EP37: Women in AI: Claire Roberts' Vision for Building a Purpose-Driven Tech Future

From Delivery Management to "Custodian of Value"

Claire's career spans nearly three decades in technology, including major SAP ERP transformations, agile and DevOps implementations, and large-scale strategic portfolio management at engineering giant Arm. As her responsibilities scaled from managing a handful of projects to hundreds, she realised her genuine value no longer lay in tracking delivery detail — a shift she describes vividly: at ten people and thirty projects, she knew everything; at hundreds of projects, that was no longer possible, or the point. She deliberately carved out a new role — Senior Director of Transformation and Value — repositioning herself and her team as custodians of ensuring technology work delivered genuine business value, rather than simply managing delivery mechanics.

Realising the Job Was Really About People

Claire describes a pivotal shift in self-understanding: that her real job wasn't delivery management at all, but people and culture — creating an environment where hundreds of people across her function could succeed, not just her direct reports. This led her toward a genuine interest in team dynamics, psychological safety, and the tangible creative and innovative benefits of diverse teams — interests she saw play out in practice during her time at Arm.

Why She Left to Start Her Own Business

Claire is candid about the trigger for founding her own company: watching organisational commitment to diversity and inclusion wind down after several years of investment, a pattern she's seen echoed more broadly across the industry. Combined with growing discomfort — shared with her husband, also working in a senior AI-focused role — about the ethical and philosophical direction of the AI industry, she concluded that meaningful influence over culture required building something of her own, grounded in the ethical principles she felt were being sidelined elsewhere.

Building a Blueprint Around Ethics From Day One

Rather than treating responsible AI as an afterthought, Claire and her husband spent four months documenting everything they'd learned across transformational change, the people side of AI adoption, data, and strategic portfolio management — explicitly positioning ethics as central to their offering from the outset. Claire notes that, in her experience, no organisation has ever pushed back on discussing ethics seriously — particularly once it's framed not as a compliance checkbox, but as a genuine driver of competitive advantage and long-term strategic sustainability.

Why Employees Resist Sharing Their Own Automation Ideas

One of the most striking insights Claire shares concerns a genuine paradox many organisations face: employees are often asked to contribute ideas for how AI could improve their work, but doing so effectively means identifying which parts of their own job could be automated — creating a powerful disincentive to share genuinely good ideas. She argues organisations need to meet this openly, with honest workforce planning and clear commitments about how AI will augment roles, rather than leaving employees to guess at their own job security while being asked to volunteer efficiency ideas.

The Hardest Challenge: Doing Good While Making Money

Reflecting on her own experience as a new founder, Claire is refreshingly honest about the tension between mission-driven work — including free AI training for women in tech, and support for underserved communities — and the practical reality of running a viable business. She describes the ongoing challenge of balancing genuine commitment to community and advocacy work with the commercial activity needed to sustain the business long-term.

Using AI as a Genuine "Superpower"

As a two-person team, Claire describes AI as central to punching above their weight — from building her own company website through "vibe coding" with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini (a process she credits with genuinely improving her own coding skills, not replacing them), to using AI voice tools as an active participant in strategic brainstorming conversations with her husband, effectively acting as a third collaborator in the room.

The Three C's: Care, Context, and Constraint

Claire and her husband developed a practical framework — Care, Context, and Constraint — designed to push responsibility for ethical AI use beyond developers and large integrators, and toward everyday users. Her core argument: AI tools themselves can't create societal impact without human input and interpretation — meaning individual users bear real responsibility for how they prompt these tools, and what they do with the output. Practically, this includes explicitly prompting AI tools to consider diversity and inclusion by default, and actively questioning outputs rather than accepting them uncritically — a way of consciously "building inclusion back in," given known limitations and biases in underlying training data.

Advice for Women Starting Their Own Path

Claire's advice to women considering entrepreneurship is direct: start sooner rather than later, since responsibilities only accumulate with time. She's candid about the emotional reality of founder life — near-daily self-doubt, and the need to become genuinely comfortable with rejection — while cautioning against the comparison trap of social media, particularly LinkedIn's pressure toward constant content creation. Her more grounded metric for success: a handful of genuinely good conversations each week matter far more than surface-level engagement metrics.

A Vision for "AI30"

Looking ahead, Claire shares an ambition for a campaign — provisionally called "AI30" — inspired by the principle that marginalised groups' voices are meaningfully heard once representation reaches around 30% within an organisation. Drawing inspiration from the automotive industry's Automotive 30% Club, led by male industry leaders committing to diversity for clear commercial reasons, Claire envisions a similar movement within AI and tech — reframing diversity not as a purely moral cause, but as a genuine commercial and strategic advantage that industry leaders themselves choose to champion.