What are the generative AI tools all women should be using to progress their careers?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already transforming many of the traditional workplace roles, and the rapid advance of the technology will continue to impact the jobs market for many years to come.

For those individuals already using or experimenting with AI and generative AI tools, this early adoption could help safeguard their job and progress their career, as more businesses look for staff who can develop or work alongside AI programs.

Unfortunately, this leaves women at a disadvantage, as currently there’s more uptake of AI tools among men than women. Research from the Oliver Wyman Forum found that while 59% of male workers aged 18 to 65 use generative AI tools at least once a week, only 51% of women do. What’s more worrying is that the gap is biggest among the youngest workers: 71% of men aged 18 to 24 use gen AI weekly, compared to 59% of women.

The problem with this is, if women lag behind men when it comes to uptake of AI tools, they’re more likely to lose out on future promotions and be first in line for layoffs triggered by AI replacing people. Camille Oster, COO at MVPR, notes:

My experience tells me that women are disproportionately at risk. We're overrepresented in junior roles that look easy to automate, while underrepresented in senior positions deemed safe. Some companies are already using AI to freeze hiring or reduce headcount, and that hits women harder. In tech, I see women clustered in roles like marketing and communications rather than technical roles. All these jobs can benefit from AI - but feel equally threatened by it.

Unfair burden

While the burden shouldn’t be put on women to solve a consequence of workplace inequality, Oster says it's crucial for women to get familiar with AI, most importantly to understand what it can and can't do so they can identify their irreplaceable value. Here are Oster’s tips for AI tools and scenarios women should be trying out:

• ChatGPT (the free version) to get unfiltered, honest feedback daily. Upload your last email/proposal. Ask: ‘As a sceptical client/manager, what would make me say no to this?’
• Claude to access perspectives you lack. Share a deck, note or email and prompt: ‘Act as a Fortune 500 CMO in X sector. What three concerns would you have about partnering with us?’
• Claude Projects (paid version, with your own writing samples uploaded for a consistent voice) to multiply your content output. Transform one blog post into five LinkedIn posts, eight tweets, and three emails in 15 minutes - and get to see how terrible AI is without human guidance.
• ChatGPT Voice Mode to save time. Use your commute to workshop strategies hands-free.
• Any LLM (Large Language Model) with role-play to create your own advisory board. Before big decisions, get AI to represent three different stakeholder viewpoints.
• Any AI to get credit for invisible work. Prompt: ‘Turn my behind-the-scenes problem-solving - here you can describe everything you've done this week that no one has noticed - into visible case studies for my performance review’.
• An AI note taker such as Fireflies.ai, Otter.ai or Fathom means you’ll no longer need to have a split focus on a call while taking notes, and you can use freed time to contribute more fully while AI captures details.

These AI tools and scenarios aren’t limited to a particular industry sector or role; many of them would have benefits for women working in anything from sales and marketing to recruitment and finance.

Diverse perspectives

For women working in the tech sector, and more specifically in technical roles, the need to embrace AI is even more pressing. Women are still a minority group in the IT industry, and to avoid being shut out from the AI workplace too, they need to be much more proactive in investigating which AI tools are available to support their current roles and get them to the next stage in their career. As Faye Ellis, Principal Training Architect at Pluralsight, notes:

Technology is rapidly changing our world and we need women to be involved. AI needs diverse perspectives to avoid biased outcomes, so all of us must be a part of shaping how this technology is being designed, implemented and governed.

Experimenting with AI at and outside of work will help women get familiar with the tools, and understand its strengths and limitations. Ellis says:

My recommendation is to first think about ways that we can lead innovation in the roles we do today. For instance, by automating routine tasks like writing code snippets, summarising meetings or drafting reports. Consider repetitive tasks that are done daily or weekly, experiment to find ways that AI can help accomplish these things more efficiently.

It's worth considering new areas where AI adoption could open up alternative career paths, for example female tech workers could focus on ethics, explainable AI, security and compliance. Ellis adds:

If you are someone who is interested in helping safeguard systems, then now is the time to explore these areas and start developing the skills needed to pivot in this direction.

Sector-specific skills

The best approach is to build AI skills that align with your existing strengths and the evolving needs of your organization or sector. Ellis explains:

If you are a data expert, you might be interested in data strategy; a software engineer could focus on ways that code written by AI models can be properly tested and evaluated; and a security expert might be interested in how AI-powered systems need to be secured, the security threats that AI poses, and how it can be used to help protect our systems.

According to Ellis, hot AI skills in demand now include:

• AI Agents and Agentic RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation);
• Python, currently one of the most popular programming languages, with lots of libraries that enable interaction with AI models;
• LangChain and LangGraph frameworks, which make it easy to build Agentic systems;
• AI coding assistants such as Amazon Q Developer, GitHub Copilot or Cursor, which are improving all the time and are a must for anybody who writes code.

Even though technologies are changing and updating all the time, skills learnt today will ensure women are ready for any future developments. Ellis adds:

Committing a little time each week to update your skills will go a long way towards helping you to stay current.

Time constraints

A couple of challenges women might face when it comes to testing out AI tools are a lack of time - as a result of juggling childcare, elderly care and household duties - and of technical expertise. But the process of mastering AI doesn’t need to take up huge amounts of time, says Caroline Monfrais, VP and Head of Consulting, Europe at Wipro Consulting. She explains:

Anyone can teach themselves how to leverage AI effectively in under a week, with just an hour a day and zero technical skills. It’s empowering, transformative and it works.

Monfrais notes that there are various cognitive strengths where AI can give women a unique advantage. These include pattern recognition and decision agility, which AI supercharges by analysing vast data sets, surfacing insights and reinforcing intuitive judgment with hard evidence; and communication and influence, with AI-driven refinements helping women navigate complex conversations and decode team dynamics. She adds:

Developing advanced prompting skills beyond the basics of ChatGPT is a career superpower, a skill that amplifies natural talents and fuels professional acceleration.

My take

Some really useful advice here for women concerned about the impact of AI on their future career. I like the sharing of specific tools and prompts, and hope people find some time over the summer period to try some new ones out.