The global artificial intelligence market is booming—projected to reach USD 390.9 billion this year and USD 1,811.75 billion by 2030. And while women have historically been underrepresented in the field, their influence is becoming increasingly impossible to overlook.\My own path as a co-founder and CEO of an AI SaaS startup was not the easiest one. But when we, women in AI, step forward, we don’t just join the conversation—we change its direction.\And that’s exactly what’s happening now. Across research labs, startups, and global companies, women are pushing the boundaries of what AI can be—and doing it in ways that make the technology more innovative, more ethical, and more human.\This piece is about celebrating them. The builders. The leaders. The women who are reshaping AI at the center of the field.\Elena Poughia, Managing Director at Dataconomy; Founder of Data NativesElena Poughia is a Greek entrepreneur, publisher, and community builder with a passion for AI, technology, and people. As Managing Director of Dataconomy, one of the world’s leading AI magazines with 1.5 million monthly readers, and Founder of Data Natives, Europe’s largest data science and AI community with more than 300,000 members across 50+ chapters, Elena has spent the past decade connecting innovators, investors, and changemakers.\Through Dataconomy and Data Natives, she has created ecosystems where technologists, researchers, policymakers, corporates, and investors exchange knowledge, influence regulation, and spark new ventures. From hackathons that led to startups, to policy roundtables shaping AI governance, to amplifying underrepresented founders, her platforms have become catalysts for both innovation and inclusivity.\Elena approaches AI from multiple angles: media, community, investment, and culture. She has co-founded initiatives that empower female founders, invested in women-led businesses, and launched startup programs in the Middle East, bringing startups and investors together to accelerate breakthrough technologies while spotlighting women leaders. She also co-founded LALA Art Space in Athens, merging creativity with technology and community. Whether mentoring through African Tech Vision and tech2impact, serving on juries such as the Board of SXSW and as the European Prize for Women Innovators for the European Commission, or advising Europe’s top entrepreneurs, Elena consistently opens doors for others.\Looking ahead, she is most excited about shaping the shift from centralized AI to open, decentralized, and inclusive AI ecosystems. She believes that inclusivity in data, governance, and leadership is not just a matter of fairness but the real driver of innovation. For Elena, the breakthrough moment will be when AI is not confined to a handful of big players but becomes transparent, collaborative, and globally accessible.\Early in her career, Elena found that her insights were more frequently challenged than her peers’, which pushed her to create platforms where diverse expertise couldn’t be ignored. Access to capital and networks was limited for women in frontier tech. Instead of waiting for a seat at the table, she built her own. Dataconomy and Data Natives emerged from this need—platforms that amplify diverse voices, democratize access, and make space for the next generation of women in AI.\Today, Elena continues to show that leadership in tech is not just about advancing technology. It’s about opening doors, building communities, and shaping a future where innovation is both profitable and equitable.\Selina Tirtajana, Co-founder & CEO at JawsaverSelina Tirtajana is a mission-driven inventor and entrepreneur reimagining how healthcare can be smarter, more accessible, and empowering for everyone. She began her career in medtech product development and strategy at Covidien/Medtronic before joining several healthtech startups, where she quickly discovered her skills and energy were perfectly matched with the startup journey. Today, as co-founder and CEO of Jawsaver, she is pioneering a sleep health wearable company that is redefining how we understand and improve sleep. The company has already been recognized with the 2023 CES Innovation Award, became a semi-finalist at SLUSH100, and received the prestigious Women TechEU grant for deep tech founders.\Her path into AI was born out of necessity. Developing a tiny in-ear wearable to manage teeth grinding and clenching, she and her team realized that AI could help transform raw sleep data into real-time, personalized insights. Jawsaver is now pushing the boundaries of edge AI, designing algorithms that are accurate, fast, and adaptable while operating within the constraints of a small, low-power device. Because the company’s data comes from its own patented sensor, Selina and her team are working with entirely new datasets—building models from scratch, scaling them quickly, and finding ways to deliver highly personalized insights without sacrificing privacy or trust.\Selina doesn’t see herself as traditionally “influential,” but her work demonstrates how AI can solve pressing real-world problems under real-world constraints. While much of the industry focuses on training models with massive datasets and unlimited compute, Jawsaver is tackling the opposite challenge: limited labeled data, limited compute power, and the urgent need for solutions that adapt to each individual. For Selina, the real innovation lies in creating AI systems that are not only reliable and personalized but also transparent, private, and human-centered.