She Builds with AI: Women Shaping the Future

Julia Lach

She Builds with AI: Women Shaping the Future – Formerly the LuxeAI Highlights This is the podcast for women at the forefront of AI & Emerging Tech: founders, consultants, creatives, and changemakers redefining what’s possible in business and beyond. Hosted by Julia Lach, Fortune 500 Project Manager, AI Consultant & Speaker, this show explores how women are building with AI & Emerging Tech: launching startups, leading transformations, designing intelligent systems, and shaping the future with purpose and precision. From fashion and beauty to retail, consumer goods, digital consulting, and beyond, each episode explores current trends or spotlights bold voices blending innovation, strategy, and impact. Inquiries to hello@julialach.de 🎧 New episodes every month. Subscribe and meet the women building what’s next. 

  1. Aug 3

    Owning The Intelligence Your Company Creates - With Shanea Leven of Empromptu AI

    Your AI prototype is impressive, the demo gets applause, and then production happens. Suddenly you’re dealing with weird edge cases, shifting outputs, unclear ownership, and a stack of tools that don’t quite add up to something your company can trust. We sit down with Shanea Leven, co-founder and CEO of Empromptu AI and the founder of CodeSee (acquired by GitKraken), to talk about what it really takes to move from “it works” to “it’s reliable.”  We dig into why AI is not just another SaaS feature, and how non-deterministic systems demand a different approach to engineering: clean data, system-level guardrails, monitoring, and evaluations that define what “good” means for each workflow. Shanea shares a practical way to think about accuracy across use cases and why edge case detection is where enterprise AI lives or dies. If you’re building AI agents, internal copilots, or customer-facing AI products, this is the part that decides whether you earn trust or burn it.  Then we get into the long game: the difference between renting intelligence from third-party foundation models and building an intelligent asset your company owns. We talk dependency risk, business continuity, open-weight models, and when it makes sense to fine-tune or train custom models using expert feedback and real operational workflows. Shanea also shares lessons from raising a lean pre-seed in a market obsessed with mega-rounds, plus what she’s learned as a second-time founder leading with conviction.  If this sparks new questions about your AI roadmap, subscribe, share the episode with a builder on your team, and leave a review so more people can find the show. Stay Connected with Shanea Leven and Empromptu AI 🔗 Shanea on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaneak/ 🔗 Empromptu AI: https://empromptu.ai/

    Owning The Intelligence Your Company Creates - With Shanea Leven of Empromptu AI

  2. Jul 20

    Gender Data & The Future Of Women-Centered AI — With Shubhi Rao of Uplevyl

    AI doesn’t fail women because it’s “bad at math.” It fails when the data behind it leaves women out, flattening real lives into a default user that never had to navigate widowhood, caregiving, fragmented healthcare, or high-stakes rights decisions. I sit down with Shubhi Rao, founder and CEO of Uplevyl, to unpack what gender data actually means in practice and why women-centered AI can’t treat women as one monolithic group. Shubhi shares how her path through software engineering, finance, and executive leadership led to a simple but uncomfortable question: if AI is powered by datasets and algorithms, where are the datasets that reflect women’s lived experiences across life stage, culture, and circumstance? From the great wealth transfer and the hidden complexity of widowhood to the need for trauma-informed support for survivors seeking workplace rights, we explore what trustworthy AI looks like when the stakes are real. We also get concrete about privacy and safety: anonymity, minimal data retention, and clear boundaries on whether user interactions are ever used to retrain models. And we zoom out to the opportunity for women inside companies today, from process reengineering to board-level governance and risk, with practical questions to ask about sourcing, testing, accountability, and who benefits. If you want ethical AI, responsible AI, and products that actually work for women, this conversation offers a blueprint for building, not just reacting. Subscribe to She Builds with AI, share the episode with a woman who needs a nudge to claim her seat at the table, and leave a rating or review so more listeners find these stories.  ✨ Stay Connected with Shubhi Rao / Uplevyl: 🔗 LinkedIn Shubhi Rao: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shubhirao/ 🔗 LinkedIn Uplevyl: https://www.linkedin.com/company/uplevyl/ 🔗 Instagram Uplevyl: https://www.instagram.com/uplevyl/

