So I was delighted to meet an entrepreneur putting an AI stake in the ground and offering up innovation that gets at a core challenge facing families: the “mental load” of parenting, and specifically of motherhood.

Introducing AVA

This week I had the pleasure of participating in an event for women hosted by Chief, moderated by Samantha Mulcahy, and alongside fellow panel guest Laura Cunningham, founder of a new app called AVA. What Laura and I share is a passion for digital literacy and personal empowerment, and after two hours talking with a room full of engaged women, it was clear we’re on the right track in giving them what they need to understand and embrace this new technology.

We are all living in this moment where AI can allow women to move ahead with ideas, projects, and initiatives like never before—but many of us aren’t embracing the potential. So not only is AVA a game-changer for busy parents, it’s an example of the ways in which AI can supercharge female entrepreneurship—and that’s something worth paying attention to.

I had a chance to speak with Laura in more detail recently, and here is what I learned about this thoughtful business leader and her new project AVA.

Entrepreneur Laura Cunningham

AIF: Tell me more about your background and what brought you to this moment?

LC: I’ve spent more than fifteen years as a product leader, almost all of it at the intersection of technology and human systems that are supposed to serve people but usually aren’t built for them.

I started in public education. I worked inside the New York City Department of Education, in what was then Mayor Bloomberg’s Office of Innovation, using technology to help teachers and administrators understand what kids were learning in an ongoing way. From there I went to KIPP, the national charter school network, and then spent years in ed-tech startups, both early and later stage, building products for teachers, students and their families. Most recently, before AVA, I led AI product strategy at NEAR, a layer-1 blockchain and deep-tech company.

So my through line isn’t education or crypto or AI, exactly. I keep ending up in places where the technology is powerful and the humans it’s meant to serve are an afterthought. I’ve spent my career trying to close that gap. AVA is the most personal version of that work I’ve ever done, because this time the human being the system forgot about was me.

AIF: What has motherhood changed about your thoughts / experience of work?

LC: A few things...

The first is efficiency. I became a radically better worker after I had my daughters because my hours got much more finite. I know when my workday starts and when it ends, and I hold the hours with my family as non-negotiable. We eat dinner together almost every night, as a matter of principle. In order to make this work, I’ve had to increase my focus on work that leads to outcomes instead of the kind that looks pretty in a deck. I’ve had to get ruthless about what actually matters and I think that constraint has made me sharper.

The second is mission. I’ve always been mission-driven, sometimes to a fault. But becoming a mother took that from an intellectual commitment to something closer to a physical one. I want to contribute to the world in a way my kids will one day understand. I want my daughters to see me leading. I want them to grow up with a model of a woman who can build something real and still be fully a woman and fully a mother, not as a balancing act but as one whole life.

The third is that motherhood kind of cured me of the optimization story. For years I chased “balance,” which is a lie we sell women, the idea that if you just distribute yourself correctly across every demand, you win. You don’t. You just get very good at being partial everywhere. What I want now is something more like self-actualization. Becoming more fully the person I’m capable of being, in all of it, instead of managing myself into smaller and smaller pieces. That shift is honestly a big part of why AVA exists.

AIF: What is AVA?

LC: AVA is a company focused on reducing the mental load of parenthood (usually, statistically, motherhood) which leads to both mental health issues as well as workforce attrition. AVA is both a product—an app that uses agentic AI to proactively handle family admin and coordination work—and a community of parents who are advocating for better support systems in the US. 

AIF: Tell me more about how it works?

LC: Every modern household runs on an enormous amount of invisible executive-function labor. The remembering, the anticipating, the coordinating, the deciding. Roughly fifteen hours a week of it, and it falls disproportionately on one person, usually the mother. We have a name for it now, the mental load, but naming it hasn’t moved it. Most families are running this on sheer vigilance, group chats, and hope.

AVA the app is an ambient AI layer built to help you carry that load. It helps you anticipate what needs to happen, find the best solutions for your specific family, and makes sure things get done. 

