Sessions: WomenTech Global Conference

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Session	Speaker	Share to Vote
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
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
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
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, Julie 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
Deborah Berebichez Partner, AI Products Leader, Client Technology at Ernst & Young LLP	What AI Leaders Need to Know About Quantum, Before It’s Too Late AI is the technology shaping the present. Quantum computing is the technology that will reshape the foundations underneath it. Most AI leaders are not preparing for the moment when quantum-capable systems begin to break the cryptographic assumptions that protect today's AI infrastructure, training data, and deployed models. This Meet & Greet conversation will cover what every senior AI practitioner should know about quantum computing, quantum-safe cryptography, and why "quantum readiness" is becoming a board-level question for any organization deploying AI at scale. … 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
Swarnamalya Mohan Senior Full Stack Developer at FedEx	Architecting Intelligent Agents: Multi-Step Reasoning with Live Demo AI is quickly evolving from chat-based interaction to systems that can think through tasks, make decisions, use tools, and take action. These intelligent agents represent a major step forward in how we design software, but building them effectively requires the right architecture, not just a powerful model. In this talk, we’ll explore how intelligent agents work behind the scenes and what it takes to design them for multi-step reasoning. We’ll walk through the building blocks of agent systems, including planning, memory, retrieval, tool use, and execution, and discuss how these… read more
Lori Barrington NAM Chief Data Officer at Schneider Electric	Trusted Data @ Scale: The Foundation for AI That Delivers The presentation will explore the work undertaken to build reliable, scalable data infrastructures underpinning AI solutions. Attendees will gain insights into the tangible results achieved, key lessons learned during implementation, and considerations for future improvements in data-driven AI projects. The session aims to equip participants with practical strategies for fostering trust and performance in AI through robust data practices. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Tina Mylon Chief Talent and Diversity Officer at Schneider Electric	Futureproof Your Career Tina will share insights from Schneider Electric's leadership, skills and culture transformation journey on what really matters when it comes to building a sustainable career, especially during times of rapid and disruptive change. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Megan Samford Vice President, Product & Supply Chain Security at Schneider Electric	Impact of the Evolution of Threats on Cyber Posture “AI didn’t break cybersecurity. It revealed where trust was thin. The future belongs to those who can demonstrate trust—not just claim it.” Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Rhonda Holmes Sr. Director Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging at Anaplan	Anaplan Meet & Greet Learn about Anaplan, what we do and our winning culture. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Linda Shi Senior Technical Recruiter at Rakuten Kobo	Get to Know Rakuten Kobo + Q&A Join Linda for an introduction to Rakuten Kobo Inc. to learn how they're evolving to meet the needs of readers globally and making reading lives better. As Kobo continues to grow, Linda will share what it's like to join the team, highlighting current open roles, and the perks & benefits that make Kobo a great place to grow your career. The session will wrap up with a live Q&A. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
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