Impact, Opportunity, and Closing the AI Gender Gap
I scored one of the two remaining tickets for Women of SaaS New York’s latest event. Rachael Nemeth, CEO & Co-Founder, Opus Training moderated a fascinating panel event featuring:
Melody Koh, Partner & Chief Product Officer, NextView VC
Stephanie Nachemja-Bunton, COO & Founder, PunttAI
Shensi Ding, Co-Founder, Merge.dev
Themes throughout the evening centered on impact and opportunity.
From left to right: Rachael, Melody, Steph, Shensi
Impact
When discussing how to advance at work, Steph and Shensi agreed that promotions come with the impact you make in addition to your skill. Steph put it clearly "You must demonstrate the impact you are making."
She also emphasized the importance of confirming the AI you're using is driving real value. It's fine if your AI agents are just helping you personally. But if they're significantly assisting your work, that benefit extends to the whole team.
Rachael added that “Success used to be around managing a team of people. Now it's managing agents." That means monitoring the agents you build and regularly looking for ways to improve them. The more we use AI, the more we learn about better prompting. It makes sense to revisit agents you built early on and check whether their workflows are still optimized. Small tweaks can make a real difference in time saved or accuracy gained.
Opportunity
In 2026, it feels nearly impossible to go an hour without thinking, discussing, using, reading, or learning about AI. This provides ample room for opportunity. Rachael said "There is more opportunity than risk right now," a reassuring note given how much attention AI's larger risks have drawn lately.
What kind of Women of SaaS event would this be if they didn’t spend a little time on gender? Melody framed it this way: "There's an opportunity to close the historical gender gap. You can either be motivated by fear or by joy."
The gender gap in AI adoption
Gini Dietrich, founder of the PR firm Spin Sucks, recently wrote about this. In her piece "When Men Use AI, They're Resourceful. When Women Use AI, They're Cheating," she points to research from Harvard Business School, Berkeley, and Stanford. Across 18 studies covering more than 140,000 people, the researchers found that women adopt generative AI at about a 25% lower rate than men.
I firmly believe that if you're not using AI, you're already behind, and that was the overall message from the panel too. Every panelist agreed: learning, understanding, and using AI matters no matter your industry. Shensi summed it up best: "We have to tinker and be creative."
That belief is part of why I joined Women Defining AI. At one of their in-person events, I sat down and started vibe coding my Toastmasters Goal to Role App. I’d wanted to build it for a while and this session, sitting shoulder to shoulder in that coffee shop, is the push I needed to just do it.
You're probably already tinkering with AI. This week, take it one step further, pick something slightly harder than what you'd normally build. Give it a shot, and let me know what you create, I’d love to see it. ✨