The belief underneath the whole company is simple: care is infrastructure. We’ve spent a century treating the work of running a family as a personal talent or a personal failing, when it’s actually infrastructure that a household needs and that no one ever built. AVA is my attempt to build it. 

AIF: Do you think women are hesitant to embrace AI? 

LC: I think the reality is, as usual, more nuanced than it might first seem.

Starting with a fact that surprises people: parents (ahem, moms) are among the heaviest AI users in the country right now. Surveys have found around 79% of parents using AI versus about 54% of non-parents. Mothers are using it for caregiving logistics, for the mental-load work that has no other tool, for scripts to have a hard conversation with a partner. So the “women won’t touch it” narrative is not totally true.

What is real is that women are being punished for using it in ways men are not. There’s research showing that when identical work is labeled as AI-assisted, it’s rated as less competent, and the penalty is more than double for women. Women are far more likely to hide their AI use at work. Men are significantly more likely to be encouraged by their managers to use it, and more likely to be praised when they do. So I think many women are having a rational response to a real, measurable tax that we pay and men don’t.

And I think into this moment, our culture is handing women a set of scripts about how to personally deal with all this, and I think every one of them is a trap. Use AI to frantically keep up, which is just the girlboss optimization story in a new logo, making each woman individually responsible for a structural shift she didn’t design. Or refuse it as principled resistance, which sounds noble but falls hardest on exactly the women whose jobs are most exposed.

Women are something like 83% of workers in the most AI-exposed occupations. For a woman in that position, refusing the tool her whole industry is adopting is more like unilateral disarmament. Or the two quieter scripts: use it but hide it, or use it and apologize for it. All four ask us to manage our own complicity instead of changing who gets to shape what comes next.

My belief is that we need to use it, see it, and shape it. Use it, because the leverage is real (it truly makes me feel so powerful!). See it, meaning refuse to hide our use, because the penalty exists precisely because women’s work keeps getting made invisible, and the fix is to make it legible. And shape it, which is the one that actually matters most.

AIF: So ironically, AI may be MOST useful to women...

LC: I think this all comes back to the hyper-concentration of power that has been born from “big tech” over the last 20 years. 

Right now a very small number of people are setting the direction of this technology. I sometimes think there are fewer than a hundred people genuinely steering it, moving fast and largely unchecked, while the rest of us are kept busy and fragmented.

Women are about 22% of the global AI workforce, and the pipeline that would put more of us in the rooms where these tools get designed is actually shrinking right now, at the exact moment the public conversation is telling women to step back. Two doors are closing simultaneously. If we are not in the room, there is no reason to expect the tools to reflect our real lives.

So the thing that has to change is that concentration of power. And the answer is emphatically not women stepping away from the table. That’s the worst possible move, and it’s dressed up right now as virtue. We have to do the opposite. We have to be in the conversations, we have to be building the products and not just consuming them, and we have to insist on being visible when we use them so the data stops confirming what the culture already wants to believe.

I think the best way to counter this concentration is to build the civic muscle for distributed power. Many people, moving in coordination, with a shared understanding of the problem and a shared plan. That requires exactly the human capacities that get coded as soft and dismissed: empathy, the ability to be with people you disagree with, the work of actually organizing other humans toward something.

AIF: What are some concrete examples of what needs to change?

The pipeline has to reopen, which means companies and investors have to stop letting women in early-career product and engineering roles quietly wash out. The workplace penalty on visible AI use has to be named and dismantled, because it’s just the credit gap and the mental-load gap wearing a new outfit. And we need governance and civic structures with real teeth, because we’ve now watched what happens when we outsource the ethics of this technology to a handful of billionaires and hope for the best.

The version of the future I’m working toward is one where the woman running the household isn’t the last person the technology considers but rather the person it was designed around, because she was in the room helping design it. That’s the whole bet. Care is infrastructure, and until we treat it as such, our society will continue to rupture for everyone but the top .0001%.

