What VivaTech Taught Me About Women in Tech Entrepreneurship
This week I spent three days at VivaTech in Paris.
180,000 people came through. Founders, investors, women in tech, and builders from more than 170 countries.
There were dancing humanoid robots. There were keynotes from the biggest names in AI.
And yet the things that stayed with me were quieter than any of that.
Three ideas, really. Each one about women in tech entrepreneurship, and about what it now takes to build something of your own in the age of AI.
I have kept a SaaS business alive for more than fifteen years. I have coached over 1,200 senior executives. And I walked out of this conference thinking differently about the path I help women build.
Here is what I learned.
1. At the Table, or on the Menu
One line from a talk on AI has not left me.
If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.
It was about who gets to decide how AI models are built, and what they are allowed to do. Right now very few people sit at that table. And very few of them are women.
Here is the uncomfortable part.
If women in tech are not helping shape AI, it gets shaped without us. And then it gets pointed at us. We become the data. The user. The product. Not the author.
But I did not leave that room discouraged. I left it inspired.
Because this week I met women doing the exact opposite. Founders of Women in AI, Women in Tech, and Women in STEM. The president of the Women’s Forum. Several of them give up to half of their week to unpaid work, just to move these topics forward for the rest of us.
Here is what I want you to take from this. You do not need to run a research lab to have a seat. You need to build something of your own. A product. A company. A voice the industry has to reckon with.
That is a seat at the table. And it is still open.
2. The Best Product No Longer Wins
For years, the advice was simple. Build something great and people will find it. On search engines. On social media. Through word of mouth.
That is not the world we are in anymore.
More and more, an AI decides what to show, and who to show it to. It is becoming the gatekeeper between your business and your customer.
So you can build the perfect offer for your ideal customer, and still never be seen.
This is the part that matters for the women I coach. The product is rarely their biggest risk. Being invisible is.
The question is no longer only “is my idea good.” It is “will the right person ever be shown it.”
And here is the quiet good news. AI does not invent who to recommend. It learns from real signals. Real customers talking. Real reviews. Real demand.
Which means the old habit of building in private and launching once everything is perfect is now the riskiest move of all.
→ Building something people want is still step one.
→ Step two is making sure a real human can find it, and talk about it, long before it is perfect.
This is exactly why I teach validation first. Talking to real customers is not only how you build the right thing. It is now how you become visible at all.
3. We Are Starting to Trust AI More Than Ourselves
The talk that scared me most was by the philosopher Gabrielle Halpern.
She said more and more of us now ask AI for advice. Instead of our colleagues. Our friends. Our family. The experts around us.
Her new book carries a title I cannot shake. Artificial intelligence, and man created God. Her argument is that we are quietly turning AI into the all knowing presence humans have always longed for. Always available. Always patient. Always sure.
Then she asked the question I keep turning over. Are we becoming professional verifiers? People who only check what AI said, instead of creating anything of our own.
I see this already in the women I coach. They open a tool to answer one question. Three hours later they are lost in a rabbit hole, and they have forgotten the decision they came to make.
The real risk with AI is not that it gets things wrong. It is that we slowly stop trusting ourselves.
Most of the answers you need are already in you. AI should help you think, not think for you.
So use it as a tool. Never as a god.
What I Brought Home From VivaTech
Three days, 180,000 people, and the lesson was smaller and clearer than I expected.
AI is changing who gets a seat, who gets seen, and even who we trust to make our decisions. None of that is a reason to stand back. It is a reason to step in. To build something of your own, on purpose, with your own judgment intact.
That is the whole idea behind a Weatherproof Business™. A validated business you build alongside your career, on real proof, without betting your reputation or your income.
If you have been sitting on an idea while the world races ahead, this is your moment to claim your seat.
My free masterclass walks you through the full Weatherproof Business™ Formula, step by step. It is free, and it will show you exactly where to start.