    Gender Data & The Future Of Women-Centered AI — With Shubhi Rao of Uplevyl

  3. Jun 30

    Closing The AI Gap: Women, Power, And AI At Work And Beyond — With Erica Anderson Rooney

    AI is already shaping who gets hired, who gets promoted, and who gets seen, and that should change how we talk about “learning AI.” I sit down with Erica Rooney, executive coach, keynote speaker, and author of Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors and The AI Gap: Women, AI, and the Next Great Leap Forward, to look at AI through the lens that actually determines careers: power, visibility, and the systems that define credibility. We dig into the sticky floors that keep even high-performing women playing small, like earning one's worth, perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and the quiet belief that hard work automatically gets rewarded. Erica shares why AI does not create inequality from scratch, but it can accelerate bias already embedded in hiring, promotions, performance management, and leadership expectations. If AI is trained on patterns where most CFOs and CEOs are men, what does it “assume” a top candidate looks like, and what happens when leaders accept confident outputs without asking why? We also get practical. Erica explains how to move from AI anxiety to AI fluency without becoming an engineer, how to treat AI like a specialized subject matter expert, and how to challenge outputs by surfacing blind spots and requesting diverse comparisons. For leaders, we talk responsible AI, what to audit first, why HR and IT must be involved early, and why you are still accountable for decisions even when a tool recommends them. If you want to build leverage, protect your time, and make sure women help shape what comes next, listen now. Subscribe to She Builds with AI, share this with a woman who needs a stronger voice in the AI conversation, and leave a rating or review so more people can find the show. ✨ Stay Connected with Erica Rooney: 🔗 Website: https://www.ericaandersonrooney.com 🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericarooney 🔗 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ericaandersonrooney 🔗 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EricaAndersonRooney

    Closing The AI Gap: Women, Power, And AI At Work And Beyond — With Erica Anderson Rooney

  4. Apr 30

    Scaling Enterprise AI With Trust And People First — With Noe Ramos of Agiloft

    Most companies can spin up an AI pilot. Far fewer can scale AI in a way that people trust, leaders can measure, and teams actually want to use. That gap is where AI operations lives, and it is exactly what we unpack with Noe Ramos, VP of AI Operations at Agiloft, whose work sits at the intersection of enterprise AI, governance, organizational change, and real world execution. We get specific about what separates “trying AI” from becoming AI capable: treating AI as an operational capability, building accountability structures, and defining success beyond simple adoption metrics. Noe shares a pragmatic lens for filtering hype, asking whether a tool changes a real decision or outcome, and avoiding “motion without movement”. We also talk about why capacity matters more than efficiency, and how leaders can reinvest the time AI frees up to deepen the human skills that make teams stronger. Trust is a through line. Noe breaks down what trustworthy AI governance looks like inside an organization that needs to move fast, and why governance without trust turns into compliance theater. We also explore the human side of AI adoption: making space for fear, creating clarity about what AI means for each role, and sparking the moment when people see themselves in the work and start bringing better ideas than any central team could invent. The conversation closes on leadership, authenticity, neurodiversity, and the future of work, including what remains uniquely human: judgment, context, and accountability. If you care about human centered AI, AI literacy, and scaling enterprise AI responsibly, this one is for you. Subscribe, share with a friend who is leading AI change, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway. ✨ Stay Connected with Noe Ramos & Agiloft: 🔗 LinkedIn Noe: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noe-ramos-psyd-3a1808178 🔗 Website Agiloft: https://www.agiloft.com/

    Scaling Enterprise AI With Trust And People First — With Noe Ramos of Agiloft

  5. Feb 8

    How AI Is Rewriting Fashion Content Production For Premium Brands — With Jill Asemota of Parallel Pictures

