57,000 Women Walked So We Could Run (With AI)

Last week I caught myself explaining a multi-step AI automation to a friend and realized— mid-sentence— that I'd completely forgotten what it felt like to not know what a prompt was.

I was describing the thing I'd built and she was nodding politely, and her eyes had gone the specific blank that means "I am being supportive but I have no idea what you're saying." And I thought: oh no. I've lost it. I've lost the entry-level perspective.

Here's the thing about learning something quickly: you stop being able to see it as a beginner. The steps that felt impossible six months ago are now just... how you work. Which is great! But it also means I've been building things that my friends— smart, capable, non-technical women— would look at and feel immediately, irrationally behind.

So I went looking for proof that this gap is closeable. And I found it.

57,000 women. 30 countries. Zero computer science degrees required.

Founderz's AI Skills 4 Women program hit 57,000 completions in 2025. It was featured at Davos in 2026. The women in the program built over 600 real AI projects— actual tools, actual automations, things that saved them real time at work or in their businesses.

Not one of them needed to understand how a large language model works to build something useful with it.

This matters because the narrative we're still fighting— "AI is for technical people," "you need to be a developer to really use it," "it's complicated"— is not just wrong. It's actively keeping smart women on the sidelines of a shift that is happening with or without them.

Timnit Gebru, one of the most important voices in AI ethics, has been saying for years that who gets to build AI determines what AI gets built. The same is true for who gets to USE it.

Here's what I know to be true from building things with AI over the past year:

You don't start by understanding AI. You start by solving one specific problem that is annoying you right now. Pick something that takes you 20 minutes and you wish took two. Then ask an AI tool to help you make it faster.

That's it. That's step one.

Where are you right now on the AI comfort scale— complete beginner, curious lurker, or already-building?

Jonelle