Sessions: WomenTech Global Conference

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Session	Speaker	Share to Vote
Vrinda Bhatia Senior Software Engineer at Block	A Production-First Framework for Evaluating LLM Agents As LLM-powered applications transition from demos to production, teams encounter failure modes that traditional observability tools were never designed to handle: non-deterministic reasoning, tool misuse, silent hallucinations, evaluation blind spots, and unpredictable cost explosions. This talk presents a production-first evaluation and observability framework for LLM agents, grounded in real world. We show how to define agent-specific evaluation criteria and wire them directly into tracing and feedback loops, turning evaluation from a one-time exercise into a continuous… read more
Shivani Sivashankar Solutions Engineer at Cisco	Rewire: Building a Tech Career That Energizes You Technology evolves by the minute, and with it, the demands of our industry. In a landscape of fierce competition, shifting requirements, and endless possibilities, how do you discern what's truly right for you? How do you recognize and pursue opportunities that don't just advance your career, but genuinely fulfill you? The pressure to keep up can be paralyzing. We're told to stay current, stay competitive, stay relevant—but what if the real challenge isn't keeping pace with change, but learning to navigate it with intention? What if the key to thriving isn… read more
Priyanka Kuvalekar Senior UX Researcher at Microsoft	From Prompt to Product Outcomes: Building AI workflows for the UX Research lifecycle UX researchers are expected to move from ambiguous problem spaces to decision-ready evidence, often under tight timelines and with limited support. This talk presents a practical, end-to-end approach for using AI across the UX research lifecycle, with a focus on building lightweight skills that accelerate the repeatable parts of the job and free up time for the work that drives product strategy. Grounded in real workflows using Claude, the session covers how to build these skills, with examples drawn from real UXR practice. Attendees will leave with the patterns to build their first skill,… read more
Carmela Fortin CEO at Seattle Startup Coaches	The Missing Layer in AI Adoption: Why Smart Teams Still Stall (and How to Fix It) We’re surrounded by AI tools that promise speed, scale, and productivity, yet most teams aren’t seeing real results. The issue isn’t talent, budget, or ambition. It’s the missing layer before AI ever works. In this lightning talk, I introduce the concept of the Pre-AI Layer—the human, organizational, and decision infrastructure required for AI to actually drive outcomes. I’ll show why even highly capable teams struggle with AI adoption, how uneven AI usage quietly fractures organizations, and what leaders can do immediately to create alignment without slowing innovation.… read more
Kasey Roh US CEO at Upstage AI	Investment & AI Startup Ecosystem Trends: challenges, and success factors for AI ventures from seed to scale. This panel dives into the dynamic world of AI startups and investment, highlighting the unique challenges and success factors that guide ventures from seed stage to scale. The panel will share insights on navigating funding cycles, building resilient teams, and turning innovative AI ideas into lasting business impact. Attendees will gain practical strategies for overcoming common obstacles in AI product development, market adoption, and organizational growth, while also exploring how diversity, leadership, and collaboration can drive both personal and company-level success in the tech… read more
Mallika Rao Senior Engineering Manager at Zocdoc(ex-Netflix, Walmart, Twitter)	Seeing the Signals: How Women Can Navigate Reorgs for Career Acceleration Reorganizations are a constant in tech, yet many talented women experience them as destabilizing rather than opportunistic. While roles and org charts change overnight, the real signals of power, influence, and growth often emerge quietly—through shifts in ownership, funding, decision-making, and executive attention. In this talk, I’ll share a practical framework to help women decode the underlying signals during a reorg and use them to make intentional career moves. Drawing from real-world leadership experience across large-scale tech organizations, we’ll explore how to… read more
Miesha Robinson Founder & CEO, The Ready Lab \| Business Educator & Systems Strategist at The Ready Lab	Why Startups Fail to Raise Capital (and How to Fix the Readiness Gap) Fundraising is not won with a pitch, it is won through preparation. Many startups fail to raise capital not because their ideas lack promise, but because they lack the business fundamentals investors expect, including clear financials, operational discipline, and sound governance. This session reframes investor readiness as an operating discipline, not a fundraising event. Attendees will learn how investors evaluate risk across business models, metrics, diligence readiness, and execution and why strong products and early traction still fail without foundational systems in… read more