\As founders without traditional AI backgrounds, both Selina and her co-founder often faced skepticism from investors who questioned whether non-software engineers or data scientists could lead an AI startup. Her response has been clear: entrepreneurs don’t need to fit stereotypes to create breakthrough technology. Their strength lies in seeing what others miss—connecting dots between emerging technology and real-world needs, building the right team, and relentlessly pursuing a vision of a better future. That philosophy has guided Jawsaver’s progress over the past five years.\Beyond her company, Selina actively mentors women entrepreneurs, particularly in digital health and wearables. She shares her experience to help others navigate challenges, find resources, and connect to supportive networks. She also speaks frequently at conferences and panels, creating visibility for female founders with non-traditional tech backgrounds. Her mission is to advance innovation in AI and healthcare, ensuring that women like her are seen, heard, and celebrated in shaping the future of technology.\Parul Gupta, Senior Engineer at a big tech company in California (undisclosed)Parul Gupta is an award-winning engineer and advocate for responsible AI, recognized in 2025 with the Women in AI award for Responsible AI. Based in California, she specializes in taking AI workflows from research into production and is an expert in the Python ecosystem. Her technical contributions include early work on FairLearn, an open-source library that helps assess and reduce bias in AI systems. She has presented her work at more than 25 conferences, panels, and podcasts, where she shares insights on advanced topics in AI and Python with global audiences.\Parul's contributions to FairLearn included developing fairness constraints and optimization techniques through efficient algorithmic solutions, as well as conducting empirical experiments on hybrid search methods within fairness constraints. This work provided valuable insights into improving speed, accuracy, and fairness simultaneously, pushing the boundaries of AI ethics research into practical applications. With more than five years of work in AI ethics, Parul combines technical expertise with a broader mission to shape a responsible future for the technology.\Parul envisions AI as one of the defining forces of our era—capable of enabling enormous progress, but also posing risks if misused. She is passionate about guiding AI toward a human-centered, responsible direction, ensuring diverse ideologies and voices are included in how it evolves. For her, fairness and inclusivity in AI are not optional—they are foundational to its success.\Gupta's experience also highlights the importance of role models. Early in her career, she rarely saw women in AI to look up to, until she found a few mentors who helped open doors she had never imagined. Inspired by that experience, Parul now mentors others through nonprofit organizations like Re-writing the Code, CodeLabs, PyLadies, and alumni networks. She also serves as a judge and reviewer at conferences, supports hackathons and competitions, and encourages early-career technologists—especially women—to get involved in open source as a way to strengthen skills and networks.\For Parul, impact is about scaling herself: using mentorship, community involvement, and technical leadership to ensure that the next generation of technologists builds AI that is fair, inclusive, and transformative for society.\Dalma Szabo, Founder & CEO of OH, a potato!Dalma Szabo is the co-founder and CEO of OH, a potato!, the first AI-native app designed to tackle household food waste—a hidden culprit behind 60% of global waste. What began with food guilt in her own kitchen grew into a climate solution that now serves over 30,000 households worldwide. Featured by Apple and ranked #1 on Product Hunt, OH, a potato! blends behavioral design with adaptive AI to make sustainable living feel effortless. Instead of another recipe app, Dalma is building a system smart enough to handle the unpredictability of real life—last-minute plan changes, busy days, and forgotten leftovers.\The app uses multimodal LLMs to scan fridges, recognize ingredients, and suggest recipes that maximize what’s already on hand. It even lets users capture recipes from anywhere—spoken aloud in a video, jotted in an old notebook, or saved online—turning scattered inspiration into practical meals. What excites Dalma most is what comes next: fully on-device, hyper-personalized AI systems that predict what food a household is likely to waste and adjust meal plans in real time to prevent it. For her, on-device AI isn’t just a technical upgrade—it’s a paradigm shift toward privacy, agency, and climate impact.\ “Most consumer tech still treats AI as an add-on,” she says. “I built OH, a potato! around it from day one—not for novelty, but to solve a real behavior-level problem.” By moving beyond rigid personalisation toward living, adaptive systems, Dalma is showing how AI can feel organic, responsive, and human.