We’re so excited to unveil a new series: Mindstream’s Most Interesting Women in AI!

Over the next 8 weeks, we’ll profile the women doing the most interesting things in the AI space.

This is our class of 2026. Their projects are epic. We want you to know about them.

Kicking things off today, Mindstream Senior Writer Maria explains why this series matters to her.

Tune in tomorrow for the first profile.

What’s in store:

Read Time: 5 minutes

MOST INTERESTING WOMEN IN AI 2026

A Letter From Maria

I found the first one by accident. I found the second because the first one led me there. By the sixth, I had a notes app full of names, a lot of feelings, and genuinely nowhere to put either of them.

Not for any particular reason I could name at the time. I was just paying attention and noticing the same thing over and over: I was just paying attention and noticing the same thing over and over: the coverage of AI had a type. The same voices in the same rooms making the same predictions, never once asked to account for the ones that did not land. (We love to see it. We do not, in fact, love to see it.)

Meanwhile, in medicine and agriculture and law and food science and materials discovery and sleep health and long-term care, women were building things that mattered in ways the usual coverage had simply not gotten around to yet.

One woman's name in a thread led to a company that led to a problem that led to another woman who had been working on it for years while the industry looked elsewhere. I was not building a series. I was just paying attention and the series built itself, which, if I am honest, is how the best things tend to happen.

Eventually I realized someone should be talking to these women properly, and that someone was me, which was not obvious to me for an embarrassingly long time. I asked if they had an hour. I sent the questions the day before so nobody walked in cold. And then I sat across from eight women who have spent years inside problems the world was not paying enough attention to, and I asked them the things I actually wanted to know.

Not "tell me about your journey." The real questions. The ones about the calls they made when the room was wrong, and what they saw before anyone else framed the question, and the standards they refused to lower when it would have been so much easier to lower them.

What I found was not what I expected, even though it probably should have been.

I expected to be impressed. I was. What I did not expect was to feel personally impacted by several of the conversations, which was not in my editorial brief, but here we are. I also did not expect how much they would stay with me afterwards. How often I would be making dinner or walking somewhere and a line from one of these interviews would just appear in my head and not leave. 

A woman saying "we never had vocabulary for this topic." A woman saying "nobody needs to die of breast cancer, honestly." A woman writing in her journal that an idea was spiraling out of control, meaning it as a warning, and then doing it anyway.

These are the pen-down moments. The ones that earn the "I am not okay about it" text to a friend at an unreasonable hour. I have been holding them for months and I am extremely glad to finally be handing them over. Consider this my notes app with somewhere to finally send it.

What you are about to read is not a polished profile series. It is not soft lighting and aspirational quotes about resilience. It is nine women doing some of the most specific, most original, most underreported work happening in AI right now, in their own words, asked the questions they actually wanted to be asked.

Read one. Read all of them. Come back when a line from one of them appears in your head three days later while you are doing something completely unrelated.

That is how you will know it worked.

With a completely professional amount of obsession,

Maria 

Senior Writer, Mindstream at HubSpot

To celebrate the launch of our new series, you can get our top 100 prompts for Claude!

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