Ready to give AVA a try?

AVA is a behind-the-scenes parenting partner that handles family admin and coordination so parents can get time back. Download the app here and use the code AI4FAM for early access. There is a two-week free trial, and after that you will receive discounted access for 6 months. AVA is also hosting onboarding sessions for direct support with setup and to answer any questions—check out the upcoming dates here.

Scaling El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without a rope could have ended very badly but we know it’s okay even before pressing play. Could it encourage dangerous copycat climbs? Sure. But not likely just because one might get a documentary made about the effort.

From National Geographic to Netflix

It would be hard to argue that the spectacle on Netflix this past Saturday was the “same” as the documentary. Because it wasn’t. Alex climbed Taipei 101 for a live audience (and was paid to do it; although according to the climber not nearly enough).

The 101-story skyscraper was the world’s tallest building from its opening in 2004 until the opening of the UAE’s Burj Khalifa in 2009. The building is an architectural marvel, full of diverse exterior features and the kind of nooks and crannies that make a televised free climb exhilarating TV.

It was also deeply unsettling. I couldn’t help but feel that we were watching the Hunger Games. The setup of Alex’s climb felt eerily familiar with the same fanfare, chipper commentary, and the “someone might die today” subtext.

Of course, in the Hunger Games the game is about the majority of players not surviving. But considering the fact that Alex could have fallen during the live telecast, wasn’t that also part of the appeal?

Is This What We Want?

Although there isn’t yet a compelling AI-generated movie or TV show capturing our attention, it’s coming. And it may shift how we feel about entertainment forever.

For instance, we’ll see the business of background actors falling away. Having spent a couple of years accompanying my daughter on set as an extra, it makes perfect sense. It’s a lot of work to usher groups of people around who are merely glimpsed in the background. There is a ton of paperwork, transportation, catering, and herding from set to craft services. Why bother if a filmmaker can just generate them using AI?

And while entertainment will still require human artistry and talent, it may remove familiar faces from our screens, leaving us with a void that we can’t explain.

When “Connecting” With Our Humanity Means a Thirst for the Ultimate Risk

So what comes next? Do we start to invite life or death feats into our homes as entertainment? Are we so bored by art that is helmed by an unknown AI-generated face that we look for the thrill that comes of seeing “real” humans in dire circumstances?

I worked for Netflix two decades ago and they were always a company that could see many years into the future. And it’s in that context that I feel even more unsettled. They may actually see what’s ahead.

While the imaginative Hunger Games or even the very real Roman Gladiator events in history seem extreme in comparison, the thirst feels the same. The commentators chatting chirpily with Alex and his loved ones through the two-hour show made it even more unsettling. Every time they talked about “Alex making it,” they meant either stopping (best case) or, more realistically, falling and dying.

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So What Comes Next?

In addition to being forward-thinking, Netflix is also a shrewd company and they would have made sure that the odds of Alex falling were slim. While that may give us some assurances, it doesn’t make the situation any better. At the end of the day, all they could do is be flexible about shifting the time (it was delayed by a day because of the weather) and institute a 10-second delay (in case he falls so it’s not televised).

Very few media outlets have ventured into the moral discussion in covering the story. They likened it to other “live events” on Netflix, or talked about Alex’s past feats and his ability to determine the feasibility of any climb. But make no mistake: he could have died on live TV. And he was paid to take that risk, and we were lured to watch on that basis.

A few writers have been bold enough to say this quite part out loud:

“Live” isn’t about authenticity; it’s about monetizing the possibility of the worst outcome, packaged around the one person the world trusts to get away with it. It’s rubbernecking with a subscription login. —Seiji Ishii, Gear Junkie, Jan 22, 2026

I watched the climb, and discussed my concerns with my family. What I’m worried about is not that it happened; I’m worried that viewers wanted to see it. I’m worried that we will start to justify this type of content (e.g., “it’s his decision”) and like Seiji Ishii writes, we’ll allow for it to become commoditized.

