🍓 Closing the gap.

Hi Reader,

Last week I needed a customer database for a little side-hustle. The "proper" move is to buy one — pick a platform, pay the monthly fee. Instead I built one from a Google sheet and a free script. It has already caught two people I'd have forgotten to follow up with.

There's an old anthropology word for this — bricoleur, the person who builds what's needed out of whatever's at hand. It sounds fancier in French than it looks in practice, which is mostly me squinting at a spreadsheet.

Here's the part worth holding onto. Most of us already see what our business needs — you know exactly where a follow-up goes quiet. The seeing was never the hard part. The doing was, because it used to require a developer or a software budget. It doesn't anymore. I described what I wanted to Claude the way I'd describe it to a smart friend, then went back and forth until the thing worked. (The back-and-forth is most of it, honestly.)

The distance between knowing what your business needs and having it exist has never been shorter.

Warmly,
Kate
She Leads AI

Tiptoeing into your inbox all summer 🐾 with The SLAI Effect — talk to you in the next one.

P.S. — She Leads AI has a list of the words AI ruined (for now). Keep it open when you edit your next draft and cut whatever shows up: https://sheleadsai.ai/words-ai-ruined/

🗓️ Social Saturday

The weekly gathering for human-centered AI practitioners, where women gather to make sense of AI, together.

Free for all women. Hosted by Beth Lyons and Jen Schwartz.

The gathering is warm and encouraging — a safe place to try new ideas. Women bring shared experiences and different perspectives to every question, with a human-centered approach to all of it. You leave with new ideas and new friends, and often a challenge to take home.

Every Saturday
10am-Noon Pacific
Zoom

Gather With Us On Saturdays

Social Saturday is made possible by the She Leads AI Society, our membership program for human-centered AI practitioners.

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🔥 Upcoming Events

🗓️ Social Saturday - every Saturday from 10:00am-Noon Pacific
Free to all women in AI

🗓️ Special Member Jam - Wednesday, July 29 from 11:30am-12:30pm Pacific
Build, Launch, Scale Lab with Pamela Oberg. Member Jams are a benefit for members of the She Leads AI Society. (RSVP in the community.)

🗓️ Claude Girl Summer - Workshop #1 - Command Center. 2:00pm-3:30pm Pacific. Most systems were built for someone else's brain. This one gets built around yours, with Claude. A four-part virtual workshop series · July 29 to September 9. Register at https://claudegirlsummer.com/

📢 She Leads AI Society Members Making an Impact

Suzel Wyvill-Jones has spent twenty-five years making other people's technology arrive on time. At Cricket Wireless she ran the eSIM rollout and served as Release Train Engineer for eighteen agile teams. She directed AT&T Fiber's back-office deployment — a $140M annual portfolio, sixty to ninety concurrent projects at a time. Then she pointed that discipline at AI. Through Mindshift Dynamics, the consultancy she founded last year, she has built and deployed more than thirty AI agents across telecom and travel, and wrote a book on the framework behind the work. She designs governance into AI systems from day one, as part of how they get approved and monitored rather than a layer added after launch. She advises leaders on what to pursue and what to skip, based on constraints rather than trends. As she puts it: "AI is not a side initiative. It's a test of how well your organization actually runs."

Denise Gangi has spent more than twenty years on the question most people avoid — what is this worth? She came up through IBM structuring outsourcing deals from $10M to $2B, then spent twenty-one years at Broadridge, the last eleven as VP of Strategic Pricing, building value-based frameworks across a global technology portfolio and closing multimillion-dollar competitive deals without eroding the client relationship. Then she co-founded an AI automation company, and in January she launched Value Exploration to help others articulate the value of what they sell. When she led a Social Saturday session for She Leads AI in April on Pricing When Time and Money Don't Mean What They Used To, she brought the harder version of the AI pricing conversation. Clients see AI in your product and ask whether the efficiency gains should come back as a discount. Denise's response is to measure first — including compute time, which most firms forget to count. Pricing is a puzzle she has been solving since 2002.

Kim Olpin runs Jericho Road Pasadena, matching skilled volunteers to nonprofits and building peer networks for executive directors across the San Gabriel Valley and greater Los Angeles — leaders who spend a lot of time feeling like the only one dealing with whatever they're dealing with. She came up through the operational end of the sector. At L.A. Works she directed corporate engagement for a 50,000-member volunteer action center, growing revenue 70% in twenty-four months. Before that she raised grant funding at CLARE and ran clinic logistics for a medical program serving remote coastal communities in Panama. She has a master's in nonprofit management and describes the job plainly — she helps nonprofits run better, and that's it. Lately that includes AI, where she is blunt about where nonprofit leaders sit. They are either terrified of it or pretending they already understand it.

🍓 Worth a Share

Erika Gianni, She Leads AI member and Certified AI Educator, built Good in Progress, a library of verified stories about people using AI for good.

A farmer in Chiradzulu, Malawi who sent a photo of his crop instead of waiting for an extension officer. A radio station in Kaitāia that built its own te reo Māori speech model in ten days, with 2,500 community members donating their voices, and kept the data theirs. A town clerk in Long View, North Carolina who fixed a job she dreaded and now tells clerks across the country how to fix theirs.

The stories sort by lens — Ordinary People, Breakthrough — and by domain, from agriculture to disaster response. Erika's own framing sits at the top of the site. Somewhere right now, someone is building the future instead of waiting for it.

It just launched. Fifteen stories up and a nomination form open. Fourteen becomes fifteen when someone sends one in. If you know a woman whose AI work belongs in this library, nominate her.

goodinprogress.org

CREATE Conference 2026 is three days in Salt Lake City built for women in AI leadership — October 16–18. Strategy, hands-on sessions, and peers who understand the challenges you're facing. Gather with us →