Sessions: WomenTech Global Conference

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Session	Speaker	Share to Vote
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 & USA Today Bestselling Author, Founder & CEO at Orange Leaf Consulting & Orange Leaf 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 & USA Today 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… read more
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
Jayashree Dutta CEO at atronous.ai	Transforming Retail with Clean & Structured Item Data The scale of the item data problem in retail is real: poor or incomplete product data is estimated to cost retailers nearly $3.9 trillion annually in lost sales and abandoned carts (data from VMG Partners). It's something we hear about constantly across the broader retail ecosystem, retailers managing thousands of SKUs across dozens of channels, losing conversions not because of product quality, but because their upstream catalog data is incomplete, inconsistent, or simply not structured for how modern commerce actually works. As AI agent-led discovery increasingly dominates commerce, a… read more
Morgan Cundiff Head of Machine Learning and Product at Armoire	Immersion on both sides: bringing strategy to the ML world and vise versa. We keep seeing a push for non-technical individuals to vibe code but not the corresponding effort. Helping technically-minded employees and entrepreneurs build the strategy and technical design around their work. What are you building and why? It is no longer sufficient to have engineers or data scientists isolated from the end use cases of their work. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Lauren Keeler Social Impact Principal at New Relic	The Connection Cure: Building Resilient Cultures Through Collective Impact Tech is facing a connection crisis. As we navigate hybrid work, shifting priorities, and "efficiency" cycles, how do we keep the "human" in our software? The answer isn't another happy hour; it's shared purpose. In this session, we’ll discuss how Social Impact serves as the "connective tissue" for global teams. Using New Relic’s journey as a blueprint, we’ll explore how volunteering and community giving act as a "rhythm" for the company—providing morale when things are tough and a sense of belonging that transcends the daily grind. Discover… read more
Sandy Venugopal CIO, at CoreWeave	What It Takes to Run AI at Enterprise Scale Explore how CIOs are turning AI strategy into reality, with real-world examples, governance best practices, and scaling responsibly. AI has moved beyond experimentation. In 2026, the real differentiator is not ambition; it is execution. While many organizations have launched pilots and proof-of-concepts, far fewer have successfully embedded AI into core workflows, decision-making processes, and operating models at scale. The challenge is no longer identifying use cases; it’s driving adoption, managing change, aligning architecture, and delivering measurable… read more
Rachel Bender Co-Founder & CEO at Batesly	The Buyer on the Other Side of the Demo: What AI Founders Miss When Selling Into Regulated Industries Most AI founders selling into legal, healthcare, finance, and other regulated verticals are pitching to buyers who are evaluating them in ways the founder doesn't see. As a lawyer and the co-founder of Batesly, I'm in the unique position of selling a legal-tech SaaS into my own regulated industry. This 20-minute talk is a field guide to what regulated-industry buyers are actually scoring during your demo — and what they'll never tell you to your face. I'll walk through the five unsaid objections that kill deals after the call ends, the post-demo legal and… read more
Debbie Sterling Founder/CEO at Smore Labs, Inc.	From GoldieBlox to Smore: Rethinking How Kids Build with AI Founder’s journey from empowering kids to build with construction toys to AI tools. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Jennifer Stokes Senior Director, Product Management (Marketing & Personalization) at Sephora	Tech at Sephora: Conversations on Careers, Growth, and Tech Life Join us for an interactive meet and greet Q&A featuring Jennifer Stokes, Senior Director of Product Management, Melissa Schulte, Senior Director of Product Management, and moderated by Amber Oubre from Technical Talent Acquisition. This 30 minute session offers an inside look at what it’s like to build and grow a career in tech at Sephora. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Melissa Schulte Senior Director, Product Management (Client Experience Product Management) at Sephora	Navigating the In‑Between: Product Leadership in an AI‑Native World The move toward AI‑native technology organizations isn’t a clean handoff - it’s an in‑between moment filled with experimentation, uncertainty, and learning in real time. In this fireside chat, Melissa Schulte and Jennifer Stokes explore how product teams are adapting during this transition, how leaders make decisions without all the answers, and how women’s perspectives help bring balance, clarity, and humanity to complex change. A candid conversation about leading through ambiguity - without pretending it’s easy. Did you like this session? Share to vote.