How Three Women Built Businesses By Making AI Matter

2024 was a year when Silicon Valley’s AI hype cycle remained at fever pitch. Despite growing skepticism about realized value and AI remaining an abstract concept for many businesses and individuals, the industry continued to chase ever-larger valuations and bigger moonshots. Yet amid the soaring investments and technical proclamations, a concerning pattern has emerged: the same gender imbalances that have long plagued tech threaten to carry forward into the AI era. Recent studies show women hold only 26% of data and AI positions globally, raising concerns about bias in what many consider the most consequential technology of our time.

AI’s New Path: Solutions Born from Experience

However, beyond the hype and headlines, a new wave of female founders is emerging and charting a different course—one that leverages AI not just as technology but as a means to solve real human problems drawn from their own lived experiences. Their stories offer an important counternarrative to both AI’s overheated promises and its potential to exacerbate existing inequities.

What is unique about AI is how modern tools have opened doors for entrepreneurs who understand real-world problems. This accessibility has been transformative for women founders, who can now build sophisticated solutions without having extensive technical backgrounds.

I spoke to three women who are turning this promise into reality, each tackling fundamental challenges they encountered firsthand: a lawyer streamlining privacy compliance for developers, a foster care survivor democratizing career access, and a retail tech veteran making AI accessible to mid-sized businesses left behind by big tech’s solutions.

^{AI: A Compliance Game-Changer – Nia Castely}

Nia Castely’s path to AI entrepreneurship began in the legal department at the Google Play Store. As product counsel, she saw developers drowning out privacy compliance rather than coding. A recent Amazon Web Services report confirmed her observation: developers spend just one-hour daily writing code, with the rest consumed by regulatory tasks. ‘We found ourselves asking repeatedly – how can we pre-emptively help developers in this space? There has to be a better way,’ Castely recalls. The answer was AI.”

So, in January 2020, while pregnant with her third child, Castely co-founded Checks, an AI tool that automatically scans privacy policies and monitors data handling, flagging potential issues before they become problems. The solution proved so valuable that Google acquired Checks in the spring of 2023, recognizing its potential to transform how developers navigate privacy compliance across their ecosystem.

“Unlike some AI applications which can feel abstract, Checks has clear, demonstrable value,” Castely explains. “Developers just want to design and develop. We demystify the legal inertia around a complex regulatory landscape, allowing them to focus on what they do best: creating great apps that users can trust.”

For Castely, AI represents more than just technological advancement – it’s a bridge between different disciplines and a pathway for diverse voices in tech. “AI has shown that careers need not be linear. It can break down barriers, especially for minorities and women,” she shares. “What we need more than anything is access and to excite girls. Women are doing great things with AI, but their work is not highlighted. We have a visibility gap.”

^{AI: A career matching tool for everyone – Cathy Huang}

The visibility gap is well known to Cathy Huang, whose path to AI entrepreneurship started far from tech’s wealthy epicenters in Detroit’s public housing system. As the daughter of refugees, Huang spent part of her childhood in the foster care system – an experience that shaped her vision for democratizing career access. Though she found crucial mentors early on, she knows her story is rare and many young people feel left behind by a third level education system that often fails to provide meaningful matches for their skills and passions. Huang highlights that today, 36% of young adults struggle with mental health issues, and with people spending a third of their lives at work, this gap between education and meaningful employment isn’t just a personal crisis – it’s costing the economy an estimated $1.9 trillion in lost productivity.

“When you’ve navigated systems that weren’t built for you, you develop a different perspective on what technology should do,” she tells me. “The question isn’t just about education – it’s about giving people the tools to find purpose in their work.” That perspective led her to create Folio, which she explains is “a platform revolutionizing how students prepare for an AI-driven workforce. Unlike typical edtech solutions, Folio doesn’t just teach technical and professional skills – it saves companies 50% or more on interns by utilizing billions of dollars available via wage subsidies.”

“For kids like me, its not just about learning AI,” she shares, “its about leveling the playing field and making this generation the most inclusive, productive and purpose-driven yet.”

^{AI: The Enterprise AI Democratizer- Maya Mikhailov}

While Huang is transforming educational access, Maya Mikhailov is democratizing AI for another overlooked segment: mid-sized businesses trying to compete in an increasingly AI-driven landscape. “The narrative around AI in retail has been dominated by what the titans are doing with their massive tech teams and billion-dollar budgets,” Mikhailov says, “but what about everyone else? All the other businesses who don’t have those kinds of resources but still need to stay competitive?”

After spending over a decade at the intersection of retail and technology, including founding and selling GPShopper to Synchrony Financial, Mikhailov saw how these businesses needed help to meaningfully connect with customers despite having mountains of data at their disposal. “Everyone was talking about personalization, but most solutions were either too complex, too expensive, or missing the fundamental human element,” she explains. “These retailers were drowning in data but starving for insights that reflected how people shop and make decisions.”

Drawing from her experience as a retail technologist and a consumer behavior expert, she built what she describes as “AI with human intuition baked in.” SAVVI AI emerged from this vision – an AI platform that helps mid-sized businesses in the financial services space compete with the giants by making AI accessible and actionable. “We’re not just building abstract AI solutions,” she explains. “We’re helping businesses to understand the ‘why’ not just the ‘what.’ And we’re doing it in a way that doesn’t require a team of data scientists to implement.”

As the AI gold rush continues, these three founders represent a different, perhaps more critical, technological revolution. Checks, Folio, and SAVVI AI demonstrate that AI’s true potential lies not in its complexity but in its ability to solve real human problems. While their success isn’t measured in billion-dollar valuations or headline-grabbing technical feats, they demonstrate the power of realized value through democratizing technology. Enabling developers to focus on creation rather than compliance, students to find their path in an AI-driven economy, and small businesses to compete effectively in a digital world.

More importantly, they’re proving that diverse perspectives aren’t just nice to have – they’re essential to building AI that works for everyone. As we stand on the cusp of a complex future, perhaps it’s time to look beyond the hype and ask ourselves: what if the future of AI isn’t about building ever-more-powerful models but about making technology more accessible, more human, and more inclusive? These women aren’t just building companies – they’re showing us what that future could look like for all of us.