\Beyond her company, Dalma mentors product managers and first-time founders, especially women making the leap from employee to entrepreneur. Through her blog Problem Solved?, she breaks down how to sharpen product intuition, identify the real problem worth solving, and trust your instincts while building something meaningful. Her approach is hands-on and practical: fewer frameworks, more clarity, and a relentless focus on solutions that matter.\Violetta Chekan, Founder & Managing Partner at Vis CaeliVioletta Chekan, widely known as VC, is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur with more than a decade of experience in early-stage investing. As Founding Partner of Vis Caeli, she focuses on B2B startups at the intersection of blockchain and AI, accelerating technological innovation across industries. She also invests as an angel in late-stage AI deals, with a particular focus on AI agents and their role in shaping the future of enterprise technology.\Violetta began her venture capital career at just 20 years old and later founded her own startup, gaining rare insight into both sides of the table—as a founder and as an investor. This perspective fuels her approach to supporting entrepreneurs beyond capital, using her global network to connect founders with investors, partners, and industry leaders. She is also the host of Web2+1 with VC, a YouTube podcast where she interviews leading entrepreneurs and investors in blockchain, crypto, and decentralized AI.\One of her most impactful contributions to AI so far has been her early-stage investment in Humanos, a company developing the human permission layer for AI agents. By ensuring that users can grant permissions and issue commands in GDPR-compliant and ethical ways, Humanos tackles one of AI’s biggest challenges: how to integrate trust, privacy, and oversight into systems that operate in highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and telecommunications.\Looking ahead, Violetta is particularly excited about the rise of decentralized AI agents. In her view, the next five years will see agents evolve from basic tools into secure, autonomous entities with applications across supply chains, healthcare, and financial services. Blockchain will play a crucial role by providing transparency, interoperability, and trustless operations. Through Vis Caeli, she is committed to backing projects that address these challenges while ensuring ethical governance and user ownership of data.\Starting her VC career so young came with challenges. At 20, she was often underestimated in high-stakes boardrooms and meetings, where age and gender stereotypes lingered. She overcame these by focusing on her track record, delivering measurable results. Programs like VC Lab, the leading venture capital accelerator, and VC Unlocked: Silicon Valley, an executive program in partnership with Stanford and 500 Global, sharpened her strategy alongside her results—investing over $20M across 16 deals with strong returns in emerging tech—which together built her lasting credibility.\Today, through her investing and podcasting, she creates visibility for founders in blockchain and AI, connecting them with the capital and networks they need to succeed. For Violetta, true influence lies in building ecosystems where transformative technologies empower ambitious founders to redefine industries.\Hannah Maude, Founder of Fire & ForteHannah Maude is redefining how businesses and leaders harness AI.When consumer behavior shifted overnight during the pandemic, Hannah moved from a strategy role into digital at Unilever in Australia, helping the company prioritize where to capture value and how to partner with the country’s biggest retailers. She quickly realized that lasting impact required more than short-term fixes — it meant equipping teams with new skills at speed.\That insight drives her work today as founder of Fire & Forte, where she helps leaders, teams, and communities get AI-ready. Her approach combines safe experimentation with measurable outcomes, building not only adoption but genuine enthusiasm. Known for her approachable style, Hannah has become a trusted partner for organizations of all sizes seeking to accelerate AI adoption.\One of her flagship initiatives is the Women+AI Accelerator, launched in London in 2025 and now expanding across the UK. Its next chapter, AI Changemakers, is designed to upskill business teams with a clear differentiator: every participant leaves with a tangible AI action plan, from identifying use cases to brainstorming innovations at work and at home.\Hannah’s vision is to unlock the limitless potential of humans powered by AI through rapid skills development and literacy. By bridging human brilliance with AI’s capabilities, she creates strategies and spaces where anyone can see themselves as a changemaker.\ “There’s never been a more exciting time to grab the opportunity ahead,” she says. “My mission is to help many more people step confidently into the future and shape it for the better.”\Galya Westler, CEO & Co-Founder of HumanBeam Technologies; CEO at Plazus TechnologiesGalya Westler is the founder and CEO of HumanBeam Technologies, where she is pioneering AI-powered 3D advertising and visual concierge platforms that blend immersive design with intelligent interaction. From healthcare to hospitality and retail, HumanBeam reimagines customer engagement—guiding people through complex decisions with natural conversation, real-time data, and interactive visuals that elevate both client experience and business performance.