Introducing the very first “She Builds AI” spotlight — because the women building the future deserve to be seen.
There’s a moment a lot of people have with AI. You’re skeptical, maybe a little curious, definitely overwhelmed by the hype — and then something happens that makes your jaw drop and your whole brain recalibrate. For Kaia Watkins, that moment came when she built a fully functioning marketing portal in 25 minutes.
Twenty-five minutes. A project that would normally take her organization nine months.
That’s not a small improvement. That’s not “working smarter.” That’s a complete category shift — and Kaia recognized it immediately. She didn’t just file it away as a cool party trick. She changed how her entire organization thinks about what’s possible.
We’re so excited to kick off the She Builds AI series with Kaia as our very first spotlight. This series exists to shine a light on women in AI leadership who are doing the real work inside their organizations not just talking about AI, but actually building with it, championing it, and dragging the future forward whether everyone else is ready or not.
Let’s get into it.
The Shift
Kaia is honest that she’s had plenty of “wow, that’s so cool!” moments with AI. Most of us have. You ask it something that would’ve taken you an hour to research, and it hands you an answer in twelve seconds. You use it to draft an email you’ve been dreading for three days. Cool! Fun! Neat!
But cool and fun don’t always change behavior. What does change behavior is when something is so undeniable that you can’t unsee it.
For Kaia, that was the marketing portal moment.
“That learning shifted my mindset from making incremental improvements to 10x transformation,” she told us. “We’ve been pushing the organization forward with that mentality ever since.”
That distinction, incremental versus transformational, is huge, and it’s something a lot of organizations are still wrestling with. It’s easy to adopt AI in ways that just automate what you were already doing. Copy this, summarize that, write me a subject line. Useful, sure. But Kaia saw something bigger: the possibility that AI could collapse entire timelines, not just shorten them.
That shift in perspective is what separates people who use AI as a fancy spell-checker from women in AI leadership who are genuinely reshaping how work gets done.
What It Actually Looks Like to Champion AI From the Inside
Here’s something Kaia said that we want to tattoo on a wall somewhere:
“With AI, you don’t really have to sell the idea — just build the thing, then show the thing.”
If you’ve ever been in a meeting where your idea got nodded at politely and then a man repeated it back five minutes later and suddenly everyone loved it — you know exactly why this is such a power move.
Women in AI leadership don’t have to wait for a committee to approve the concept. You can just… do it. You can build the solution, walk in with the demo, and let results do the talking. The proof of concept is the pitch.
But Kaia is also realistic: building the thing is only half the battle. Getting people to actually use it? That’s a whole different challenge. Her approach to adoption is genuinely clever and deeply human.
“I ask what’s frustrating them right now, then show how we can build a solution,” she explains. “It’s hard to be skeptical about something that just solved their problem in real time.”
Think about that. She’s not selling AI as a concept. She’s not holding training sessions on the theoretical benefits of machine learning. She’s pulling up a chair, asking her colleagues what’s driving them crazy, and then solving it in front of them. On the spot. With AI.
That’s not a technology strategy. That’s a people strategy. And it’s brilliant.
When you remove the abstraction and make AI personal, resistance evaporates. You can’t be skeptical about a problem that no longer exists.
The Tool That’s Had the Biggest Impact: An AI-Powered Prospecting Workflow
Now let’s talk about the thing Kaia built that we genuinely cannot stop thinking about.
Business development. For most organizations, it’s important, everyone knows it’s important, and it’s also the first thing that gets pushed to the back burner when things get busy. The prospecting and qualifying process takes forever. If you’ve got solid organic growth keeping the lights on, it’s really easy to tell yourself you’ll get to it later.
Later never comes. Until Kaia built something that made it impossible to ignore.
She created an AI-assisted prospecting workflow that:
- Identifies top target prospects aligned with the organization’s ideal client profile (ICP)
- Builds out location listings for those targets
- Scores each prospect’s network on marketing maturity
- Completes a full opportunity assessment — all in minutes
And then, here’s the cherry on top: the highest-potential prospects automatically surface to the top.
No more manually combing through spreadsheets. No more debates about who to prioritize. No more “we’ll circle back to BD next quarter.” The system does the heavy lifting, and her team wakes up to a ranked, ready-to-act list of opportunities.
This is exactly what AI adoption in business looks like when it’s done right. It’s not AI for AI’s sake — it’s AI applied directly to a real, persistent problem that was costing time, momentum, and revenue. The result isn’t just efficiency. It’s organizational capacity. It creates bandwidth that didn’t exist before.
What Kaia Wants Every Woman to Hear
We asked Kaia what she’d say to other women who have the positioning and the influence to bring AI into their organizations but aren’t sure where to start. Her answer was refreshingly no-nonsense.
“Women are conditioned to wait for buy-in before we move forward,” she said. “Stop waiting.”
There it is.
We are socialized, sometimes subtly, sometimes not subtly at all, to seek consensus before we act. To float the idea, gauge the room, wait for approval, build the coalition, and then move. And while collaboration is genuinely valuable, that pattern can also become a way of stalling indefinitely. Of waiting for permission that may never come.
Kaia’s advice cuts right through that:
Pick one real problem your team has right now and solve it with AI.
Not a theoretical problem. Not a strategic initiative. One real, specific, annoying thing. Then open ChatGPT or Claude and literally say: “This is my problem — help me solve it.”
You don’t need a task force. You don’t need a workshop series or an AI steering committee or a three-month pilot program with a consulting firm. You need a problem, a tool, and 30 minutes.
“Solve the problem, then show everyone what you did and how cool it is,” Kaia says.
That’s the whole playbook. Build. Show. Repeat.
The thing is, this approach works precisely because it bypasses the part where ideas get watered down or stalled out. You’re not asking for permission to explore AI, you’re walking in with receipts. A before and a very impressive after.
Why This Series Exists
She Builds AI isn’t about celebrating women in AI leadership just for optics. It’s about documenting what’s actually happening on the ground inside organizations where women are making real decisions about technology and change.
Because those stories don’t always make it onto the main stage at the conference. They don’t always end up in the case studies or the Forbes lists. But they’re happening every day — in meetings and Slack channels and late-night “okay, what if I tried this” experiments that turn into game-changing workflows.
Kaia Watkins is the proof. She didn’t wait for the industry to validate her. She built a marketing portal in 25 minutes and thought, what else is possible? She asked her colleagues what was frustrating them and solved it on the spot. She built a prospecting system that turned a perennial back-burner problem into a competitive advantage.
She built the thing. Then she showed the thing.
That’s the energy we’re here for.
Want to be featured in the She Builds AI series, or know a woman who should be? Drop us a message — we want to hear from you.
