodke Lead Product Manager at ADP	The Cost of Irrelevance: Why What AI Doesn't Say Matters as Much as What It Does We've spent years asking whether AI is capable enough. I want to ask a different question: what happens when AI is too willing? In enterprise conversational AI, there's a hidden cost that rarely makes it into product reviews or boardroom decks. I call it the Cost of Irrelevance. It's the compounding operational, trust, and behavioral damage that occurs when AI systems respond to queries outside their intended scope. A customer service agent that offers legal advice. An HR assistant that speculates on performance decisions. A learning tool that answers questions… read more
Meetu Malhotra Data Analytics Principal at S&P Global	ROI‑First AI: Turning Tokens Into Value Through Cost and Performance Optimization This presentation explores how AI costs accumulate across the lifecycle—during training, inference, and in environmental impact—and why unmanaged spend quickly erodes ROI. It then outlines practical, evidence‑based techniques to cut compute, optimize inference, and reduce carbon footprint without sacrificing model quality. By the end, participants will leave with a clear checklist they can immediately apply to design AI pipelines, benchmark their current systems, and make more informed trade‑offs between accuracy, latency, and cost. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Shruti Dhumak Head of Customer Engineering, Google Cloud at Google	Beyond the Hype: Building Production-Ready AI That Actually Scales A pragmatic, "how-to" session for CTOs and VPs of Engineering. 88% of early agentic adopters are seeing ROI, yet most enterprises are still stuck in "Pilot Purgatory." Let’s look at the Google Cloud blueprint for moving from a demo to a dependable, revenue-generating AI ecosystem. Key Themes: Hybrid AI Architectures: Balancing cost, latency, and performance using domain-specific models vs. massive general-purpose LLMs. The A2A (Agent-to-Agent) Protocol: How open standards are allowing Google Cloud agents to talk to third-party… read more
Adaluz 'Julie' Veloz Global EVP, Head of Edelman Learning Institute	Distinctively Human: Winning in the Age of AI As artificial intelligence raises the baseline of what “good” looks like, differentiation is no longer about speed, access, or even technical skill. When everyone can generate polished output, the real advantage shifts to something far less replicable: how distinctly human you show up. In this session, Adaluz J. Veloz explores the emerging gap between capability and judgment, and why over-reliance on AI is quietly eroding the very skills leaders need most. From decision-making without depth to communication without true understanding, many professionals risk becoming… read more
Elina Konstantinidou Founder & CEO at noscis	Hiring Is the Hardest Thing Founders Get Wrong. AI Is Making It Worse. Hiring is the decision that shapes everything else. The team you build determines the culture you have, the speed you move, and whether the vision in your head ever becomes real. And yet most founders approach it with outdated processes, a gut feeling they trust more than they should, and criteria that live entirely in their heads. When it goes wrong, they blame the candidate. When it goes right, they call it instinct. Neither is the full story. At a startup, the cost of getting it wrong goes far beyond the salary. Every person you bring in shapes how the team… read more
Maham Khalid Founder/CEO at Revohub	The Founder bottleneck : Why smart startups struggle to build teams that scale In the early stages of building a company, founders are required to do everything, strategy, execution, hiring, operations. This creates a hidden risk: the business becomes dependent on the founder rather than built to scale. What begins as agility quickly turns into inefficiency, unclear roles, lack of task donation, reactive hiring, and teams that are busy but not effective. This talk examines one of the most overlooked challenges in startups: task allocation and team design. Why do capable founders struggle to delegate? Why do early hires often fail to deliver expected… read more
Bhawna Singh CTO, Customer Identity at Okta	The Hidden Complexity of AI Systems: What CTOs Are Dealing With In 2026, CTOs are dealing with the reality that moving AI into production introduces a new class of engineering challenges. Systems behave unpredictably, data pipelines break under pressure, infrastructure costs escalate, and architectures not designed for AI struggle to keep up. As organizations move AI into production, CTOs are encountering a new class of engineering challenges. Systems behave unpredictably, data pipelines break under pressure, infrastructure costs escalate, and architectures not designed for AI struggle to keep up. At the same time, AI… read more
Christine Gadsby Chief Security Advisor, at BlackBerry	Cybersecurity Leadership in the Age of AI: Defending at Machine Speed In 2026, cybersecurity executives are operating under unprecedented pressure. AI adoption is accelerating faster than governance frameworks can keep pace. Autonomous agents are being deployed across business units, AI-generated code is entering production at scale, and non-human identities now vastly outnumber human users. Meanwhile, regulatory scrutiny is intensifying, compliance has become continuous, and cyber threats are increasingly AI-powered and automated. This executive panel explores the strategic realities shaping cybersecurity leadership in 2026. How do CISOs and… read more
Edelweiss Kammermann AVP of AI & ML at IT Convergence	From Chatbots to AI Agents: Building the Next Generation of Enterprise Intelligence The evolution from chatbots to AI Agents marks a new era in enterprise intelligence — where autonomous systems can reason, act, and collaborate with humans to solve complex business challenges. In this session, Edelweiss Kammermann explores how organizations are designing and deploying AI Agent architectures that combine Generative AI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and domain-specific knowledge to enable natural interactions with enterprise data. Drawing from real implementations across industries, she will demonstrate how these agents can improve decision-making, automate… read more