.png){kind=small}
AI in Action At WxAI Anniversary Event
- Lisa O
- Feb 17
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 18
I recently attended Women x AI: AI in Action on the Google campus in celebration of women and the one-year anniversary of this extraordinary organization.
What stood out was not the tools. It was the leadership behind them.
AI in action is not about demos. It is about decisions. It is about ownership. It's about what you do when the stakes are real.
Resilience Is Built in the In-Between
Sarv Nadezad, CEO and Co-Founder of United Sales, reframed resilience in a way that landed.
It is not the bright, shiny wins.It is the quiet moments where you fight through.
She offered a simple framework:
Recognize where you are. Acknowledge it.
Reset. Accept that this is your starting point.
Restart with a compelling vision of what’s next.
And one powerful shift: Do not compare yesterday to today. Compare today to tomorrow.
That feels especially relevant in AI. Many teams are reacting to change. More need to intentionally build toward a future they define.
The Real Risk Is Over-Reliance
The panel, moderated by Stefanie Miller, brought together leaders across biotech, finance, engineering, and executive coaching.
One theme kept surfacing: risk. Not the risk of AI replacing people.The risk of people disengaging their judgment.
AI should augment thinking. It should spark better questions. But when it quietly becomes the decision-maker, without understanding how it works, consequences follow.
As Rajeswari Vinayagam from Cisco shared, the moment you realize AI will impact people and the business is the moment you have to step up and own it.
If you did not build it, you will not know how to fix it when it breaks.
That is not fear. That is responsibility.
Guardrails Create Confidence
There is still hesitation inside many organizations. Valerie Martin spoke to the need for deeper data literacy and education.
Guardrails are not barriers. They are confidence builders.
When teams understand how AI works, where it can fail, and how to stay accountable, adoption becomes thoughtful instead of reactive.
And that is the shift.
AI in Action Means Ownership
Yes, there were delightful moments from 2025 shared across the stage: Notebook LLM, Claude artifacts, even the realization that ChatGPT has a voice.
But beneath the novelty was something bigger.
AI in action means ownership. Of the outputs. Of the impact. Of the future you are building toward.
The organizations that will lead are not the ones using AI the loudest.They are the ones using it with the most clarity.
And clarity like that does not happen in isolation. It happens in rooms where people are willing to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, and share real experiences.
A heartfelt thank you to Reut Lazo, Jenny Kay Pollock, and the entire Women x AI community. You created a space that was thoughtful, grounded, and future-focused.
You set the tone for the year ahead. Here’s to leading with ownership!
Editor's note: this blog was crafted by me along with help from AI collaborators ChatGPT "the Humanizer", Claude, and Midjourney.