By Elizabeth (Liz) Ngonzi

Next month, I return to Iceland for my third gathering at the Reykjavík Global Forum. Convening with more than five hundred leaders across government, enterprise, and civil society at the Harpa Conference Centre always provides a clear view of global leadership dynamics. Iceland sets an impressive global benchmark for gender equality, and the leaders in this community focus closely on empirical data to evaluate where progress is taking root and where structural friction persists.

One of the most valuable resources from this community is the Reykjavík Index for Leadership, developed by Verian in partnership with the Forum and Women Political Leaders (WPL). The Index measures societal perceptions regarding the suitability of women and men for leadership, where a score of 100 indicates complete perceived equality.

The latest findings present an unmistakable wake-up call for executive teams and boards. After peaking at 73, the aggregate G7 score has slipped to 68. Even more striking is the generational dissonance: across G7 economies, young people aged 18 to 34 demonstrate higher levels of prejudice against women in leadership than their parents and older cohorts. That trend was central to our discussions at the Reykjavík Global Forum’s CSW session on the power of data, where researchers and practitioners from the World Bank and the OECD emphasized that perception frequently lags policy, and intention is never a substitute for execution. Across economic sectors—including the Index's measure of High-Tech and Artificial Intelligence—the data confirms that rapid technological deployment does not automatically modernize leadership mindsets.

We see that same systemic friction reflected in technology workforce analytics. According to LinkedIn’s global Economic Graph—highlighted by Sarah Steinberg, Head of Global Public Policy Partnerships at LinkedIn, during the World Woman UNGA Agenda—global demand for AI talent has doubled over the past two years. Yet women still account for only 25 percent of new AI hires and hold just 13 percent of technical leadership roles in AI enterprises. Across enterprise sectors, that representation drops precipitously at the executive committee and board level.

These dynamics present a decisive commercial and governance challenge. They require us to rethink how we articulate value, how we build cross-sector alliances, and who guides the systems shaping our core institutions.

My perspective on today's AI landscape is shaped by more than thirty years working across enterprise computing, organizational strategy, and human systems.

After completing my studies in Information Systems at Syracuse University, where fewer than ten of us were exploring how digital networks would impact organizations, I was one of 16 graduates selected nationally for Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) Marketing Leadership Development Program. In my initial rotation in aerospace marketing, I was often the youngest person and the only woman in the room. In my second rotation in Corporate Communications, part of my work involved analyzing research from technology research firms like Gartner and DataQuest to prepare strategic briefings for executives. It was a fast-paced environment that taught me how complex systems operate and how decisions get made at scale.

Later, while serving as a sales executive at MICROS Systems Inc., my manager offered advice that permanently shaped my leadership philosophy: if you deliver phenomenal work but fail to articulate your value, people assume you aren't doing anything. That insight taught me that communicating contributions with clarity is not vanity; it is an operational imperative that ensures capability is visible to key decision-makers. Applying that principle directly, I became the highest revenue-generating first-year salesperson in the company's history.

After directing post-merger integration and technology strategy at Arthur Andersen Business Consulting through the dot-com era, I launched my strategic advisory practice. For over a decade, we partnered with leadership teams across financial services, healthcare, higher education, and multilateral institutions, guiding them through enterprise digital strategy, stakeholder engagement, and major capital alignment initiatives.

When social media platforms began restructuring organizational communications, many institutions resisted the transition, uncertain of how to govern digital identity. I began addressing this challenge at New York University in 2009, developing executive curricula focused on digital storytelling, resource mobilization, and strategic communications. Today, as an adjunct assistant professor at NYU's Center for Global Affairs, I architected and lead our course series on AI for Impact.

That pedagogical work directly informed my executive leadership as CEO of Afrika Tikkun USA from 2014 to 2018. Recognizing the power of digital narrative early, we partnered with Facebook on a global initiative for International Day of the Girl and collaborated with McCann Worldgroup on a targeted LinkedIn campaign that engaged a Fortune 50 CEO as an anchor funder, demonstrating how strategic storytelling across professional networks can unlock C-suite capital and scale an organization globally.

Through The International Social Impact Institute®, which I founded in 2020 as an incubator for our leadership and educational frameworks, we engaged more than 40,000 participants across 140 executive convenings and 60 custom programs. Today, through Liz Ngonzi + AI, I have had the privilege of equipping more than 12,000 leaders and professionals across six continents to apply generative AI with elevated confidence, strategic judgment, and ethical responsibility.

Through every era, whether deploying networked enterprise architectures in the 1990s, enterprise social platforms in the 2010s, or generative and agentic AI today, the foundational reality remains constant. The barrier to progress is rarely the technology itself; it's whether an organization invests in the judgment, capability, and alignment of its people.

Addressing the regressions highlighted by the Reykjavík Index requires an honest look at how we frame equity.

Whenever progress is presented as a zero-sum contest, stakeholders naturally conclude that another group's advancement necessitates their own loss. No one performs their best work from a defensive posture.