Janan Guillaume Vice President of Product at AirWorks	From Pixels to Precision: Building AI Products That Transform Physical Industries The construction and engineering industries have remained largely unchanged for decades—until now. At AirWorks, we're proving that AI isn't just for chatbots and recommendation engines; it can revolutionize how we build the physical world. This session takes attendees behind the scenes of building an AI-powered geospatial platform that transforms drone imagery and aerial data into survey-grade CAD drawings—work that previously took human drafters weeks, now delivered in hours with 2-pixel accuracy. I'll share the product leadership lessons learned from bringing… read more
Prathusha Prakash Engineering Manager at TikTok	The Leadership Shift: Coaching Engineering Teams for Change Fitness in the AI Era As we enter 2026, the primary challenge for engineering leaders has shifted from managing "Technical Debt" to managing "Adaptability Debt." With over 40% of software tasks now augmented or handled by autonomous agents, the traditional engineering management playbook is obsolete. To survive this transition, leaders must move their teams from a state of resilience to Change Fitness—the proactive ability to continuously evolve alongside non-deterministic technologies. In this session, I will share a leadership blueprint for scaling high-performing engineering teams in… read more
SC Cavali Founder at Beyond the Mind Innovations	The Power You Can’t See: How High-Achieving Women Get Undermined — and How to Stay in Control As women rise in leadership and autonomy, not all resistance is structural — some of it’s personal. Silent sabotage often comes from relationships, partnerships, or professional circles where someone feels threatened by your growth. In this talk, I uncover the invisible power dynamics high-achieving women face as they ascend — and show how to navigate them using strategy, legal insight, and data-backed self-advocacy. When Power Becomes Invisible: Pattern Recognition, Power Dynamics, and Strategic Self-Advocacy As women rise in leadership, the… read more
Shalini Sudarsan DevOps Engineering Manager at Kindercare Learning Companies	Right-Sizing AI for DevOps Abstract—The rapid evolution of AI in DevOps has led to the creation of a range of complex models, from large-scale generative natural-language reasoning models to lightweight statistical models. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated high performance in tasks related to semantic interpretations and cross-document synthesis. Frequent use of LLMs is applied in situations where smaller models have produced the correct outcome at a lower cost, higher efficiency, and superior accuracy as compared to LLMs. This article explores an end-to-end framework to determine the appropriate… read more
Pooja Gada Engineering Leader at 1Password	Engineering Trust: What Building Software for Security Taught Me About Building Teams We spend enormous effort designing secure, trustworthy software—but far less designing trustworthy teams. Drawing from experience working on security-focused, remote-first engineering teams at 1Password, this talk explores how principles like intentional design, least privilege, and defense-in-depth apply just as powerfully to human systems. Attendees will learn practical ways to build psychological safety, scale trust without micromanagement, and recognize early signs of low-trust environments—whether they’re an individual contributor, tech lead, or aspiring… read more
Neelam Koshiya Principal Applied AI Architect at Amazon	From Zero to Cloud Hero: How AWS Solutions Architect Certification Transforms Careers Across Industries The cloud computing revolution has created an unprecedented skills gap, with organizations desperately seeking AWS-certified professionals while millions of workers face career uncertainty. This session reveals how the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification serves as the ultimate career catalyst—whether you're a fresh graduate, career changer, or IT professional seeking advancement. Drawing from real-world transformation stories and industry data showing 300% job growth in cloud computing, this presentation will demonstrate: * The $50K+ salary impact: How… read more
