Leading With Intention: What Women Leaders Told Us About AI And The Future Of Work

Insights From The Forrester Women’s Leadership Roundtables At B2B Summit

At this year’s B2B Summit, I had the privilege of cohosting our Forrester Women’s Leadership Program with my colleagues, Maria Chien and Amy Hayes. Over three days, more than 200 women joined us to connect, learn, and reflect on what it means to lead with clarity and confidence at a moment when AI is rapidly reshaping work.

The Forrester Women’s Leadership Program was designed around a simple but powerful idea: Focus fuels intentional action, and intentional action drives transformation. By creating space for candid dialogue and relationship‑building across marketing, sales, customer, and product roles, the program aims to help attendees cut through disruption without losing sight of purpose, equity, or impact. The result this year was a deeply human counterbalance to the accelerating pace of AI adoption.

Why AI And Women’s Leadership — And Why Now

The program featured an inspiring keynote on resilience from Divya Rajagopalan, VP of global partner strategy at ServiceNow; panel discussions, including one with members of Forrester’s inaugural Future Leaders cohort; and a session with facilitated roundtables focused on preparing for an AI‑driven future.

We chose AI as the roundtable topic deliberately. The conversation about AI and women at work has intensified — and polarized opinion. Recent coverage has ranged from warnings, such as Barron’s focus on the disproportionate risk for women, to more optimistic perspectives, in Forbes, Fortune, and CNBC, on women’s potential advantage in AI‑enabled leadership.

During the event, I also shared a perspective from a webinar hosted by the International Institute for Management Development. The webinar moderator, Heather Cairns‑Lee, captured the moment succinctly: “AI may become one of the most significant leadership opportunities for women in decades. Its impact will depend on how capability, governance, and leadership are built around it.”

That framing resonated strongly with participants — particularly in light of data, such as McKinsey’s finding in its “Women in the Workplace 2025” report that showed women are 23% less likely than men to receive manager support for using AI and less likely to be recognized for doing so. The implication is clear: AI alone won’t close gaps. Leadership choices will.

The Distinctive Strengths Women Bring To AI–Driven Organizations

Across a room of roundtables, participants first reflected on the perspectives women uniquely contribute in an AI‑enabled environment, including showing agility as learners in fast‑moving, ambiguous contexts and demonstrating both emotional intelligence and empathy at organizational scale. In addition, women provide calm, adaptive leadership in moments of crisis and engage in community building and mentorship as force multipliers.

These strengths shaped how participants approached the central question of the roundtables: What can each of us do — individually and collectively — to ensure that AI transforms leadership in equitable ways? What emerged from the discussions was both practical and actionable:

AI adoption accelerates when leaders explicitly remove the “cheating” narrative.Women consistently cited stigma associated with AI use as a barrier. When leaders clearly state that AI use is expected, legitimate, and smart, adoption rises quickly. Visible modeling matters as much as policy.
Hands‑on, in‑workflow learning outperforms formal training alone.Experimentation, shared prompts, and show‑and‑tell sessions build confidence faster than standalone courses. Learning that competes with the day job doesn’t scale; learning embedded in work does.
AI creates both a visibility risk and an opportunity for women.When AI compresses effort, contributions can disappear. Women emphasized the importance of narrating impact and not just delivering outcomes. AI leadership requires storytelling.
Inclusive AI depends on guardrails, clarity, and governance.Access alone doesn’t create equity. Clear guidance on approved tools, ownership, bias mitigation, and expectations enables broader participation.
The most differentiating leadership skills are human, not technical.Judgment, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, confidence, and change leadership surfaced as essential capabilities — often more so than technical depth.

A Final Reflection

Attendees described AI less as a destiny and more as a leadership moment. What we heard in these roundtables was not fear but resolve: a shared belief that women can shape how AI shows up at work by setting norms, building capability, and leading with intention.

If we get this right, AI won’t diminish the human side of leadership. It will make it more visible, more valuable, and more necessary than ever.

Thank you to all of the women who participated in the Forrester Women’s Leadership Program at the Forrester B2B Summit in Phoenix this past April 26–29.