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As of yesterday, March 12, hundreds of thousands of innovators, disruptors, and leaders began descending on Austin for SXSW. If you search “Tech and AI” in this years schedule, youll find 185 results. Thats more than double the 80 AI sessions in 2024, the same year I wrote a Fast Company op-ed about how women have spent decades building the intellectual foundation of AI while receiving almost none of the credit. It was also the year that companies with at least one female founder raised $38.8 billion in venture capital funding which is a 27 percent increase from the year prior, but still not close to the high point in 2021 with a raise of $62.5 billion. Two years later and the gapboth in acknowledgement and investor fundinghasnt closed. However, something else is happening and its worth paying attention to. There is a new wave of women who refuse to wait for the AI industry to become “fair” and “equal.” They are building their own companies, on their own terms, with a more authentic and purpose-driven design mentality. Its not general-purpose AI; its gender-purpose AI. An important distinction Before you roll your eyes, the distinction matters more than you might think. By 2030which is now only four years awayAI wont just enhance companies’ business models. According to IBM, it will be the business model. Right now, that business model is being built unsurprisingly by male-dominated teams for general audiences. The truth is technologyas an industry and a conceptwas never built for women. It was not built to prioritize or accommodate our visions. But that is changing. A new class of female leaders in AI is disrupting this model and demanding more room for gender-purpose AI and less patience for the influx of male-dominated teams building general-purpose tools. This is the year we move beyond celebrating their presence and start backing their vision with real investment. One of those women is Rana el Kaliouby, co-founder and general partner of Blue Tulip Ventures, who will deliver a keynote at this years conference titled “Why the Future of AI Must Be Human Centric.” She has spent more than two decades humanizing technology. As co-founder of Affectiva, she pioneered the field of Emotion AI, which reads human feeling through facial expression and vocal cues, and now as co-founder and general partner of Blue Tulip Ventures, she literally puts her money where her mission is and invests in early-stage startups building ethical AI that is good for people. The word “good” is subjective. But for too long, its been defined by the people building the problem, not solving it. The problem is also being solved by women like Valerie Chapman, CEO and co-founder of Ruth AI, an AI-powered career advancement platform. Last month, Valerie asked Sam Altman at an OpenAI builder town hall how AI can be used to fix the $1.6 trillion gender wage gap. His response was that AI should be an equalizing force in society and like Valerie pointed out in her recent op-ed, when AI is designed with intention, it can close the gap and its time to build it. What’s next As a fellow female founder helping brands understand and utilize AIas a topic and technologyin their comms strategies, heres what this shift tells me about where we are headed in 2026. 1. Male tech leaders want AGI. Female tech leaders want gender-purpose AI. The second is more inclusive. When women build AI, they tend to ask different questions in the design and development stage. Questions like who is this actually for and who will benefit from these capabilities? The truth is artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is at least 10 years away and the race toward the “holy grail,” as Big Tech has coined it, should not hold as much power and influence as it does. Gender-purpose AI is a race toward something more rewarding and meaningful: relevance. What a conceptthat we could have more technology that works for the people it claims to serve. 2. The gender wage gap will not close with more women working in tech. It will close when more women are building tech. Representation matters every month, not just during Black History Month, Womens History Month, or International Womens Day. Women deserve representation in the very tools and technologies they depend on. With almost 78 million women in the American workforce, this is a demographic that has earned our time, attention and investment. 3. Investment in gender-purpose AI means nothing without investing in the women who will build tomorrows innovations The increase in female founded and funded VC companies is a great step in the right direction. But the progress pipeline matters just as much if not more. We need more mentorship programs, technical education, access to capital for first-time female founders who have the vision but not a seat at the Big Tech table. To ensure we double down on gender-purpose AI as an industry, we have to prioritize and support the women who want to build what comes next. 4. The milestones for women in AI arent just on stage. They are in hallways and in boardrooms. When women lead AI companies, th product looks different. Canadian computer scientist Joy Buolamwini pioneered Gender Shades in 2018, which piloted an intersectional approach to inclusive product testing for AI and exposed racial and gender bias in Microsofts, IBMs, and Amazons facial recognition systems and insisted they change. Rana built technology that reads human emotion because she believed machines should understand people, not just process them. These are real-world use cases that prove that whoever builds the technology determines what the technology does and who it serves. In 2026, women wont be waiting for “the next big thing” because they will be the ones behind it. They will be the ones building the technology that addresses what male leaders have not addressed: equity, inclusion, and a redefinition of “good” that finally reflects what 51% of the world wants, needs and deserves. Its time the other 49% joined us.