\In parallel, Galya also leads Plazus Technologies, an enterprise solutions company recognized for its expertise in cybersecurity, penetration testing, and blockchain-enabled software. At Plazus, she focuses on safeguarding enterprise AI adoption with layered security approaches that include generative AI security tools, penetration testing suites simulating real-world threats, and blockchain-based verification systems to protect data integrity. This dual focus—innovation and protection—enables organizations to adopt AI confidently while maintaining the highest standards of trust.\Galya’s influence in AI comes from her ability to make the abstract tangible. At HumanBeam, she turns algorithms into immersive, visual, and conversational experiences that industries and consumers actually want to interact with. At Plazus, she ensures those innovations are underpinned by enterprise-grade security, building the trust layer that AI adoption demands. This rare combination of vision and execution—imagination paired with delivery—sets her apart as a leader who both envisions the future and brings it to market.\Looking ahead, she is focused on overcoming one of the greatest barriers to AI adoption: fear and resistance. In her view, hesitancy comes not from lack of potential but from AI feeling cold, untrustworthy, or disconnected from real human needs. Her mission is to flip that narrative—making AI more human, more transparent, and more secure. Through HumanBeam, she is proving that AI can be immersive and conversational; through Plazus, she is building the security infrastructure that enterprises need to deploy AI at scale.\Beyond her own ventures, Galya is committed to multiplying influence. She is opening doors for her team by giving them real responsibility—leading conversations, owning outcomes, and building confidence through action. Outside her companies, she connects entrepreneurs in her community, fostering collaborations and creating opportunities they might not otherwise access. For Galya, influence only matters if it multiplies through the people around you.\Sharmistha Chatterjee, Vice President of Data & AI at American ExpressSharmistha Chatterjee is a seasoned technology leader with expertise spanning data engineering, advanced analytics, cloud transformation, and AI/ML innovation. A graduate of Aalto University with published research papers, she has led digital transformations across industries, including retail, BFSI, IoT, and telecom. Over the course of her career, she has built and scaled AI solutions that have delivered millions of dollars in revenue uplift, combining deep technical insight with strategic leadership.\Currently Vice President of Data & AI at American Express, Sharmistha has previously held senior roles that shaped enterprise-scale AI adoption. At Commonwealth Bank, she led an Advanced Analytics Chapter of 180+ members, overseeing AWS cloud migration, developing ML deployment infrastructure, embedding DevSecOps practices, and founding a GenAI team to drive large-scale adoption of LLM-based solutions. At Publicis Sapient, she delivered advanced ML models and big data pipelines across sectors like retail and fintech, while earlier, as a founding team member at a Princeton startup, she helped file multiple US patents and scale SaaS and cloud-based platforms from inception to enterprise adoption.\Sharmistha considers her most influential work to be the consistent translation of cutting-edge AI research into scalable, production-ready systems. She has built GenAI teams from the ground up, authored books including Platform and Model Design for Responsible AI and Revolutionizing Youth Mental Health with Ethical AI, and contributed to responsible AI adoption by embedding ethics, transparency, and security into large-scale deployments. For her, influence means enabling organizations, industries, and teams to accelerate AI transformation while maintaining responsibility and inclusion.\Her vision is to encourage transformations in the GENAI industry, especially in the world of Small Language Models (SLM). She emphasizes that true progress requires models that are not only powerful and accurate but also explainable, secure, and aligned with evolving regulatory frameworks.\Alongside her enterprise leadership, Sharmistha has built a reputation as a community voice and mentor. She is a 2X Google Developer Expert, a multi-award-winning data scientist, and a global speaker at events including Women in Data Science and Silicon Valley ML Conference, where she has also served as chair. She contributes regularly to publications such as Hackernoon and TechAIResearch, mentors startups at Nasscom’s deep tech club, and serves as a judge for initiatives such as the APAC Women in AI Awards.\Sharmistha's journey as a woman in AI has not been without barriers, from underrepresentation in leadership roles to unconscious bias in technical environments. Her approach has been to combine resilience with advocacy, building inclusive cultures within teams and organizations. She actively leads employee resource networks, such as the Generational Diversity Employee Network in India, and champions inclusive hiring and career progression policies.