As I’ve started to write about human “outliers” who represent those qualities we need to hold tight to, and whose stories we can’t lose sight of, Alex’s case shows how we can exploit their specialness too. We should embrace the stories of outliers, not use them to feed our desire to keep connected to the worst ways we are human.

Share AI for Families

But as I soon found out, the happy demeanor is just the start of a long list of accomplishments and gifts that this runner possesses. For starters, she is a medical student at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine—somehow also finding time to train as a long-distance runner. She’s a former NCAA champion swimmer and graduated from Harvard in just three years. In her last season at the school, Felicia was recognized by the NCAA for holding a 4.0 average during the 2022 record-setting swimming season.

Felicia then headed to Ohio State University, where she used her continued eligibility to swim for the Big Ten school while studying for a master’s degree in bioethics. Felicia’s accomplishments as a swimmer are too many to list here and alone would warrant a full profile of the scholar-athlete. But it was her breakthrough as a sub-elite NYC runner that caught my attention and earned Felicia an entire new cohort of fans.

After placing first in a number of local races this year, she was invited to compete in the elite women’s category at the New York City Marathon. And incredibly, she didn’t just run with the world’s best, Felicia came in first among New York women, 8th among American women, 14th overall among women, and also qualified for the 2028 Olympic Marathon Trials with a time of 2:35:17.

It’s an incredible accomplishment from someone who embodies the qualities we hope to see in the next generation—discipline, empathy, grit, wisdom, and joy. And these are the stories of the amazing “outliers” that need to be told.

Introducing the “Outliers”

As I’ve written about previously, while AI can help us achieve great things, we also need to consider the potential unintended consequences of the technology. For instance, AI systems tend to favor “safe” and “bland” responses. From a data science perspective, delivering the “most likely” or “average” answer, especially to questions that aren’t definitive and binary in nature, makes sense. But this can come at the expense of learning about “impossible” achievements and extraordinary people. In data terms, these extraordinary people are the “outlier” data points that can easily be filtered out—if they’re captured at all.

So, what does that mean in practical terms? Well, it could mean that safe answers woven throughout everything we access and the content our kids learn from can start to erode our imagination, creativity, and dreams. It’s the stories of other human beings that connect us to our own sense of what we can achieve—and we could lose this to AI systems. If these stories are “edited out” of content or never make it into what we read or experience, we risk becoming duller and less inspired in our thinking.

Through profiles of extraordinary people, I’m hoping to explore this topic in more detail. And I could not be more excited to share Felicia Pasadyn’s story as the inaugural profile for this section. Because unless you’re a runner here in NYC or have encountered Felicia in another context, you’ve likely never heard of her—but you likely will. Not only for her achievements but for Felicia’s fresh and unique perspective that highlights the power of those uniquely “human” skills that will be critical for kids to succeed in tomorrow’s world.

Meet Felicia Pasadyn

(Our chat edited for length and clarity…)

AI4F: You are, of course, an objectively amazing person, Felicia, but I also sense something different about your experiences and approach. So let’s start from high school. What has your journey been like? What has motivated you to succeed?

FELICIA: I was a three-sport athlete in high school. I also took a lot of advanced placement courses and was a very busy student athlete all during this time. I also grew up in a family that was extremely supportive of every dream that I had. And I dreamed big when I was younger.

I remember all the great moments, like being invited to the Olympic training center for being one of the top swimmers in the country. I also traveled a lot for swim competitions and for running competitions. I have three older sisters who also liked to run and swim and be very active. This was how I originally got into sports.

But for me, I also fell in love with the idea of sports. I loved the grit and self-determination that I felt every day at practice. It was about getting competitive with myself and then seeing the results. It’s like you get this little taste of success and all you want to do then is get back into the pool or back on the track and work even harder the next day.

“I always say hard work breeds success, and then success breeds hard work.”