Elizabeth Moyle Founder & Principal Consultant, AI & Digital Transformation at Elizabeth Moyle Enterprise Consulting, LLC	That Awkward Moment When Your ERP Thinks It's Still 1998 Are you tired of seeing your company's ambitious AI initiatives stall, underdeliver, or fail outright? You're not alone. In this thought-provoking session, Elizabeth Moyle of Elizabeth Moyle Enterprise Consulting dissects a critical but often overlooked problem plaguing the world of artificial intelligence: our tendency to treat AI like a magic wand. We're starting with massive, unmanageable scopes and expecting flawless, instantaneous results — a recipe for disaster that mirrors mistakes from decades past. Drawing on foundational research in behavioral psychology and… read more
Sanjana Arun Product Lead at eBay	The AI Cross-Functional Leader: Turning Models into Product Decisions In my experience working at the intersection of data science and AI, initiatives rarely fail because of models. They fail because teams don’t align. Product, data science, and engineering often operate with different incentives, languages, and definitions of success. The result is promising AI work that never turns into real user or business impact. In this talk, I’ll share a practical leadership framework for leading cross-functional AI teams - where product, data, and engineering move together instead of in parallel - drawing on my experience as a PM working… read more
Subha Shrinivasan SVP/Global Head of Services at Rakuten Symphony	From Capability to Outcome: Where AI still needs Humans AI systems today can generate code, train models, and demonstrate impressive capabilities — yet most organizations struggle to convert these capabilities into reliable, scalable outcomes. The failure is rarely the model. It is the absence of delivery capability. This talk focuses on the concrete execution layers required to operationalize AI in the real world: cloud foundations, Kubernetes orchestration, data and model pipelines, environment consistency, rollout automation, and production governance. Using examples from large-scale AI and cloud deployments, it examines why… read more
Amanda Moran Senior Engineering Manager at NVIDIA	Behind the Model: The Infrastructure Powering the Magic This will be a deep dive session about how the models you know and love are architected and hosted. Typically, we look at this process from the researcher's perspective, today you will learn from the lens of the people who manage the infrastructure. Through this session, you will discover how the hardware that enables model development is configured and managed at scale. Learn about inference, large scale training and tuning in multiple cloud environments. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Gayatri Tavva Senior Data Engineer at Amazon	Governed Multi-Agent Architectures for Enterprise Analytics and Decision Systems As AI agents move from experimentation to production, enterprises face a critical challenge: how to scale multi-agent systems without sacrificing trust, accountability, and governance. This talk presents a practical, architecture-first approach to building governed multi-agent AI systems designed for real-world enterprise analytics and decision-making. Drawing from hands-on experience designing AI-enabled platforms for high-stakes domains such as compensation and audit analytics, this session demonstrates how role-based agents—spanning data retrieval, validation, reasoning,… read more
Leslie Grandy Author, Lead Executive in Residence at University of Washington Foster School of Business Executive Education	Your Culture may be AI Ready, but is it AI Native? Most organizations train people to prompt, automate, and optimize, but they leave the underlying thinking habits untouched. So they stall because they stop at readiness. Work stays structured around speed, efficiency, and known problems. Being AI-native goes further. It means redesigning how people think, challenge assumptions, manage risks, and solve problems when answers are cheap and always available. In an AI-native culture, the differentiator is no longer access to intelligence, but the ability to frame better questions, exercise judgment, and navigate ambiguity without… read more
Shalini Thyagaraja Director at Microsoft	Thrive, Don’t Just Survive: Sustainable Wellbeing & Work-Life Integration Women in technology are navigating unprecedented demands, high-performance cultures, constant change, caregiving responsibilities, and the invisible pressure to “do it all.” Burnout is no longer an exception; it has become the norm. In this talk, Shalini draws from over 20 years of corporate leadership at Fortune 500 companies, her work as a wellness coach, and her lived experience as a first-generation immigrant and working mother to reframe wellbeing not as self-care, but as a leadership strategy. This session introduces a practical, sustainable approach to… read more