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Every time a headline tells me women are behind on AI, my eyebrow goes up.
Those numbers are part of why I started the AI Queens podcast. I saw a gap and I wanted to help close it. Lately, I've had to change my tune. The women I talk to are using AI. They use it every day, in real workflows, to run real businesses.
So when Taylor Smith, founder of The Power Table, joined me for Can AI Fix Event Follow-Up? 2 Founders, 2 Systems, 1 Showdown (Part 1 of 2), she went straight for that headline.
The stats are stale
Taylor named the BS right away: "I think the BS is that women aren't using AI or we're doing it at a much slower rate, and I think that's simply not true."
Her point is that a lot of those numbers seem to come from around 2023. They also come from big companies whose audiences lean male. Think Fortune 500 CEOs. That's a very specific room, and most of us were never invited into it.
Taylor is running a survey for The Power Table's Female Founder Economy Report. The early results tell a very different story about how women in business use AI day to day. The first report comes out in January 2027, and I cannot wait to read it.
This matters for you. If you keep hearing that women are behind, you start to believe you're behind. You hesitate. You wait until you feel ready. Meanwhile, plenty of women just like you are already building with it. You're in good company.
Caution counts as care
There's a reason the old story sticks. Many women I talk to are vocal about their concerns. Data centers. Ethics. How the information was gathered in the first place. Most of the men I talk to just jump into the deep end.
I think that caution gets misread as women skipping AI altogether. So I said it on the show, and I'll say it again here: "being cautious about it and not using it at all are two completely separate things. You can be cautious about it. You can want to approach it ethically and still use it every day, and a lot of women are."
You get to hold your values and your tools at the same time. Asking hard questions makes you a thoughtful user. Keep asking them.
Where I drop the ball
Then we got practical, because this episode was a beta test of a new format for season three. A business owner brings a real problem, and we brainstorm how AI could help solve it.
Taylor brought events. In-person events are a huge sales channel right now. They're also overwhelming and overstimulating. You meet a ton of people, and then you have to remember who they were.
This one hit home. I'm hyperfocused at events. I'm on my A-game. Then I get home, I'm drained, and the motivation to reach out to all those badass women slips away. A few weeks later I'm staring at a LinkedIn connection thinking, wait, who is this again?
There are still too many places where I am the bottleneck in my business. Follow-up is one of them.
The messy system I'm testing
My hypothesis: you don't need one perfect app. Every capture method I already use can keep running, and AI can do the matching.
My plan:
Popl on the free plan to scan badges and business cards, with quick voice notes attached to each contact. Then I export it all as a CSV.
Plaud, a little wearable AI recorder, clipped on and recording.
Screenshots of people's social profiles, a trick I'm stealing from Taylor.
Selfies, because people remember you when you take one together.
Every one of those has a timestamp. So I'll hand it all to Claude, inside a project that already knows my business, my ideal audience, and my services. I'll ask it to match everything up by time, build me a dashboard, and sort people into professional connections and potential clients.
Taylor pushed it further. Give Claude your goals for the event, and have it propose a clear next step for every person. So often we skip follow-up because we're too tired to figure out what to say.
Then one more layer: a nightly coach. Upload day one, and let Claude tell me where my conversations drifted from my goals and which three things to focus on tomorrow. I turn into a little event squirrel. I'd love the help.
I don't expect ROI from my book club. A conference is different. And that ROI is my responsibility.
Point AI at the busywork
Taylor said something I keep coming back to: "This is the most valuable thing you have in your business is relationship."
Her advice is to aim your AI and automation at everything else, so you have more room for the human part. That's the whole point of this experiment. Claude handles the sorting and drafting. I get to show up for the people.
She also reminded me that a lot of these tools are free. She uses the free version of Blinq. I'm on the free Popl plan. You don't need a big budget to start.
We're both testing this at upcoming events, then again at Adobe MAX in November. Part two airs on The Power Table podcast, where we'll report what worked and what flopped. Follow Taylor at thepowertable.co so you don't miss it.
If building your own system like this sounds fun, come build with us at a Buildathon: aiqueens.com/build. Build it your damn self.
Key takeaways
The story that women aren't using AI leans on old data from rooms women weren't in.
You can care about ethics and still use AI every day.
You don't need one perfect follow-up tool. Let every capture method run and let Claude match them by timestamp.
Give Claude your business context and event goals so it can sort leads and suggest a next step for each person.
Point AI at the busywork so you have more energy for relationships.
Keep building and keep reigning with AI
