Sessions: WomenTech Global Conference

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Session	Speaker	Share to Vote
Lauren Wu CEO / Adjunct Professor of Law at Heart Led Leadership / Northwestern Pritzker School of Law	Still Here, Still Working: Designing Accessible Leadership with AI and Empathy As organizations face increasing pressure to move faster and deliver more, traditional leadership models built on constant capacity are showing their limits. This session explores how disability — particularly invisible disability — challenges conventional assumptions about productivity, presence, and performance, and how leaders can respond through better system design rather than individual resilience. Drawing on lived experience recovering from a major health event, occupational therapy principles, and the practical use of AI as an accessibility tool, this talk reframes leadership… read more
Gunjan Mundhra Director, Commercial Transformation Strategy at Microsoft	Vibecoding an App: Building personal scalable systems with AI I built a fully functional AI-powered habit-tracking app for myself without a technical background—not by learning to code the traditional way, but by “vibecoding”: using structured thinking, clear goals, and iterative experimentation to create a tool that serves real outcomes. This session begins with my consulting years, where rigid structure was the only way to operate at the highest level of performance amid constant demands. I’ll share how frameworks from books like Atomic Habits, Why We Sleep, and Deep Work inspired me to design a simple habit framework that brought… read more
Susmita Singh Senior software engineer at Google	Beyond the Prototype: Building Resilient, Non-Hallucinating AI Agents at Google Scale Building an AI agent prototype is often just 5% of the journey. The challenge lies in the remaining 95%, transforming that prototype into a resilient, inclusive, production-ready system capable of serving millions of users without hallucinating. From the real-world experiences of building agents, this session explores the engineering required to bridge the prototype to production gap. We will dive into the critical pillars of production-grade AI: building robust evaluation frameworks to tame non-determinism, implementing multi-layered safety (redactions, citations, and consent) and… read more
Parisa Moazeni Principle ISV Generative AI AM at AWS	Revenue, Influence & AI: How Women Lead in the New Tech Economy How GenAI changes go-to-market models • Partnering with CTOs vs CFOs • Avoiding being sidelined in deep technical conversations • Owning the narrative when the room is 90% male engineers • Where women should position themselves in AI (sales, product, strategy) Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Snow Zhao Founder & CEO at AIgentic	Break the Cloud Lock-in: Building Adaptive Intelligence Orchestration with DIO AIaas are often stuck in a binary choice: pay the "token tax" for convenient Cloud APIs or manage the complexity of local open-source models (Llama/Mistral) yourself. The future belongs to a hybrid architecture—but the routing logic shouldn't be spaghetti code. In this session, we introduce DIO (Distributed Intelligence Orchestration), a new open-source framework designed to bridge on-premise infrastructure and cloud capabilities. We will move beyond theory and look at the code behind the Federated Decision Engine (FDE)—the algorithm that allows you to dynamically route prompts… read more
Ramya Narasimha Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft	Architecting Reliability: Moving Beyond the 'Perfect Answer' in AI Evaluation In 2026, the challenge with AI isn’t just generating correct answers—it’s knowing when to trust them. Most AI evaluation today still centers on a narrow set of metrics: accuracy, latency, and fluency. While these are easy to measure, they say very little about how an AI system actually behaves when information is incomplete, signals conflict, or verification fails. This talk explores why current evaluators are poorly equipped to assess reasoning quality and user trust, and why evaluating internal chains of thought is neither stable nor sufficient. Instead, we’ll examine a shift toward… read more
Harshita Lall Associate Director of Product at PubMatic	How AI Systems Accidentally Manipulate Humans — and Why It Backfires AI products are scaling fast. Trust is not. As AI moves from experimentation to monetized, enterprise-scale deployment, a critical risk is emerging: most systems optimize for engagement, conversion, or efficiency — but not for long-term human trust. In high-stakes domains like commerce, finance, healthcare, and enterprise software, this misalignment creates subtle but compounding consequences. Optimization loops amplify persuasion. Confident model outputs trigger authority bias. Reinforcement systems reward short-term gains while quietly eroding credibility.… read more
Dhanashri Phadke CEO, Founder at Stealth	Digital Empathy : The Human Side of AI By 2050, the world will have about 2.1 billion people aged 60+ which is nearly double of today and is forcing us to rethink about health, community, and care. There is also growing loneliness and social disconnection which affects people of every age, with strong links to both mental and physical health. This engaging session explores how practical, human-centered AI paired with intuitive design, adaptive interfaces, and game-inspired experiences can help people feel more connected, stay mentally engaged, and maintain independence across life stages. Grounded in research, pilot… read more
Dr. Cindy McGovern WSJ Bestselling Author, Founder & CEO at Orange Leaf Consulting & Academy	The Permission Gap: Why High-Performing Women Hesitate in Leadership Moments—and How to Lead with Confidence in Tech Women in technology often deliver exceptional performance, yet many hesitate during the defining conversations that shape career trajectory. Moments involving visibility, negotiation, influence, and leadership presence frequently determine advancement, but hesitation can quietly undermine otherwise strong performance. In this session, Wall Street Journal bestselling author and organizational communication strategist Dr. Cindy McGovern explores what she calls the Permission Gap—the internal and structural dynamics that cause high-performing professionals to hold back in moments… read more
