🍓 I take locked settings personally

Hi Reader,

I'm Gen X, which means I was raised on minimal supervision and I take locked settings personally. Every scheduling tool I ever tried wanted me to work its way — deciding what a booking looked like and how my day got sliced, and I adjusted.

Lately I quit adjusting and made my own, as many schedules as I want that run on a plain Google Calendar without extra costs. A time tracker for contracted workers came next. A QR code generator followed, written from scratch, error-correction math and all. Then a small game on a Raspberry Pi, which I cannot justify at all.

Tools built around your brain instead of someone else's defaults — if that sounds like your kind of summer, it's the whole premise of Claude Girl Summer. Sarah Mary of Build with Sarah and Anne Murphy will spend four workshops helping you build a Personal Operating System that works the way you already think, with Claude. The series starts July 15 — details are in the events section below.

Warmly,
Kate
She Leads AI

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

P.S. Anne's Ikigai Client Engagement Test shows you who's driving the car — you or your potential client. Find it at https://sheleadsai.ai/ikigai/ (password Ikigai)

🗓️ Social Saturday

No Social Saturday this week

We're stepping back for the 4th of July. However you spend it — celebrating, resting, or both — we hope it's a good one.

We'll be back together on Saturday, July 11th!

Gather With Us On Saturdays

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

[Our Zoom Policies]

🔥 Upcoming Events

Build Your Personal Operating System

With Sarah Mary of Build with Sarah and Anne Murphy of She Leads AI.

Most systems were built for someone else's brain. This one gets built around yours, with Claude.

Workshop 1 - Command Center: Turn the business brain you already have into the home base you run your day from. Outcome → Clarity
Workshop 2 - Authority Engine: Give your business brain a soul. Pull the method out of your own head and name it. Outcome → Visibility
Workshop 3 - Sales Engine: Point your brain at the people you want to reach, and sound like you doing it. Outcome → Momentum
Workshop 4 - Business Intelligence: Teach your brain to learn from what happened, and tell you what to do next. Outcome → Insight

The four-part virtual workshop series starts July 15.

The full four-workshop series is $600 - buy 3, get one free.

With this, you also receive the June 11 replay, along with all five playbooks.

Get the Four-Pack • $600

📢 She Leads AI Society Members Making an Impact

Sarah Downey spent more than 20 years leading in the nonprofit sector, including serving as Executive Director of three Canadian charities, before founding Sarah Downey Consulting in Victoria, British Columbia. Now she helps mission-driven organizations adopt AI ethically, building policy and governance frameworks that protect values and build trust — giving boards and staff clear guardrails before the tools arrive. She's blunt about why the timing is urgent. Canada wants to move from 12 percent to 60 percent AI adoption by 2034 with no protective legislation on the way, so the organizations that write their own rules now will adapt on their own terms. She keynoted the 2025 Volunteer Victoria Annual General Meeting with the conviction that runs through everything she does — nonprofits can lead the way on ethical AI adoption.

Monique Jones built her career on the engineering side of AI before she ever carried a product title. With a degree in electrical and computer engineering from Texas State University, she joined Intel as an AI software engineer and rose to lead DevCloud for the Edge — a browser-based environment that let developers test edge AI applications on Intel hardware in minutes. She took that work on stage at the 2021 Embedded Vision Summit, showing engineers around the world how to build without waiting on physical dev boards. Today she's a Senior Technical Product Manager at Veracity Insurance Solutions in Austin, bringing AI and data analytics into an industry that runs on risk decisions. Colleagues describe her as a natural leader who takes on work bigger than her title and delivers — one predicted she'd end up a VP or CTO. When Monique looks at a product, she sees both the code underneath it and the person in front of it.

Niki Weiss works in the part of the digital age most people avoid talking about. A digital legacy thanatologist with a background in healthcare and risk analysis, she founded ENDevo, a death tech startup, and created the My Final Playbook Systems App to guide people through end-of-life planning step by step — from legal documents and finances to the digital assets most of us never think to protect. Colleagues from her two decades in hospice and end-of-life work describe her as someone who anticipates what people will need before they know to ask for it. She's carried that same foresight into AI, speaking on AI governance at the Project Control Summit and pursuing the International Association of Privacy Professionals' AI governance credential. Niki has built a career on the hardest conversation there is, and she turns it into one people are relieved to have.

🍓 Worth a Share

Pamela (Walters) Oberg, MA, PMP takes on the data center backlash from an angle most coverage skips. The water numbers are staggering and the anger is justified, but she argues the problem isn't AI itself. It's how we're allowing it to be built. Finland is already heating entire cities with data center waste heat while US communities get shut out of the approval process. She also asks a harder question about why this outrage took 18 months to arrive when harms like cobalt mining have been documented for decades. Read the full piece →

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 →