#WomensMonth | Women shouldn't just adapt to AI. They should shape it

AI isn't simply another workplace technology; it is increasingly influencing how we recruit, create, communicate, analyse information and make decisions. In the creative industry, it is already changing workflows and creating entirely new roles and capabilities.

That makes women's participation in AI much bigger than a diversity conversation. It's a design decision.

Technology reflects the people, information and assumptions behind it. If women are underrepresented in the team’s developing AI, implementing it and deciding how it should be used, their experiences are less likely to influence the systems that increasingly shape our working lives.

Women remain underrepresented. The World Economic Forum has consistently identified gender gaps in technology and AI-related fields, while research has also shown disparities in who uses generative AI at work.

This matters because we are still relatively early in defining what an AI-enabled workplace looks like.

Organisations are redesigning jobs and agencies are rethinking creative workflows. New disciplines are emerging; skills that barely appeared on job descriptions several years ago are becoming valuable almost overnight.

This is the moment women need to be at the table, not once somebody else has finished setting it, because AI doesn't only need technologists.

Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about careers in AI is that they belong primarily to engineers and data scientists, but they don't.

At Brandtech+, we see AI becoming part of the work of copywriters, designers, motion artists, strategists, project managers, account leaders, operations teams and talent professionals.

That matters for women because the opportunity is significantly bigger than the technology sector itself. The future AI workforce needs people who understand culture, language, human behaviour, brands, creativity, ethics and how teams actually work. It needs technical capability, certainly, but it also needs judgement, empathy, curiosity and critical thinking.

Women don't need permission to enter ‘AI careers’. Increasingly, every career will require some level of AI fluency.

As a talent leader, one of the things I believe organisations need to watch carefully is how people respond when the skills required for their jobs suddenly change.

There is a danger that we recruit only the people who already describe themselves as ‘AI experts’, when many of the strongest future employees may simply not have had enough exposure to the technology yet.

AI capability can be taught, curiosity can be encouraged, and experimentation can become part of a company's culture. People can be given access to tools, training and the psychological safety to use them without feeling that every failed prompt proves they don't belong.

Employers therefore have a responsibility here. If AI literacy becomes a prerequisite for opportunity but businesses don't invest equally in giving people the chance to develop it, existing inequalities will simply acquire a new technological layer.

We should be asking not only: who already knows how to use AI? but who could become exceptional if we gave them the opportunity? And there is understandable anxiety about what AI might mean for employment, but I don't think encouraging women to fear the technology protects them. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

The greatest career risk may eventually be not knowing how to work with it. That doesn't mean abandoning the skills people have spent years developing. A brilliant copywriter doesn't stop being a copywriter because she uses AI, a designer doesn't surrender her craft because she can generate an image, and a project manager doesn't become less valuable because technology removes hours of administration.

Their expertise becomes the thing that allows them to use AI intelligently, and the opportunity is therefore to combine established human capability with an entirely new set of tools. The decisions businesses make over the next few years will influence who benefits from the AI economy for decades.

Recruit women into AI-enabled roles and give existing female employees meaningful access to AI tools and training, create pathways for junior talent and make experimentation part of people's jobs rather than something they are expected to teach themselves after hours, and ensure women aren't simply using AI, but are represented in the rooms where organisations decide how it will be used because representation after the transformation has happened is too late.

We have an opportunity to build a future of work in which technology expands access to creativity, global careers and new forms of employment, but inclusive technology requires inclusive participation.

AI needs more women at the table, and we need them there while we're still deciding what the table looks like.