Sometimes, the communities that inspire you at the beginning of your career become the very places where you return years later—not as a learner in the audience, but as someone sharing your own journey.
A Journey That Started in 2017
My journey with Women Who Code did not begin in New York. It began in 2017, in Bangalore, India, during the early years of my software engineering career.
At the time, I was still discovering what kind of engineer I wanted to become. Every day introduced a new framework, programming language, or development tool. While I enjoyed solving technical problems, I soon realized that growing as an engineer required much more than writing code. The best lessons rarely came from documentation or online tutorials—they came from conversations with people who had already faced the challenges I was just beginning to encounter.
That realization led me to the local technology community.
Every week, after work or over the weekends, I searched Meetup.com for developer events happening around Bangalore. Those meetups quickly became part of my routine. Some were organized by Women Who Code, others by Women Techmakers, Google Developer Groups, startup communities, and local engineering organizations.
Each event introduced me to a new perspective.
I listened to software engineers explain how they scaled distributed systems, product managers discuss customer-centric thinking, founders share the realities of building startups, and engineering leaders talk honestly about failures, career transitions, and leadership. These sessions were never just about technology—they were about people, problem-solving, resilience, and continuous learning.
As someone just beginning her career, these conversations were incredibly valuable. They expanded my understanding of what it meant to work in technology and showed me career paths I hadn't previously considered.
More importantly, they gave me confidence.
Seeing women confidently leading technical discussions, architecting large-scale systems, managing engineering organizations, and presenting on stage helped me imagine possibilities for my own career. Representation matters. Watching women lead in spaces traditionally dominated by men quietly changed my perception of what was possible for me.
At that time, I was simply attending events to learn. I had no idea that one day I would return to the same community as a speaker.
Staying Connected with the Community
Over the following years, my career continued to evolve.
I transitioned from front-end engineering into fintech, where I worked on products across digital payments, lending, insurance, and wealth management. As Artificial Intelligence began reshaping the technology landscape, I became increasingly interested in understanding how AI could improve software development, business workflows, and decision-making.
Learning became a continuous part of my career.
Although my responsibilities changed, I remained connected to the communities that had contributed so much to my professional growth. I continued following Women Who Code, subscribed to their newsletter, attended virtual sessions whenever possible, and kept an eye on their global initiatives supporting women in technology.
Then one morning, while checking my email, I noticed an announcement that immediately caught my attention.
Women Who Code was accepting speaker proposals for its annual summit in New York City.
I opened the email almost immediately. For a few minutes, I simply read through the details, wondering whether I should apply. This wasn't an ordinary conference. It would bring together engineers, AI researchers, founders, product leaders, executives, architects, and innovators from some of the world's most respected technology companies, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Anthropic, IBM, PayPal, Adobe, Netflix, Salesforce, Oracle, JPMorgan Chase, and many others.
Initially, I questioned whether my experiences would be valuable enough to share.
Then I reflected on my own journey.
Over the previous eight years, I had worked across multiple technology domains, built products used by millions of users, explored AI-powered solutions within industry projects, and had recently begun pursuing a master's degree in Business Analytics and Artificial Intelligence at Stevens Institute of Technology. Throughout that journey, Generative AI had become an integral part of the way I learned, researched, developed software, and approached problem-solving.
I realized that while many people were discussing the future of AI, relatively few were showing practical ways to use these tools responsibly in everyday work.
That became the foundation of my proposal. Instead of presenting AI as something futuristic or intimidating, I wanted to demonstrate how students, engineers, researchers, and professionals could integrate Generative AI into their daily workflows to improve productivity, learning, software development, research, content creation, and decision-making while remaining aware of its limitations and ethical considerations.
How to Use Generative AI Tools Effectively in Real Life.
After submitting the proposal, I returned to my daily routine and tried not to think about it too much.
Then, a few weeks later, I received an email that I will never forget.
My proposal had been accepted.
For a moment, I simply stared at the screen.
The same community that had inspired me as a young software engineer attending meetups in Bangalore had now invited me to stand on its stage in New York and contribute to the next generation of engineers.
That moment wasn't just about becoming a speaker. It felt like completing a journey that had quietly begun years earlier in a small meetup room in Bangalore.
Inside the Workshop: AI Tools Redefining How Products Are Built
One of the most exciting parts of my workshop was introducing attendees to some of the newest AI tools that are redefining how software products are designed and built. While many professionals are familiar with ChatGPT or Claude as conversational assistants, the AI ecosystem has evolved far beyond text generation.
I introduced the audience to Claude Design, one of Anthropic's newest capabilities, which enables users to transform natural language prompts into user interface designs and front-end components. Instead of manually creating wireframes or writing every UI component from scratch, product teams can describe an application in plain English and quickly generate high-quality design concepts. For entrepreneurs and product managers, this dramatically shortens the journey from an idea to a working prototype and encourages rapid experimentation before development begins.
Another capability that attracted significant interest was Claude Workflow. I explained how modern businesses rarely rely on a single AI interaction. Most business processes involve multiple connected steps—collecting information, analyzing documents, generating responses, updating databases, notifying teams, and interacting with external applications. Claude Workflow enables these tasks to be orchestrated into intelligent, multi-step workflows, allowing AI to act as an operational assistant rather than simply answering individual questions.
To make this concept practical, I used the example of a solo entrepreneur building a startup. Instead of switching between multiple tools manually, a founder could use AI to automate repetitive workflows such as market research, customer support, email responses, documentation, meeting summaries, content creation, and internal task management. Rather than replacing human decision-making, these workflows reduce operational overhead and allow founders to spend more time building products and engaging with customers.
I also discussed how these tools fit into a much broader AI ecosystem. Platforms such as Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Lovable, Bolt.new, Perplexity AI, NotebookLM, Figma AI, Canva AI, and v0 by Vercel are enabling individuals to research markets, design interfaces, generate production-ready code, deploy applications, create marketing content, and automate business processes with unprecedented speed.
The future belongs not to those who simply use AI, but to those who understand how to integrate it thoughtfully into real-world workflows and build meaningful products with it.
The central message of my workshop was not that AI replaces engineers or entrepreneurs. It was that AI has become a force multiplier. When combined with technical expertise, product thinking, and creativity, these tools empower individuals and small teams to accomplish work that once required entire departments.