This principle was captured during my first visit to Iceland, which I reflected on following the 2024 Forum. During her opening address, President Halla Tómasdóttir emphasized the imperative of bringing men and boys into the dialogue, noting that many feel alienated in today's rapidly shifting socioeconomic landscape. As President Tómasdóttir observed:

Her words point directly to where leadership focus belongs. The strategic objective is not to divide a shrinking pie or pit demographic groups against one another. It is to unite collective human intelligence to address urgent, complex challenges across healthcare, education, climate resilience, and institutional governance.

Healthcare offers an urgent case in point, which I explored following discussions at the World Woman UNGA Agenda. For decades, clinical research and medical studies treated male biology as the universal default. If foundation models and diagnostic AI systems inherit those skewed historical datasets without sex-disaggregated data, they'll automate medical misdiagnosis at scale. Ensuring women are in the loop as system architects, clinical researchers, and model evaluators isn't a matter of compliance; it's a fundamental safety and diagnostic imperative that protects patients and saves lives.

With artificial intelligence touching every operational domain, leadership teams need the best collective intelligence available. As we discussed on our 2025 Reykjavík panel on data and leadership, moving the needle requires articulating the clear business case. Backing advocacy with rigorous data and showing tangible return on investment turns inclusion into an undeniable value proposition that expands market insight, mitigates operational risk, and drives financial performance.

Because institutional power and capital remain concentrated, progress depends on deliberate collaboration. Throughout my career, including my fifteen years as a member and former Communications Chair of the President's Council of Cornell Women, and my work advising graduate student teams at Cornell Tech, the most durable outcomes have come from cultivating trusted executive sponsors, engaging male allies, and building long-term professional partnerships grounded in reciprocal value.

This is precisely where Regenerative Intelligence establishes a decisive competitive advantage for modern organizations.

Through the 1+1+AI=10® Regenerative Intelligence Methodology that I deploy with executive teams and boards, we examine how individual domain expertise, institutional wisdom, and AI architectures amplify one another. The goal is never merely to generate larger volumes of synthetic content at higher velocities. The true objective is to use AI to renew human judgment, preserve institutional memory, and build sustainable organizational capability.

That principle was at the center of my recent exchanges during UNGA81 with Women Political Leaders on Peace, Security, and the Digital Compact. As I reflected with global leaders, including former Ethiopian President Sahle-Work Zewde, representation cannot mean merely handing women tools engineered exclusively by others. Value, governance authority, and systemic safety flow to those who architect, deploy, and govern the infrastructure. When women lead foundational design, we embed relational intelligence, lived context, and anticipatory governance directly into the digital substrate.

As we concluded during WPL's closing UNGA81 session hosted by EY, representative leadership is a core governance capability. Commitments acquire institutional validity only when they reach operational teams, shape capital allocations, and build enduring public trust.

Decades of organizational research confirm that leadership teams bringing multidisciplinary, diverse perspectives build more resilient, market-tested systems. In an AI sector where women occupy barely 13 to 14 percent of executive leadership seats, that breadth of perspective remains acutely scarce. We see how much it matters in practical architectures, such as Mira Murati's team at Thinking Machines Lab focusing on enterprise data sovereignty, open weights, and customizable guardrails.

That same intentionality guides my service with the American Society for Artificial Intelligence (ASFAI), where I serve on the Board of Directors and chair the Ethics and Responsible AI Committee. Nearly 30 percent of our members are women, all serving in senior executive roles across industries and geographies. In a sector where female representation drops off sharply at the executive tier, integrating this caliber of multidisciplinary leadership into our ecosystem creates reciprocal value. It amplifies their strategic impact, strengthens our institutional governance, and ensures that diverse operational, technical, and cross-sector perspectives inform how our members navigate this technology.

That same philosophy shapes our work with AI for Humanity: Human-Centered Strategies for Innovation and Impact. Developed in collaboration with ASFAI, the platform brings together over forty global contributors across industries. We focus on showing organizations how AI can support critical thinking, streamline workflows, and help leaders navigate digital transformation with confidence.

As I prepare for our deliberations in Reykjavík, one central governance question stands above the rest.

Public debate frequently centers on whether technological innovation is moving too fast. An equally urgent question for executive teams and boards is:

True leadership in this era is not measured by the output an automated model produces in isolation. It is defined by how leaders exercise human judgment, ethical conviction, and strategic clarity to create enduring institutional value.

I look forward to the dialogues in Reykjavík, and to continuing our work with leaders committed to building resilient, human-centered, and future-ready institutions.

About the Author

Elizabeth (Liz) Ngonzi is a human-centered AI strategist, executive educator, and founder of the LizNgonzi.ai Ecosystem. She serves as an award-winning Adjunct Assistant Professor at New York University's Center for Global Affairs. She is a Member of the Board of Directors and Founding Chair of the Ethics and Responsible AI Committee at the American Society for Artificial Intelligence (ASFAI), and the Originator, Editor-in-Chief, and Founding Platform Architect of AI for Humanity: Human-Centered Strategies for Innovation and Impact.

Her work focuses on equipping executive teams, boards, and global institutions to align human-centered AI with enterprise strategy, responsible governance, workforce capability, strategic storytelling, and sustainable organizational growth.