Ladies lead 9 of the businesses featured on the lately revealed Fortune AIQ 50 list, a rating of the highest Fortune 500 corporations which are most superior of their adoption of synthetic intelligence, particularly in gentle of how a lot their tech leaders worth AI investments in contrast with rivals.
These women-led corporations come from all corners of the economic system, starting from aerospace and protection to banking and retail. They account for 18% of the AIQ checklist, in contrast with girls operating simply 11% of all companies on the Fortune 500 list in 2025.
AI use circumstances which were deployed by these companies have assorted significantly. Monetary large Citigroup’s (No. 38) latest AI efforts have included retraining 175,000 employees on tips on how to write higher prompts to generate extra impactful outcomes from giant language mannequin queries. Insurance coverage supplier Progressive (No. 22) is utilizing AI to assist sort through hundreds of thousands of job applications. And a lately launched AI-powered tool at Albertsons (No. 30) can stick with it a dialog with customers purchasing on-line, suggesting grocery gadgets to contemplate shopping for, which has proved to elevate complete basket dimension.
Rounding out the checklist of women-led corporations on the AIQ 50 are monetary analytics agency S&P International (No. 12), aerospace and protection giants General Dynamics (No. 21) and Northrop Grumman (No. 43), mining firm Freeport-McMoRan (No. 31), and well being insurers Centene (No. 27) and Elevance Health (No. 35).
Gail Boudreaux, the president and CEO of Elevance Well being, says that her imaginative and prescient for AI is pretty easy and simple. “Make well being care simpler, extra inexpensive, and extra private,” she says.
Some generative AI use circumstances that Elevance Well being has deployed embrace instruments that make it simpler for customer support representatives to retrieve the data they should reply consumer questions. Elevance Well being can be utilizing AI to automate the transcription summaries of those calls and to scan for any points which will have arisen through the name. The AI instruments then supply up recommendations on tips on how to enhance a consultant’s future skill to deal with related requests.
“We’ve AI-enabled productiveness instruments which are utilized by greater than 60,000 associates to assist scale back repetitive duties, so groups can focus extra on supporting our members and suppliers,” says Boudreaux.
She additionally cited an AI certification that’s supplied to workers via a partnership with OpenAI, giving workers formal acknowledgement of their AI fluency, which ranges from foundational expertise like immediate engineering to extra superior AI-enabled work duties.
Ladies are usually “excessive adopters,” leaning into previous know-how traits like social media, and Fortune’s knowledge might sign that this consumer-driven habits is probably being mirrored within the company setting.
“What you’re seeing is that the women-CEO-led corporations are displaying as much as undertake new applied sciences, in some methods which are constant to among the client adoption habits we’ve seen in different applied sciences,” says Lareina Yee, McKinsey International Institute director and a senior companion on the consultancy.
Yee is a founder and main writer of McKinsey’s 10-year analysis mission on women in the workplace, which discovered that girls make up 29% of C-suite positions as of 2024, up from 17% in 2015. However progress has been far slower for ladies in entry-level, supervisor, and VP positions.
There may be additionally a combined image when trying below the hood of the AI race. Many of the largest AI startups which are constructing the big language fashions or different programs to propel this know-how development, together with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Databricks, are overwhelmingly cofounded and led by males. Early knowledge reveals that women-led AI corporations pull in little or no funding from enterprise capital (although former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s Considering Machines Lab, which raised $2 billion in July, is a notable exception), mirroring the final pattern across the entire economy.
Extra encouragingly, girls in tech have cornered the chief monetary officer position. At OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, and Salesforce, a lady serves as CFO.
“And so although the CEO is probably not a lady in all of these corporations, the CFO is a fairly highly effective position,” says Yee.
At S&P International, President and CEO Martina Cheung stated the corporate has made unbelievable progress upskilling the corporate’s workforce. An internally developed AI assistant, referred to as Spark Help, debuted final 12 months and throughout the first months, 14,000 workers had already used the instrument, accounting for 30% of the workforce. In 2025, that determine elevated to greater than 65% globally.
Externally, S&P International additionally made among the firm’s analysis out there to clients with a subscription via Microsoft Copilot, and individually, introduced a collaboration with Anthropic to combine S&P International’s datasets with Claude. This knowledge can be solely out there for S&P International subscribers, not a part of any of Anthropic’s broader coaching knowledge.
“This house is transferring shortly, and we’re transferring shortly with it,” says Cheung.
Sarah Franklin, CEO of AI-powered HR platform Lattice, says each genders are beginning on the similar level in terms of adoption of generative AI. “There’s nobody on this world who has 10 years of agentic AI expertise,” says Franklin. “I don’t care in case you are a person or a lady.”
She notes that company leaders may also study from previous failings. Social media is a type of know-how that was largely constructed by males, and it wasn’t till years later that research started to disclose how dangerous it may very well be to customers, together with mothers and teenage girls.
“I feel it’s an unbelievable alternative for ladies to ask the fitting questions of, how ought to we responsibly carry AI into the workforce and into our houses and into our lives?” asks Franklin. “We don’t need to find yourself with a foul, dystopian end result.”
Replace: This text has been up to date to incorporate feedback from S&P International CEO Martina Cheung.
Learn extra lessons from the Fortune AIQ 50, the newest Fortune AIQ particular report. This assortment of tales particulars how corporations on the inaugural Fortune AIQ 50 checklist have made important progress integrating synthetic intelligence know-how into their operations, resulting in actual affect.
