We have some exciting news to share: our co-founder, Pil Byriel, has been named one of the top 100 women in AI in Denmark. It’s a recognition we’re genuinely proud of – not just as a personal milestone, but as a signal that the work matters.
And the work is urgent.
At Develop Diverse, we’ve spent years in the DEI trenches. We know how painfully slow progress can be. Closing gender gaps requires sustained effort, systemic change, and a whole lot of patience. So when AI arrived – and it arrived fast – we made a deliberate choice: we weren’t going to fall behind. We started integrating AI into our software, into our daily work, into our thinking. Not because it’s easy or always comfortable, but because the alternative is worse.
Sure, it’s tempting to daydream about a simpler time. But AI is here. It’s reshaping industries, eliminating jobs, creating entirely new ones – and if you’re not in the room, someone else is making the decisions that will affect you.
The uncomfortable truth about what’s coming
We’ve already watched organisations cut headcount while simultaneously pouring investment into AI. Research from Gartner suggests those cuts rarely improve the bottom line – but that hasn’t slowed the trend. The disruption is real, and we’ve likely only seen the beginning.
AI entrepreneur Matt Shumer captured something that felt viscerally true when he wrote earlier this year: “I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job.” That’s confronting. But Shumer also pointed toward the extraordinary upside: AI could, in his words, compress a century of medical research into a decade – making cancer, Alzheimer’s, infectious disease, even aging itself, potentially solvable within our lifetimes.
The technology is not inherently good or bad. It’s powerful. And who holds that power matters enormously.
Women are already being left behind – again
Here’s where we have to be honest about what the data is showing us.
In Denmark, only 21.3% of AI professionals are women, and a mere 15% hold leadership positions, according to Connected Women in AI Denmark. Women also use AI 30% less than their male colleagues.
Globally, the picture isn’t much better. Women are already 16% less likely than men to use generative AI tools for work. Only 28% of women report using AI regularly, compared to 45% of men. And the gap is widest exactly where it will matter most: among the youngest workers. Among Gen Z, 71% of men use generative AI weekly, compared to just 59% of women – a generation that will carry those AI skills, or the absence of them, across four-decade careers.
Women currently found around 20% of AI startups globally, but only 10% remain female-led – a statistic that tells a story of women being systematically pushed out or left without institutional support as companies grow and scale.
This is a pattern we recognise. We’ve seen it in boardrooms, in tech hiring, in VC funding. Now it’s playing out in AI – the most consequential technological shift of our generation.
Three things Pil wishes more women would hear
Pil’s recognition didn’t come from a smooth, linear path. It came from building a tech company with AI at its core without being a developer. It came from being told she couldn’t succeed, from imposter syndrome in rooms full of “perfect CVs,” and from showing up anyway. Here’s what she wants to pass on.
- Don’t wait for permission – claim your seat at the AI table
Too many people assume AI is someone else’s responsibility – that it belongs to Product, Engineering, or Data teams. But AI is reshaping every part of the business, from customer service and sales to hiring, learning, and leadership. If your function is being impacted, you belong in the conversation. Don’t wait for an invitation. Nobody has a complete roadmap for what AI means for their organization, and everyone is learning as they go. The difference between the people who help shape the future of AI and those who simply react to it often comes down to one thing: who chose to get involved. Execution beats permission every time.
- Don’t let perfect get in the way of good
Too many brilliant women are waiting until they know enough, until the idea is polished enough, until the moment feels right – and then the moment passes. The fastest way to learn AI is to make mistakes with it. Lots of them. Most of what Pil knows came from failing, adjusting, and going again. Perfection isn’t the goal. Perfection, actually, is a trap – if it’s your bar, you’ve set yourself up to fail before you start.
- Don’t give up – this one is harder than it sounds
It sounds like a cliché until you’re in month nine of building something that isn’t working yet. The people who end up shaping this technology aren’t always the most technically gifted or the best-resourced. They’re the ones who didn’t stop when it got hard. Building a tech company with AI at its core wasn’t a natural fit for Pil. The easiest path would have been to stay where she was. But she could see the potential – and she made it a goal to learn, build, and advocate for bias awareness in how AI is built and used. That decision compounds over time.
Why this matters beyond the individual
We tell this story not to celebrate one person, but because the stakes are high for all of us.
If women aren’t building AI, the AI being built won’t reflect our needs, our perspectives, or our experiences. We’ve already seen what happens when diverse voices are absent from the design of technology – we get products with facial recognition that struggles with darker skin tones, hiring algorithms that penalise women’s CVs, and health data models trained predominantly on male bodies.
AI is not going to wait for us to catch up. But it can be shaped – and the women who show up now, who claim their seats, who build imperfectly and keep going, are the ones who will do the shaping.
Pil’s place in Denmark’s top 100 women in AI is a reminder that it’s possible. But the list needs to be longer. A lot longer.