\For Chatterjee, leadership is about more than technology. It is about creating ecosystems where innovation is balanced with responsibility, and where diverse voices are empowered to shape the future of AI.\Kara Peterson, Co-Founder of DescrybeKara Peterson is the co-founder of Descrybe, a Boston-based legal tech startup launched in 2023 that uses AI to make legal research dramatically more affordable and accessible. Today, Descrybe serves thousands of users each month and has earned recognition across the legal and tech worlds, including a 2024 Anthem Award for Best Use of AI, three Webby Award nominations, and multiple American Legal Technology Awards. Kara leads marketing, partnerships, and business development, helping the company scale quickly and push the boundaries of what AI can do in law.\Beyond her startup, Kara is also the co-founder and co-host of Building AI Boston, a fast-growing show featuring leading voices in AI. With broadcasts on radio stations across New England and more than 20,000 monthly podcast downloads, the show has become a trusted platform for making technology more approachable and amplifying diverse perspectives.\Kara’s influence in AI comes from the way she bridges building, speaking, and community. At Descrybe, she is showing how AI can transform a traditionally opaque field like legal research, while through Building AI Boston, she is opening up conversations that bring together innovators, policymakers, and practitioners. Named a 2024 ABA Woman of Legal Tech, she also serves as a judge for the Webby and Anthem Awards, lending her expertise to recognize the next generation of technology leaders.\For Kara, influence is not just about building tools but about shaping culture. She speaks regularly on responsible AI and the role of women in AI, pushing for a future where the technology is trustworthy, inclusive, and widely accessible. Her vision is to ensure the AI revolution “belongs to everyone — not just the usual tech bros.”\Kara began her career navigating spaces dominated by technical voices, and she turned that difference into a strength—bridging law, technology, and accessibility in ways others overlooked. Over time, she came to see difference not as a liability but as a superpower. By bringing a unique perspective and openly acknowledging what she doesn’t know, she has built credibility while also modeling vulnerability for others. She believes that showing up authentically gives more women permission to do the same and step into AI leadership without feeling like they have to be perfect.\Today, through Descrybe and Building AI Boston, Kara is expanding who gets to participate in the conversation around AI. For her, the future of the field will be defined as much by inclusivity as by innovation.\Marie Roker-Jones, CEO at Curious Culture; Women in AI and Partnerships Lead, AI2030Marie Roker-Jones is an AI strategist, two-time founder, and ecosystem builder working at the intersection of AI, equity, and workforce development. Over the past decade, she has advised founders, designed programs that give underrepresented talent hands-on experience in tech, and built cross-sector partnerships that turn ideas into systems with staying power. Her guiding question has always been: Who gets left out when technology moves forward?\That question led to her signature framework, Curiosity-in-the-Loop™, which reframes curiosity as a safeguard in AI adoption. Instead of treating questions as inefficiencies, Marie shows startups and leaders how reflection and lived experience can serve as design guardrails. By treating overlooked questions as data and insight, this framework helps prevent costly failures before they scale. It now underpins Responsible AI pilots, leadership circles, and startup advisories — proof that curiosity is not a distraction, but a practical tool for building systems people can trust.\As Women in AI and Partnerships Lead at AI2030, Marie creates programs that ensure women and underrepresented voices are not just included but positioned to lead. Through AI2030, SheLeadsAI, and her advisory work, she has built ecosystems where communities once sidelined by technology can become decision-makers shaping outcomes. Her influence lies in building accountability, trust, and space for new leaders to emerge.\Looking ahead, Marie envisions AI as more than a prediction machine. She imagines AI systems that expand collective imagination and make hidden biases visible. In healthcare, that might mean algorithms trained both for efficiency and equity — alerting professionals when treatments consistently underperform for women or people of color. In finance, credit models could transparently show how their rules penalize marginalized groups, allowing leaders to weigh trade-offs openly. For her, the frontier is AI as a curiosity engine, one that prompts society to ask better questions and take action.\ConclusionThese ten women represent just a glimpse of the influence women are having on AI today. Their work reminds us that the future of AI will be defined not only by algorithms and models, but by the people shaping them—with creativity, ethics, and bold vision.