Kausambi Manjita General Manager, Founder, Angel Investor & Fractional Leader at Mason	From Side Project to Scale: A Woman Founder's Journey Through the AI Landscape Building an AI company as a woman founder means navigating a landscape where less than 2% of VC funding goes to women-led startups. This talk traces the journey from working in a giant like Walmart/Myntra to Y Com Startup School to scaling Mason, sharing candid lessons on fundraising, team building, and maintaining conviction through the AI hype cycle. Equal parts tactical advice and real talk, this session is for anyone building in AI who wants honest perspective on what the journey actually looks like. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Jetashree Ravi Tech Lead Manager at Fireworks AI	Make RFT Boring (In a Good Way): Predictable, Practical Tuning Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) can be a game-changer for improving model behavior-- but getting it to work well in practice isn’t always smooth. Iteration can feel slow, evaluators can be noisy, reward signals can get “creatively interpreted,” and building the right training data often takes more trial and error than expected. In this masterclass, we’ll share practical, production-tested recipes for making RFT faster, more reliable, and less painful. We’ll cover how to structure datasets that actually help, build evaluation loops you can trust, avoid reward hacking traps, and… read more
Jackie Wu Founder / President at Treasure Life’s Journey LLC	One Conversation to YES™: The Fastest Way to Land High-Value Opportunities In today’s tech market, founders and go-to-market leaders are expected to win more with fewer meetings and tighter budgets. What if one powerful and brief conversation could unlock your next 6-figure+ deal without endless follow-ups, drawnout negotiation or burnout? In this captivating session, 2x award-winning strategist (2024 & 2025) Jackie Wu reveals her proven Quick Sales Conversion Formula™—the same framework she used to close a $228K Tiffany & Co. deal in under 30 minutes with a first-time client! In another high-stakes moment, Jackie gained the public endorsement… read more
Kate Doerksen CEO, Cofounder at Sage Haven	How to Keep Kids Safe Online Start with personal story of teen family member's nightmare experience with cyberbullying and harmful online content and why I'm so passionate about fixing the relationship our kids have with tech and each other. Talk through our learnings from 500+ interviews with parents, kids and experts. Highlight a few areas of huge concern today and what's being done about them. Talk through the business opportunities emerging now that parents are so heightened. Talk about the key things we'd love to see legislators take on now including AI guardrails. Did you like this… read more
Kristen Zavo Executive Coach at Find Your Job Joy	The Career Reset: How to Reclaim Clarity, Confidence, and Direction in Your Next Chapter Many high-achieving professionals in tech reach a point where what worked before no longer works. This session introduces a clear, strategic approach to navigating career transitions with more clarity, confidence, and direction. You’ll learn how to position yourself effectively, make stronger decisions about what’s next, and move forward without burnout or second-guessing. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Naga Sujitha Vummaneni Sr. Security Engineer at Ripple	Securing the Autonomous Frontier: How Agentic AI and Neural Networks Are Reshaping Blockchain Security As agentic AI systems gain the ability to act, transact, and make decisions autonomously, blockchain networks face an entirely new threat landscape. This session explores how neural network-driven attack vectors are evolving, how smart contract vulnerabilities are being exploited by AI agents, and what the next generation of blockchain security architecture must look like. Drawing from real-world experience at the intersection of decentralized finance and enterprise security, attendees will leave with actionable frameworks for building resilient, AI-aware blockchain ecosystems. Did… read more
Kimberly Nyitray Co-Founder & COO at ChooChoo	Building Powerful AI Without Losing Trust We are entering a new era of technology where AI systems do not just answer questions. They take action. Agentic AI can retrieve information, use tools, generate outputs, and make multi-step decisions across systems with limited human intervention. That creates enormous opportunity for founders building faster and smarter, but it also creates a new kind of risk. Most governance, privacy, and compliance frameworks were built for static systems with known data flows and clear human control. They were not built for autonomous systems that behave dynamically in real time. This talk explores what… read more
Shayani Roy SVP Product Management & Design at OpenTable	Embedding AI Across Products and Teams: A Journey to Becoming an AI-Native Org Despite the rapid advancements in generative AI, many enterprises struggle to scale AI initiatives beyond the proof-of-concept phase. At OpenTable, we turned this challenge into an opportunity to embed AI strategically across our products and teams while staying true to product development best practices. In this session, we will share our transformation journey from both an IT and business perspective—offering a holistic view of how AI adoption requires alignment across technology, strategy, and operations to succeed at scale. AI-First Product Strategy: How we… read more
Heather Zindel CEO at AI MONSTER, INC.	Lifelong Learning Is Dead. Long Live Living Learning. In technology, the pace of change has outgrown the old model of learning. Static training, one-time certifications, and course completion metrics are no longer enough to keep professionals relevant in a world shaped by AI, automation, and constantly shifting tools. The real challenge is not simply learning more. It is learning continuously, practically, and in ways that keep pace with real work. This session explores why the future of skill development is not built on passive content consumption, but on living learning: dynamic, continuously updated knowledge shaped by real… read more
Leslie Murdock Founder and CEO at DeZigning Digital	AI Strategy vs. Reality: Where It Breaks Most organizations today have an AI strategy. What’s less clear is why the results don’t always follow. In practice, the issue usually isn’t the technology. It shows up in how work actually moves through the business. How decisions get made. And whether the operating model can support something like AI at all. Working with companies across different stages and industries, I’ve seen a similar pattern play out. The ones getting traction aren’t necessarily using more advanced tools. They’re set up differently. The ones struggling aren’t behind on AI. They are… read more
Aneri Shah Software Engineering Manager at Amazon	From Flat Signals to User Graphs: The Data Foundation AI Agents Actually Need AI agents promise intelligent, personalized experiences — but most are reading from flat, fragmented preference stores that tell them what a user did, not what it means. A user liked a post. A user followed a creator. These are data points. What an AI agent actually needs is context — the web of relationships between users, content, actions, and intent that makes autonomous decision-making meaningful. This talk bridges the gap between where production signal infrastructure is today and where it needs to go for AI agents to deliver on their promise. Drawing on peer-reviewed research… read more