Hi Reader,
Every time you paste something into an AI tool, you make three decisions in a few seconds. Who owns it. Who else will see it. Whether you can undo it.
Last Saturday's Social Saturday was built on the idea that AI has made all of us data managers. Our work, our clients, and our lives produce more information than we have ever had to sort, and the sorting now happens one paste at a time.
Before your next paste, run three checks.
- Ownership. A client's notes, a colleague's draft and a donor list belong to someone else, so they stay out unless you have permission.
- Say it to their face. If you would not read the paragraph aloud to the person it's about, it stays out of the tool.
- Retention. Some tools keep what you give them. Look up the setting before you use the tool for anything sensitive.
Write your answers down once and you have a personal AI policy. The Personal AI Policy Maker walks you through it, and CREATE in Salt Lake City, October 16–18, is where we keep working on questions like these together.
Warmly,
Anne and Sheila, She Leads AI's Chief of Staff
P.S. Here's something for you this week. The Personal AI Policy Maker. A short walk through how you handle data in your work, ending in a personal policy you can keep. Make your personal AI policy → https://sheleadsai.ai/policy-maker/
Social Saturday
Free for all women. Hosted by Beth Lyons and Jen Schwartz.
Open Mic Tomorrow
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.
Saturday, October 10
10am–Noon Pacific | Zoom | No cost for all women
Gather With Us On Saturdays
Social Saturday is the weekly gathering for human-centered AI practitioners — two hours every Saturday morning where women come together to learn with AI. From seasoned practitioners to the newly curious, we gather on Zoom to make sense of our collective AI journey.
Social Saturday is made possible by the She Leads AI Society, our membership program for human-centered AI practitioners.
[Our Zoom Policies]
Other Upcoming Events
COUNTING DOWN TO CREATE!
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 →
Learn More
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She Leads AI Society Members Making an Impact
Lindsay LaShell is a fractional executive in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the founder of Buffalo Collective, who calls herself a “systems thinker, dot connector, and process builder.” Since January she has been Fractional CMO and Systems Architect for Nan Sterman, WaterWise Gardener, a garden education business reaching a 5,000+ subscriber list. There she designed a seven-tier subscription structure across three content tracks and built a production content agent that turns one monthly source document into a full multi-tier publishing set. She also migrated ten years of contacts from MailChimp to Brevo with segment integrity intact. She learned her compass in 2006 as “the primary henchwoman at a venture studio,” has worked with Open Lines Marketing since August 2020, and started Buffalo Collective in October 2025. On August 31 she wrote about keeping a single source of truth, “Personally, I’m a Trello girl. If my Trello account were a person, they’d be old enough to drive.” Her rule for the systems she leaves behind: “I’d rather leave behind something a team can run without me than something that needs me to keep running.”
Nell Byrd is a consultant in Washington, D.C., who describes her work as “Talent, Operations, and AI Strategy Consulting - Serving Purpose-Driven People and Organizations.” In March, at a weekend hackathon, she built ShineLine, a tool that “helps foundations and grantmakers track and spotlight news about their grantees and network, draft newsletter content in their voice, and export it to their newsletter template in MailChimp.” She has also built Lived Values, which helps organizations integrate their core values into day-to-day operations, and TeamMode, an app for busy couples. From June 2017 to August 2024 she worked at Legal Services Corporation, where her work on professional development took satisfaction from 74% to 94% and reached 100% new hire satisfaction. She has consulted on her own since September 2024 and teaches free AI workshops. About her builds she wrote, “I’ve built a bunch of different things over the past year, and it still amazes me every single time that this is possible.” Her advice to anyone starting: “The biggest hurdle is probably mindset and just getting in there and starting to explore.”
Franchon Hurt is a photo creative artist in Georgia who describes her work as “Helping Brands Stand Out with Powerful, Customized Visuals.” Through FH Creative, which she has run since January 2023, she offers Vision Version™, a service that turns a client’s chosen photo into a framed fine art portrait. It begins with a conversation about who the client is stepping into and ends with an archival-quality print, with digital versions for the client’s brand if she wants them. For authors, the same portrait goes on a book cover and into a media kit. Before FH Creative, Franchon spent four years as a Senior Digital Production Artist at WarnerMedia, from December 2018 to January 2023, directing color and retouching for major network campaigns, with a particular focus on skin tone and texture integrity. Her description of the work: “This is not just a portrait session — it is a VISIONING ritual captured in ART.” Her rule for the portrait: “A Vision Version is not meant to hide in a folder on your computer. It is designed to be lived with.”
☕️ Worth a Share
Cyndi Coon has published Futurecasting with Springer Nature, a book that sets out the six phases of the method she and Brian David Johnson have run with “strange combinations of people who might never otherwise have been in a room together.” The book also carries the thinking of women who come at the future from different directions, from a neuroscientist to a graphic designer. Cyndi’s premise is that no single person or discipline has enough information to understand the future alone. In her words, “The future gets more interesting when more humans are invited into it.”
