Women As Orchestrators Of AI's Next Chapter

By Raji Mohanam

I've spent over two decades in medical education, research and public health. Inside the very systems that shape people's lives in very real ways. I've watched women's pain dismissed as anxiety, clinical studies dominated by male subjects, and treatment guidelines that overlooked the female patients they were supposed to help.

So when I look at AI today, I see a familiar story: we're told the technology is neutral, that algorithms are objective. But I've worked in research long enough to know that every system mirrors the priorities of its creators.

What most people don't realize is that the future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people. A few hundred researchers at a handful of companies: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and maybe two others. That's it. These are the people laying the foundations that everyone else will build on top of. So, as women, we're building on foundations we didn't lay. Once again.

But here's the critical difference this time: we don't need permission from those labs to shape what comes next. Most people working in AI, including the men positioning themselves as experts, have almost no influence over the core technology either. They're watching this unfold the same as everyone else. They just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first. And that's the advantage we can use too.

If you tried ChatGPT a year ago and thought "meh," you're making decisions based on outdated information. The free version is over a year behind what's actually possible. The people paying $20/month for the best models (and using them daily for real work) are seeing a completely different reality. They're feeling the tremors. And they're adapting accordingly.

Right now, as Matt Shumer laid out in his recent article, AI is crossing a threshold. It's moved from "helpful tool" to "does the job better than you." Tech workers are already experiencing this reality. Industry experts predict it's coming for 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs in 1-5 years—roles where women are disproportionately concentrated.

I believe that this is the moment that we can step in as orchestrators not only as individual women scrambling to save our own jobs but more collectively shaping systems that work for everyone because we've spent our lives noticing what's missing. We bring lived understanding of how systems fail people quietly. We recognize the cost of being overlooked because we've experienced it in exam rooms, workplaces, and institutions.

In healthcare, we learned that designing for the "average patient" often means designing for men and calling it universal. AI risks repeating that mistake at scale automating bias, encoding exclusion, building intelligence on partial experience.

The barriers that kept us out like the old boys' network, the technical gatekeeping, the assumptions about who belongs, well those don't apply anymore. You don't need to code to build an app. You don't need a Stanford degree to access world-class knowledge. You don't need a seat in those five companies to influence outcomes. What we need is to show up early. Not as individuals leaning in, but as a collective force asking better questions, noticing whose realities aren't represented, and building systems that advance humanity—not just those already at the top.

Our platform is aimed at seeing more women succeed in the innovation fields. To that end, we suggest taking two simple steps:

1/ If at all possible, use the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT today. Use it daily. Intimately. Not for small tasks—push it with your actual difficult work. Build the muscle memory so you feel the shifts as they happen.

2/Share what you learn with your networks. Become the person who demonstrates what's possible. Build the habit of questioning what these tools miss and whose voices are absent.

The people who will shape AI's impact aren't the few hundred researchers in those labs. They're the millions of us who use these tools daily, who notice the gaps, who build applications that serve broader humanity, who ask whether an output truly works for everyone or just for some.

The future of AI won't be decided by who writes the foundational code. It will be shaped by who asks better questions. Who understands that their own experience is not universal. Who recognizes that real intelligence begins with questioning what we inherit.

As women, we need to think beyond just adapting to AI. We need to orchestrate what it becomes.