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E-Commerce
Usually the epitome of good humor, my friend was seething. She had devised a zany and creative marketing idea for her firm. Securing the budget, designing a content strategy, hiring a creative agency, and then doing all the related work had consumed Alex and her team for a full six months. This was on top of their already demanding jobs. And then the unthinkable happened. Before the idea was announced, one of my coworkers, a PR guy, shared the ideamy ideawith the CEO and CMO. I watched her pace around my kitchen, her face getting redder and redder. While he didnt exactly say hed done the work himself, how he talked about it made it seem like it was all his. Did you tell anyone, go to your manager? I asked. Alex stopped her pacing. I did, and he said, When youre creative, people will steal your ideasyou should just get used to that fact. As we talked, I could hear that under Alexs anger was something elsecuriosity. About what this all meant. About what she could have, or should have, done differently. Was she the problem? Did she need to figure out how to play the game better? Was the PR guy the issue? Or her boss? And if it was her boss, did she need to quit? Those were the wrong questions. Its not you or them. The problem lies in the norm of tolerating bad behavior. When workplaces say, Creative ideas get stolen, harm becomes a given, not a choice. Ideas get stolen because theres no accountability. To be clear, sometimes an idea is just in the air, and two or more people come to it around the same time. And oftentimes, we create ideas together. Im not talking about those moments. Im talking about when its fully apparent what is happeningidea theft, where one party takes credit for the work of othersand how that theft is tolerated. Research shows that knowledge workers are keenly aware of idea theft; nearly one-third report having had it happen to them. Work often treats idea theft as no big deal. But the cost is real. Integrity is lost when ideas are disconnected from their source. The depth of the concept or the completeness of the thinking is lost. Downstream decisions are made without the rootedness of the original inspiration. Theft demotivates the next idea. When ideas are stolen regularly, idea generation shuts down because no one volunteers to be violated. And Alexs boss was right about one thing: Alex will certainly create more ideas. People create when they feel safe enough to imagine something new. Thatby definitionis why regulating bad behavior matters. The idea that was stolen? It became one of the firms most successful efforts that year. It inspired the companys next ad campaign and even a Super Bowl spot. But they didnt have any follow-up to this one-off success. Why? Because they no longer had Alex. The Counterintuitive Insight: We Can Take Care of Our Commons Most of us are taught to stay quiet. Dont make a scene. Go along to get along. And when someone crosses a linesteals credit, dominates meetings, dismisses ideaswe assume someone in authority will fix it. But that assumption hides a deeper truth: the rules of our workplaces are not enforced by leaders alone. They are enforced by what we tolerate together. In 2009, political economist Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for proving something that ran against decades of economic orthodoxy. Before her work, economists widely believed in the tragedy of the commonsthe idea that when a resource is shared, individuals will inevitably overuse it and destroy it. The only solution, it was thought, was top-down control: private ownership or government regulation. Ostrom proved otherwise. She showed that communities, left to their own devices, often devise highly sophisticated systems of shared managementsystems where consequences dont come from a distant authority but from the group itself. The people who depend on each other can also hold each other accountable. Her work wasnt about office politics. But it applies. Every team shares something. It might not be water or grazing land. But trust. Energy. Credit. Voice. And just like natural resources, these intangible goods are depleted when people act only in their own interests at the expense of shared interests. When a manager takes all the credit. When someone interrupts constantly. When emotional labor always falls on the same shoulders. What Ostrom teaches us is that we dont have to live inside that dynamic. We can protect shared goodsnot with permission from the top, but through practices we design ourselves. Through consequences we create and apply together. Shared spaces survive when the people inside them protect them. Change the Norm When something harmful happens at work, our instincts split: ignore it or wait for someone in charge to handle it. But silence has a cost. It makes us complicit in what we ache to change. Monica