    The cameras stopped, the planes grounded, and fashion’s content machine stalled. That shock didn’t end creativity, it rewired it. We sit down with founder and creative director Jill Asemota to trace how a career spanning fashion journalism, athlete styling, and brand strategy led to Parallel Pictures, a studio where human art direction meets AI-scale production for premium and luxury brands. Jill takes us behind the curtain on the moment COVID exposed the fragility of global shoots and how that pushed her to rebuild workflows in virtual space. We compare early 3D and photogrammetry pipelines to today’s diffusion models, unpacking why Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and controlled environments made hyper-real, brand-consistent imagery viable. From e-commerce expansions to campaign variations and backdrop replacements, Jill explains how teams pair traditional shoots with AI to move faster without losing identity. We also get practical about risk. Data privacy for unreleased collections, permissions around likeness and virtual models, and the reality of bias baked into training sets, none of this can be left to chance. Jill shares the playbook: curated templates, secure pipelines, human review, and deliberate prompts that bake inclusion into outputs. She makes a strong case for labeling synthetic content and shows how human taste still decides framing, lenses, poses, and light, only now those choices live in prompts and nodes. As her studio shifts from bespoke services to a scalable platform, Jill reveals what brands really need: education, repeatable workflows, and trust. We talk leadership in AI, clear decisions, outcome focus, and resilience, and peek at what’s next as cutting-edge video models make cinematic storytelling possible without a full set. The future looks hybrid: machines for scale, people for meaning. If this conversation sparks ideas for your team, follow the show, share it with a builder who cares about craft and ethics, and leave a quick review so more creators can find it.  ✨ Stay Connected with Jill & Parallel Pictures:  🔗 LinkedIn Jill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jillasemota/?originalSubdomain=de 🔗 Instagram Jill: https://www.instagram.com/jill_asemota/?hl=en 🔗 Website Parallel Pictures: https://www.parallelpictures.ai/ 🔗 LinkedIn Parallel Pictures: https://www.linkedin.com/company/parallelpicturesai/ 🔗 Instagram Parallel Pictures: https://www.instagram.com/parallelpictures.ai/?hl=en

    How AI Is Rewriting Fashion Content Production For Premium Brands — With Jill Asemota of Parallel Pictures

  6. 12/07/2025

    AI Agents & the Future of Personal Shopping - Part III & End of Year Thoughts

    Imagine telling your assistant, I need a new phone and plan, please handle it—then watching it compare carriers, apply credits, and schedule delivery while you sip coffee. That’s the promise of agentic commerce, and in this episode we unpack how it’s moving from hype to a real, secure transaction layer shaping how we buy everything from groceries to luxury fashion. We start by demystifying what “agentic” really means for shoppers: AI that doesn’t just advise but acts, using shared rules like the Agentic Commerce Protocol to authenticate, check inventory, process payments, and confirm orders without the messy back-and-forth. Then we tackle the elephant in the checkout lane: a high-stakes clash between Amazon and Perplexity that could set the precedent for how third-party AI agents access closed ecosystems. Is your AI an extension of you, or an uninvited bot? We weigh the legal, security, and customer experience angles and ask who truly owns the customer relationship when a bot holds the cart. From there, we go global. Alibaba’s Dian Xiaomi handled an eye-popping 300 million customer queries during Singles Day, showcasing how AI scales service without losing speed. In Europe and the U.S., Mango’s AI Stylist and Ralph Lauren’s Ask Ralph blend brand voice with real buying power, folding inspiration, sizing advice, and shoppable looks into a single conversation that follows through to delivery and returns. Along the way we share lessons from 2025 rollouts, highlight diversity as a driver of better AI outcomes, and sketch what 2026–27 could bring: proactive agents, AR-enhanced stores, agent-to-agent negotiation, and loyalty that measures your trust in a retailer’s assistant. If you’re curious about where autonomy meets accountability—and how your next purchase might be just a sentence away—this is your roadmap. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves retail tech, and leave a review with your take: should retailers gatekeep third‑party agents or open the lanes for user choice?

