What I Didn't Expect From a Room Full of Strangers Learning AI Together
Finding unexpected connection and clarity in a community of people learning AI from different perspectives.
What I Didn't Expect From a Room Full of Strangers Learning AI Together
I walked into the first-ever in-person meetup for Women Applying AI's San Francisco chapter not quite knowing what to expect. I left energized in a way I didn't anticipate and, honestly, a little surprised by how much a two-hour meetup could stay with me.
I've spent the last year rebuilding my own professional identity, moving from nineteen years behind the scenes in enterprise technology into AI business development. It's been exciting, but it's also been a little lonely at times. You spend so much time explaining AI to other people that you forget how nice it is to sit in a room where nobody needs the explanation—where everyone is genuinely curious about the same thing you are, just from a different angle.
That's exactly what this room was.
The mix of people caught me off guard in the best way. There was a college graduate just starting to explore AI, an experienced AI coach who's been in this space for years, and a corporate lawyer building out an AI and Web3 practice across two continents. Different ages, different career stages, different reasons for showing up, but everyone at the table wanted the same thing: real conversation, not another networking event where you trade business cards and forget the person's name by the time you're in your car.
We talked about why we'd each joined the group. Some wanted to learn the fundamentals. Some wanted deeper discussions than what shows up in a LinkedIn feed. Some just wanted more rooms like this one—more in-person events, more conferences, and more moments where you can actually finish a thought instead of rushing to the next handshake.
One conversation stuck with me longer than the rest. A woman there wanted to build her own AI agent but was stuck on a question a lot of people are quietly asking right now: Everyone seems to be building one, so should she build one, too, or just use what's already out there?
I told her what I actually believe. Almost everyone ends up building something eventually. The real question was never whether to build; it's what to build. You don't need a grand vision or a big product idea. Start with one small, specific thing you actually want automated in your own day—something real, something you'd feel the absence of if it stopped working. That's where the useful agents come from, not from trying to build the biggest thing in the room. I recognized the question, honestly, because I asked myself a version of it not long ago, when I was deciding whether there was a place for someone like me in this industry at all.
We ended up at a restaurant just outside a small courtyard, enjoying good food and easy conversation—the kind of night where three hours feel like one and you're mildly annoyed when it has to end.
What struck me most, sitting there, was that everyone in that room was at a completely different stage with AI, and somehow that made the conversation richer, not harder. Nobody was performing expertise. Nobody was pretending to know more than they did. There was room for a genuine beginner's question right next to a genuinely hard technical one, and both were treated with the same respect.
If your city doesn't have a Women Applying AI chapter yet, maybe it should. Not because you need another event on your calendar, but because there's something specific about learning alongside people who aren't exactly like you—people who ask questions from a completely different angle than you would—that speeds up your own thinking in a way solo learning never quite does.
What's one small, everyday thing you'd want an AI agent to handle for you first?