—Felicia Pasadyn

Having people in my life, like really good friends and family, who I care about has also been a huge motivator. I know that my parents would wake up at 5 a.m., not because they wanted to, but because that’s when my swim practice was and they wanted to drive me there. So sometimes at swim meets or at hard practices, I would just think about them to keep going.

AI4F: My daughter is fixated on your Instagram feeds (personal and fitness), as they show your commitment, discipline, and, seemingly, grueling schedule. How do you do it?

FELICIA: I have this rule called the “hitting my four non-negotiables.” It’s a rule that I’ve had for myself since college, when, at the time, I would be walking over Charles River while at Harvard at 5 a.m. to get to swim practice. That practice would then be followed by a full day of classes that were very challenging intellectually. And then there would be another swim practice followed by study in the evening. So, I developed this concept to help me look back at my week and feel balanced and fulfilled ensuring that what I’m doing is sustainable.

First of the four is that I must get 8.5 to, ideally, 9.5 hours of sleep per night, or my brain and body do not recover very well. I also focus on fueling my body in a very functional and nutritious way. Second, I am the only one in my family who doesn’t live in Northeast Ohio at the moment, so I call at least one of them every single day just to make sure I have that touch point.

Third, I’m very close with my friends, and whether it’s scheduling a weekly potluck or a card game session, or even just a small walk to the local park, that fills my cup and helps me keep things in perspective. And fourth, is just booming back out and remembering my ultimate career goal. Because eventually I want to be a breast radiologist working with women and helping detect breast cancer—work that’s very important to me.

“By doing these [four “non-negotiables”] each day, I feel happy and fulfilled and very balanced.” —Felicia Pasadyn

AI4F: I write about AI and focus on the risks and opportunities that technology will continue to introduce into our lives. What I find interesting is how much you are an illustration of the power of having very “human” qualities. For instance, you seem incredibly focused on your experiences, and the people important to you, rather than necessarily just the reward at the end. What do you think of AI?

FELICIA: That’s all true. It’s also funny because I get asked questions about AI because of my focus on radiology. I often hear, “You know, AI is just going to take over that specialty.” But I’ll tell you what, until you can prove to me that a robot can comfort that woman with the tear rolling down her cheek as she gets a diagnosis… Until that day happens, I do not believe AI will take over radiology.

AI4F: What do you think about qualifying for the Olympic trials? Have you given much thought to what that means to you in your life?

FELICIA: It’s highly selective and honestly extremely unrealistic for me to think that I would leave as an Olympic team member. But still to go and compete against the best women in the country is the part I’m most excited about. I’m just in awe of the women that I get to compete against, and actually, the faster I get the more inspired I am by the athletes I’m exposed to at these races.

AI4F: I hope you also realize how you’re becoming quite an inspiration as well. My daughter has started to pay attention to how you train and was so excited to watch you during the live stream of the New York Marathon. What would you say to kids who now look up to you now?

FELICIA: First, I would say, the bigger you dream, the more exciting, your life becomes. Whether it’s something that you’re journaling, or thinking, or telling to a parent or a friend—if it scares you even a little, then it’s a big enough dream. Because having something to think about every single day and work toward—this is what gives you the most fulfillment in life.

I also see a tendency to pigeonhole students into one field or one sport. You don’t have to differentiate yourself so early. You should remain curious and open-minded for as long as you possibly can. I think it’s important to just keep wondering: What is out there for me in the world? Keep that question in the front of your mind for as many years of your life as you can. 💕

Have a story of someone you think is a remarkable example of holding fast to our humanity? A person that exhibits the “outlier” tendencies that are worth telling others about? Please let me know!

Once we know WHO we are it’s much easier to decide HOW machines can enhance our lives and WHERE the lines should be drawn concerning our use of AI systems.

What’s at Risk?