    AI Agents & the Future of Personal Shopping - Part III & End of Year Thoughts

  7. 11/30/2025

    AI Agents & the Future of Personal Shopping - Part Ⅱ

    Shopping just crossed a line: the bot doesn’t only recommend, it remembers, compares, and buys with your permission. We unpack a pivotal year where AI agents went from reactive chat to proactive concierge, reshaping how intent turns into a purchase across Amazon, Walmart, Google, and OpenAI’s expanding ecosystem. We kick off with Amazon’s Rufus and its late‑2025 leap: activity-aware recommendations, hands-free price‑drop purchases, cart‑to‑doorstep execution, visual search that converts a messy fridge into a grocery plan, and list autopilot from a scribbled note. With model orchestration, real‑time retrieval, and side‑by‑side comparisons, Rufus aims to reduce doubt and win checkout with transparency and speed. Then we shift to Walmart’s Sparky, a companion that meets you in the app and, through a bold OpenAI partnership, inside ChatGPT. From occasion dressing to meal plans and service bookings, Sparky embodies “agentic commerce,” anticipating needs and acting across channels without friction. Google’s AI shopping mode brings Gemini-powered results directly into search: natural-language queries, review summaries, live price tracking, visual try‑ons, and even “let Google call” to confirm local inventory. With early tests of AI-led checkout, Google compresses the journey from discovery to payment, keeping trust by emphasizing relevance over ads. Finally, we dive into OpenAI’s instant checkout and the open Agentic Commerce Protocol with Stripe and PayPal, opening conversational buying to Etsy, Shopify merchants, and beyond—bringing small businesses into chat-driven commerce without custom builds. We spotlight women-led startups redefining the experience: Phia for radical price transparency and secondhand value, Gensmo for mood-driven fashion and real-time avatars, Alta for closet‑aware styling, and Doji for social, hyper‑real try‑ons. Along the way, we map how shoppers adapt—verifying AI advice, embracing seamless purchases, and blending AI groundwork with human nuance—as trust features like citations and comparisons close the last mile to buy. If you care about the future of retail, personalization, and the new rules of intent, this conversation gives you the playbook. Enjoyed the show? Follow, share with a friend who loves great tools, and leave a quick review—what would you let an AI buy for you next?

    AI Agents & the Future of Personal Shopping - Part Ⅱ

  8. 10/19/2025

    Fixing Online Shopping: The Future of AI Fashion Search & Discovery — With Chang Liu of Plush

    What if your shopping search could think like you do: mood, context, and all the tiny details that make an outfit feel right? In this epidsde I sit down with Chang Liu, co‑founder and CEO of Plush, to unpack how she transformed a personal frustration with endless scrolling into an AI‑powered fashion discovery platform that feels like talking to a stylist who actually gets you. Chang’s path runs from Yale to Wellington Management, then through analytics and product at DoorDash, where she helped scale DashPass and learned to ship minimal, lovable products. Those experiences shape Plush’s DNA: clear moats, real unit economics, and a relentless focus on clean, structured data. We explore the technology unlocks that finally make intuitive fashion search possible: multimodal models that see silhouette and fabric, instruction‑tuned LLMs that turn “elevated basics for a fall birthday party” into actionable parameters, and stronger embeddings that map vibes to precise results. But this isn’t about handing your wardrobe to a faceless agent. Chang argues for curation with evidence: fewer, better picks and a clear why behind each one, trend cues, fabrication, brand identity, and styling insights. We talk co‑founder fit, rebuilding hybrid search from the ground up to 3x retention, and real user moments ranging from “upstage the bride, but don’t” to postpartum black‑tie comfort. The future she’s building preserves the joy of browsing while removing the grind of filtering. If you’re curious about AI in fashion, personalization, or how product, data, and taste come together, this conversation delivers both strategy and heart. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves style and tech, and leave a review telling us your most specific search you’d want AI to nail.  Links Chang/Plush: LinkedIn Chang: https://www.linkedin.com/in/changliu/Instagram Chang: https://www.instagram.com/misschangeychang/Plush Website: https://www.plush.shop/LinkedIn Plush: https://www.linkedin.com/company/plushshopping/Instagram Plush: https://www.instagram.com/_plushshopping/Links Julia/aiflow/Consulting:  LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/julia-lach/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lach_julia/aiflow (Private LLMs): https://www.aiflow.io/Consulting: https://consultingluxe.ai/

    Fixing Online Shopping: The Future of AI Fashion Search & Discovery — With Chang Liu of Plush
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About

She Builds with AI: Women Shaping the Future – Formerly the LuxeAI Highlights This is the podcast for women at the forefront of AI & Emerging Tech: founders, consultants, creatives, and changemakers redefining what’s possible in business and beyond. Hosted by Julia Lach, Fortune 500 Project Manager, AI Consultant & Speaker, this show explores how women are building with AI & Emerging Tech: launching startups, leading transformations, designing intelligent systems, and shaping the future with purpose and precision. From fashion and beauty to retail, consumer goods, digital consulting, and beyond, each episode explores current trends or spotlights bold voices blending innovation, strategy, and impact. Inquiries to hello@julialach.de 🎧 New episodes every month. Subscribe and meet the women building what’s next. 

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