Empowering Women to Lead in AI: Inside the ElevateHER Launch Event in Atlanta

A Keynote On Women Leaders In AI

On March 20th, I attended the launch party of ElevateHER, a non-profit dedicated to building an ecosystem for women to lead in AI. It felt like the perfect opportunity to step into the world of AI firsthand and see what Atlanta’s women leaders and their partners were creating in our own backyard. After all Silicon Valley is too far for us to keep a tab.

My friend, Preeti Tanwar, is the Founder and CEO, and she opened the night explaining her journey as a student and fast food cashier to becoming an entrepreneur building HiEd Success, an Atlanta-based technology firm helping organizations harness transformative AI, advanced analytics, and strategic staffing. Her story set the tone to what was to come – with vision and action, anything is possible. 

Gabriel Millien, a Technologist and an AI strategy advisor for Fortune 500 organizations delivered the key note. Philanthropist Nita Sardana was invited as the chief guest to light the lamp to officially kick off the event.

The Many Use Cases Of AI

Throughout the evening, several speakers shared their work and insights. Su Rayburn, a technology leader with a background in Data Management and Analytics from Delta Community Credit Union, highlighted the importance of AI in governance and decision making at scale.

Barbara Jones-Brown, CEO & Founder of Freeing Returns, helps retailers save money by solving total retail loss. She leverages AI to create personas like Oprah and Obama on her “digital board of directors,” helping her team see all sides of a decision. Her team even builds custom GPTs and feeds Otter AI notes to anticipate client reactions.

Natalie Hogg, CEO & Founder of Method Q, explained how her marketing company uses popular LLMs to craft campaigns for clients, while Tope Mitchell, the flamboyant CEO of Reflekt Me, shared how she onboarded her global teams with tools like Gemini, ChatGPT, and NotebookLM, blending AI and storytelling in creative ways.

Priya Sarathy, the Director of the Center for Data Sciences and Analytics at Kennesaw State University spoke about the need of experiential learning and building AI fluency to stay relevant in the AI age. She teaches her students not just how to use AI, but to build and launch AI agents themselves.

The Participation Gap

Millien’s keynote was a mix of compelling story telling and facts. He urged us to “go beyond what’s on the map” and explore the unclaimed territory in AI and confront the participation gap.

There’s so much confusion around what AI means to us and if its here to make us obsolete. We keep getting bombarded by messages like, “AI will replace 300 million jobs,” “The robots are coming, are you ready?” or “Top 10 AI tools every professional needs in 2026.” But what is the direction we must head into, he asked?

“AI is going to revolutionize healthcare, eliminate bias, and create a more equitable world for everyone.” But the truth is more nuanced, he said. AI has the potential to revolutionize healthcare, reduce bias, and create a more equitable world ONLY if all of us are at the design table.

Recent data from February 2026 from UN Women and the World Economic Forum indicate that women make up approximately 30% of AI professionals globally and progress is described as “stagnant” in high-level technical positions. According to the 2025 Stanford AI Index and updated UN Women briefings, women hold only 16% to 18% of AI research roles.

When Vision Meets Reality

The program stretched into the long Friday evening. An agenda handbook would have helped center the attendees into understanding what was coming next. Some presentations felt abrupt, and some felt dragged on.

Overall, kudos to the entire organizing committee for pulling off such an inclusive community oriented launch of their non-profit. I cannot imagine the number of micro decisions that had led to an event looking so effortlessly stylish and put together.

Considering this is just the beginning, I hope to see many more such events and hope to collaborate with some of the presenters and team members in the future.

I have only “interacted” with female AI leaders in the internet space. I listen to podcasts where women like Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal, talk about the hype surrounding agentic AI and the need for data governance and oversight.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li, another Silicon Valley AI thought leader, talks about the need to understand AI as a tool in the right hands that can amplify human potential and solve some of the world’s biggest challenges, from healthcare to climate change. She recently noted that while the first self-driving cars successfully traversed the desert in the mid 2000’s, it still took roughly 20 years for autonomous technologies like Waymo to barely make it onto public roads. Exponential change can feel immediate, but meaningful progress is often slow and deliberate.

What struck me the most is in an age of Linkedin influencers, seeing change makers in person felt refreshing. The power of our networking is real, when we can use it to leverage action and change in the best possible way in a changing landscape. This is what happens when progress meets preparedness.

Claiming Our Seats At The Table

As experts like Joy Buolamwini and organizations like UN Women point out, bias in AI isn’t accidental. Buolamwini had discovered that facial recognition systems often couldn’t detect her face because of skin tone and gender, and that inspired her to start the Algorithmic Justice League. Her mantra is simple but profound, “If you have a face, you have a place in this conversation.”

I will leave you with Millien’s closing words, which captured the essence of the night:

“The baseline is still being set. The design decisions made today will shape AI for the next decade. And this is our opening. There are no dragons (dangers) at the edge of this map. There is only territory that has not yet been claimed by the people who belong in it. The map was always wrong. We are the correction.”

Indeed, we must act now.

When we integrate the tools of AI into our work, we can elevate ourselves, elevate HER, and everyone else around us.

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