Lewinskydragged through the mud of a scandal she didnt create alonecalls on us to be upstanders: people who dont just stand by, but stand up. Who see cruelty and choose courage. Who see harm and refuse to treat it as normal. Research shows that when bystanders step in, bullying stops within secondsproving that empowering peers to act can cut bad behavior in half. What we allow becomes the rule of the room. When someone steals an idea, and no one says anything, the norm survives. When someone names itcalmly, clearlythe rule changes. But lets be clear: This isnt work any of us do alone. If bad behavior is tolerated, it grows. When it meets consequences, it stops. Bad behavior isnt mysteriousits simply a crime of opportunity, repeated when no one intervenes. This is not a personal problem. Its a social problem. Its up to those who see it to actto create the consequences. Not just to protect the harmed, but to stop the harm from spreading. Behavior doesnt change because people suddenly become better. It changes because someone names whats happening and refuses to treat it as normal. When you do, you wont do it alone. Another person will join in. And then another. Until teams decide, we can be clear, fair, and firm with each other. That our shared space is worth defending, protecting. Let yourself run toward that danger, not away from it. Adapted from the book Our Best Work: Break Free from the 24 Invisible Norms That Limit Us, by Nilofer Merchant. Copyright 2026 by Nilofer Merchant. Reprinted by permission of Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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E-Commerce
During an end-of-the-fiscal-year spending spree last year, the Department of Defense (DoD) dropped some dough on new Herman Miller furniture. The DoD spent $60,719 for chairs from the Michigan furniture manufacturer last September, according to the report from the watchdog group Open The Books, including at least one $1,844 Aeron Chair, the brand’s popular, ergonomic, fabric-meshed office chair. The Herman Miller purchases were just a small fraction of the record $93 billion detailed in the report, which was more than the DoD has spent in a single month since the group’s data goes back to 2007. For Herman Miller, its share was peanuts, considering the company is the longest holder of a federal government contract for office furniture, at more than 40 years. (Herman Miller did not respond to a request for comment by publication.) The DoD goes on an annual spend-it-or-lose-it buying spree every fall no matter the president or party, Open The Books found over a decade of tracking it. The group called on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to rein in the use-it-or-lose-it approach the agency takes to its budget. Instead, 2025’s spending was a record. While some line items highlighted in the report seem like clear attempts to run up expense reports before the time runs out, like $98,000 on a Steinway & Sons grand piano and $2 million on Alaskan king crab, office furniture purchases at least make practical sense. With nearly 3 million military and civilian employees, the DoD is one of the largest employers in the U.S. That’s a lot of butts in seats, which means a big budget for chairs and other office furniture. Open The Books found furniture purchases spike 564% every September over the monthly average across the other 11 months of the year. Last year, the DoD spent $225.6 million on furniture in total. Herman Miller’s parent company MillerKnoll had obligations of more than $15 million in the last fiscal year, and the DoD makes up 80% of its awarding agencies. In the past, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) spent nearly $250,000 on Herman Miller furniture for a conference room refresh, according to Open the Books, and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spent $284,000 on Herman Miller furniture for its conference center. For defense officials looking to set up an office, Herman Miller offers DoD-approved options for everything from desks, carts, and lockers to nurses’ stations, pharmacies, and labs. This isn’t the kind of workplace interior design work that Ikea was built to handle. For Herman Miller, though, its volume of government sales isn’t what it used to be. Federal spending records since 2008 show MillerKnoll’s transactions peaked during former President Barack Obama’s administration, with obligations totaling more than $174 million dollars in 2010, a figure that dropped to a low of more than $12 million in 2023. While the DoD might not be as loyal a customer as it once was, Herman Miller has found other government work elsewhere. The company says it’s one of the largest furniture suppliers to state and local government agencies.
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E-Commerce
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