Our Founder
Why I Started Women in AI Colorado
I wanted a room with a different pace.
In 2024 I was in a lot of AI rooms in Colorado, full of genuinely smart people building genuinely interesting things. What I noticed was the tempo. Questions came fast and confident, usually from someone who already had the answer they wanted, and often in service of the thing they were building. The room rewarded speed and certainty.
That leaves the most valuable question in the room unasked. The one that starts with “I don’t understand this yet.” The one that starts with “I’m not sure I want this.” Those questions need a little air around them, and they need to be asked by someone who is not performing expertise while she asks.
So I built the room I wanted to be in. Women in AI Colorado started as a monthly meetup where women could slow down, ask the hard question out loud, and stay in it long enough to get somewhere. That is still the center of everything we do.
“The hardest questions about AI need a little air around them. We built a room that gives them that.”
What I Have Seen Since
The stakes rose faster than I expected.
Women come to us having lost a job, or watching their role narrow, or sitting with a quiet certainty that their work is about to change and no one has told them how. Almost none of it is a capability problem. It is that nobody has shown them what AI actually makes possible inside their own expertise, and they have been trying to work it out alone, at eleven at night, with a chatbot and no one to compare notes with.
Learning alone is the slowest possible way to do this. Twenty years in learning design taught me where adoption actually lives: in the human layer. The judgment, the confidence, the community, and the clarity that turn access into something real. That layer is built with other people or it does not get built.
This is why Women in AI Labs runs the way it does. Small groups, three to four hours, peer-led and coached, working on real problems from your actual job. What people bring to the room, their questions, their work, their real lives, is the material we build from. Community is the curriculum.
And the practice underneath the practice is metacognition: noticing where your thinking ends and the model’s begins, then choosing. Working with AI well is less a technical skill than a habit of watching your own reasoning. That is what we mean by staying the author of your own mind.
Why Women Are Exceptionally Poised to Shape This
At our Fort Collins gathering this summer, Melissa Reeve, author of Hyperadaptive, put language to something I had been circling for two years. The disruption arriving is not primarily a disruption of tasks. It is a disruption of identity. When AI takes the entry-level role or the junior associate’s apprenticeship, the thing that breaks is not a workflow. It is someone’s sense of who they are at work.
Someone has to help people become who they are next. That work has a long history, and women have been doing it the whole time, usually unpaid and mostly unrecognized. We have navigated our own reinventions, and we have shepherded other people through theirs. Sitting with someone in the messy middle of becoming, without rushing them to a tidy answer, is the exact skill this phase demands, at a scale nobody has planned for.
Melissa named two more things worth holding onto.
Judgment wider than the balance sheet.
Second-order effects, the people who are not speaking, the cost that lands on a community six months later. Deciding what gets measured is one of the most consequential forms of power in this moment, and women in the room change what makes the list.
Who gets to build.
The gate is open in a way it has never been. A woman with a problem and a clear head can now build the solution herself, without an engineering team’s permission. Anne Wintemute’s AimeeSays is the story I keep telling: a tool for abuse survivors that men probably would not have built, not out of malice, but because a system trained not to see a certain kind of harm would not think to build for it.
That is the whole argument for widening who builds. The things that exist got made by people close to a problem they wanted to solve. More of us close to more problems means more of the world gets built for.
“The things that exist in the world got built by people connected to a problem they wanted to solve. Widening who builds widens what gets built.”
Where We Are Now
Women in AI Colorado gathers in Boulder, Denver, and Northern Colorado, with monthly meetups and our Learning Labs running as live learning spaces across the Front Range. We operate as a program of the Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group, a Colorado 501(c)(3).
We are possibility-forward on purpose. Plenty of people have looked hard at AI and decided it is bad, and the harms they are pointing at are real. We hold those and keep going, because this moment is still shapeable and we get a hand in shaping it. That is a better use of a Tuesday evening than either doom or cheerleading.
Come ask the hard question. There is a room for it here.
About Susan
Susan Adams is the founder of Women in AI Colorado and creator of Women in AI Labs. She is an educator, facilitator, and program designer based on the Front Range, where she designs learning experiences that help people adopt AI with agency, responsibility, and creative intent. She teaches AI and Professional Practice at the University of Denver, coaches community college faculty nationally through Achieving the Dream, and serves on the executive advisory board of the Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group. She writes at Letters from an AI Classroom.