One of the unintended (and, I believe, least discussed) risks of AI is how it’s incentivized to deliver a response that is “safe.” It goes for the “most likely” or “most provable” answer. Of course, that makes sense. But are we fully considering the implications of safe and “homogenous” as we pepper AI into absolutely everything? Probably not.

Just look at what’s happening with AI-enabled Internet search results. You might be looking for a variety of perspectives and opinions when you search on Google, but now quite often the AI results are curt and binary in their “answer.”

For instance, I wanted to see what “people were saying” about the ending of a TV series I loved (The Lazarus Project). I wondered who also may have theorized about the relationship between two of the characters. And, welp, Google’s Gemini cut me right off. “No” it said. End of story.

It’s inexplicable why Google has decided to insert Gemini in this way, but that’s a post for another day. The bigger issue is how many might end their journey of discovery when an AI system offers such an abrupt response.

(P.S. hate AI intrusion into your Google search experience? When you add a phrase or question in the search bar add “-AI” and you won’t see an AI-generated answer)

Who Are The “Outliers”?

In my book I talk about the fact that boring, safe, and homogenized AI responses can (if we let them) start to shape the boundaries of what we think is possible—especially for kids.

When an AI chatbot responds with such authority that something is impossible, never done, or just simple provides a “yes” or “no” answer, it can be a serious deterrent to imagination, critical thinking, and any understanding of nuance.

Or, even worse, the answers can be inaccurate and limiting (especially as these responses are simply based on what has been written about previously).

And this is where “outliers” come into the picture. If humans and our digital data underpin these “definitive” AI responses, then it is far tidier algorithmically to just remove any errant data points from the mix (i.e., that “one person” who might have credibly argued the same theory I had about the Lazarus Project).

If there are no “examples” or content related to questions, ideas, or queries, what then? Imagine how many people have done extraordinary things that defy convention or belief but then “disappear” because the story never made it into the Internet content that drives these AI responses. That should worry us more than the “machines will destroy us” narrative we hear most frequently right now. We are at a far greater risk of handing our humanity over to technology and becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy as a result.

How Stories of “Extraordinary” People Begin to Disappear

If our news is AI generated, and our education materials led by AI, how do we resist the urge to think “within the box” rather than outside of it? Do we wake up someday and realize we are all boring, prone to group think, and risk adverse because “AI taught us” to be this way? Do we think the world can simply be organized into “yes” and “no,” “true” or “false”?

As readers you know I think that AI innovation can help us achieve great things. But if we don’t understand what is currently underpinning the technology we will fall prey to its darker implications.

That said, it’s not the technology that is to blame but the humans involved in its development and the “ingredients” that underpin AI’s output. For example:

• Local news is disappearing. According to my graduate school alma mater, over 40% of local news outlets have dissolved in the past 10 years. When you consider that AI responses come from Internet content and that local news is where we tend to find the most “human” stories, the implications are signifiant. All of those “local heroes” and individual human-interest stories that aren’t feasible to cover in the same way nationally, start to disappear.

• We Participate in fewer community events. According to the 2024 American Social Capital Survey, just 44 percent of Americans report attending a social event in one’s community even just a few times a year. It’s those interactions that expose us to a wider variety of people doing unique, interesting and even great things. It’s the very basis of our understanding of other people and what’s possible.

• Social media algorithms favor commercial (and other) interests. On the flip side, we spend so much time online that we experience the world according to algorithmic equations that prioritize commercial interests over truth. We are already prone to say “everyone thinks” these days without recognizing that “everyone” might not actually be…everyone.

Introducing “The Outliers” Special Section

And here is how we find ourselves at my new AI for Families section. As a trained journalist I always return to the mandate of “showing” not “telling” readers. And I can think of no better way to show readers what’s at risk these days than in profiling some very extraordinary human beings.

So to supplement the ideas, research, tips and overall thinking about AI that I cover on this website, I am now going start profiling the types of people who defy expectation as a celebration of what we can achieve and a warning as to what may lose if we don’t pay attention.

Know of someone that deserves a shoutout? Let me know!