Most of the technology shaping our world right now was not built with women in mind. The algorithms deciding who gets hired, who gets promoted, and whose ideas get amplified were built largely without us, trained largely without us, and are now being deployed at a scale that is moving faster than most of us can keep up with.
The numbers are sobering. 86% of jobs most exposed to AI automation are held by women. Women make up less than 25% of the workforce actually building AI. And the World Economic Forum estimates it will take 123 years to close the gender parity gap worldwide. In 2026, women are still making 83 to 86 cents for every dollar a man earns for the same work.
But today's guest is not here to talk about the problem. She is here to talk about what we do about it.
In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Miri Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of Empressa.ai, the groundbreaking AI platform built on women's lived experiences, trained on women's knowledge, and designed to close the very gaps the technology industry has spent decades widening. After 13 years at Microsoft, where she became one of the company's most recognized storytellers and published the award-winning bestseller Brand Storytelling, Miri left one of the most powerful platforms in the world to build something the industry had never seen before.
We get into why AI is either the most powerful tool women have ever had access to or the fastest way to permanently hard-code today's gaps into tomorrow's opportunities at scale, what it actually means for an AI to be built on women's lived experiences and why that changes everything about how it responds, the Empressa Imperial Council and the model that pays women royalties for the knowledge they contribute, how to start closing the gap today, and the rule Miri wants every woman to rewrite before she walks into her next room.
This one will fire you up. And it is supposed to.
About Our Guest
Miri Rodriguez is the Founder and CEO of Empressa.ai, a groundbreaking AI company reshaping the future of work for women. With 13 years at Microsoft, where she evolved from communications and marketing into one of the company's most recognized storytellers, Miri built and led work that changes how organizations connect with people. That body of work became her bestselling book, Brand Storytelling, published by Kogan Page, translated into four languages, and recognized with multiple awards worldwide.
Now she is channeling everything she built at Microsoft into something the market has never seen before. Empressa is an AI platform built on women's lived experiences, trained on women's knowledge, and designed to close the very gaps the technology industry has spent decades widening.
She is also the author of the book The Women of Microsoft, an advisor to Ragan's Center for AI Strategy, and one of the clearest, most urgent voices on what it is going to take for women to stop adapting to systems that were never built for them and start building the ones that are.
Connect with Miri
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/mirirod
Website: https://empressa.ai
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