B The Way Forward

What happens when your imagination shows up decades before the technology does?

Adam Cheyer built his first version of Siri in 1993, before the web existed. He went on to co-found Siri and Viv Labs and was the first developer at Change.org. Now he’s saying something many people in tech won’t: 2025 was the year programming died.

Brenda talks with Adam about why boredom made him creative as a kid, and how cardboard became s...

What if the most important question in AI is not how intelligent we can make machines, but what we want that intelligence to do for us?

In this episode of B The Way Forward, Brenda Darden Wilkerson sits down with Francesca Rossi, IBM Fellow and IBM's Global Leader for Responsible AI and AI Governance at the T.J. Watson Research Center, for a conversation about AI ethics, AI governance, and the human decisions behind every system we...

In this episode, Brenda is joined by Prasanna Gopalakrishnan, former Global Chief Product & AI Officer at ADP and a veteran executive with over 25 years of experience leading digital transformation across tech, banking, and media.

While much of today's conversation around Artificial Intelligence focuses on what machines will replace, Prasanna shifts the narrative toward a far more empowering question: What can AI make possible f...

Machines can now write, create, diagnose disease, generate art, and carry on a conversation. Which raises a question bigger than technology itself: if machines can increasingly do what humans do, what makes us uniquely human?

In this episode of B The Way Forward, host Brenda Darden Wilkerson sits down with Dr. Vivienne Ming, a theoretical neuroscientist, serial entrepreneur, and one of the world's leading thinkers on artificial inte...

We ask AI questions. We trust its recommendations. We increasingly let it shape decisions about our work, our health, our money, and our futures. But there's a question we don't ask nearly often enough: who taught AI what it knows and who was missing from the room while it learned?

In this episode of B The Way Forward, host Brenda Darden Wilkerson sits down with Shubhi Rao, founder and CEO of Uplevyl, and a leader who spent decades ...

For years, we were told that algorithms were neutral. Just math. Just code. Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble asked a different question, and it changed the way the world thinks about technology.

In this episode of B The Way Forward, host Brenda Darden Wilkerson sits down with the scholar, author, and educator whose groundbreaking book Algorithms of Oppression helped spark a global conversation about algorithmic bias years before most of us ha...

What does it really mean to lead with purpose in a world that rewards speed over intention?

In this episode of B the Way Forward, host Brenda Darden Wilkerson sits down with Betsy Ziegler, CEO of 1871, one of the nation's premier startup incubators and innovation hubs in Chicago. From her early days at McKinsey and GE to leading innovation at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and now championing thousands of fou...

What does it actually take to lead AI transformation inside a global industrial enterprise, and do it with both technical rigor and radical humanity?

In this episode of B the Way Forward, host Brenda Darden Wilkerson sits down with Ambica Rajagopal, Group Chief Data and AI Officer at Michigan, where she leads enterprise-wide data strategy to optimize manufacturing, services, and industrial operations through advanced analytics and A...

What does it look like to build a technology ecosystem from the ground up in a field most people can't yet name?

In this episode of B the Way Forward, host Brenda Darden Wilkerson sits down with Kate Waimey Timmerman, CEO of the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE), the Midwest's most powerful quantum information science and engineering consortium uniting universities, national labs, government agencies, and private industry.

Kate brings a...

What does it take to reach the top of one of the largest tech organizations on the planet, and then walk away to fix the pipeline that got you there?

In this episode of B the Way Forward, host Brenda Darden Wilkerson sits down with Judith Spitz, former CIO of Verizon and founder of Breakthrough Tech, an initiative reshaping who gets access to power and influence in a tech-enabled world. Judith's path from applied research scientist ...

What happens when one of the country's sharpest mathematical minds decides that being brilliant isn't enough, that the real work is holding power accountable?

In this episode of B the Way Forward, host Brenda Darden Wilkerson sits down with Cathy O'Neil, mathematician, data scientist, founder of the algorithmic auditing firm ORCAA, and author of the landmark book Weapons of Math Destruction, which exposed how opaque algorithms ampli...

In 2018, serial entrepreneur Anu Bhardwaj launched a project inspired by a simple, brilliant insight from her 7-year-old daughter, Arya: if you want adults to understand cryptocurrency, teach their kids first. And so, Krypto 4 Kids (K4K) was born.

What began as a two-day event quickly evolved into a financial literacy app - focused on crypto -  designed in collaboration with the K4K cohort and presentations by the kids themse...

Nina Sossamon-Pogue was a member of the US National Gymnastics Team, an Emmy-winning news anchor, and a tech executive who helped guide a startup to a successful IPO.But Nina’s incredible career wasn’t a straight line - it was a series of reinventions born from a series of devastating setbacks.

 An injury that ended her athletic career. A layoff at the height of her popularity as a newscaster. A tragedy that made ...

Silicon Valley loves the story of a College Dropout Founder - the genius who was just too brilliant for school. The implication of these stories is that of course they could graduate if they wanted to… it just wouldn’t be worth their time. But for every one of those, there are countless others who leave not because they want to, but because they have to.

Computer scientist, Technologist, and tEQuitable Founder, Lisa G...

Disclaimer: This episode includes brief use of strong language. As part of our mission to support real, lived experiences in tech, we’ve chosen to preserve the authenticity of this conversation.

2023 was not a great year for Betsy Tong. Only three years after losing her mother to cancer, Betsy found herself navigating a series of personal challenges - a sick father, the end of a long-term relationship - and sudden unemplo...

Lately, we’ve been talking to some of the most incredible women in Tech about some of the most non-incredible moments in their careers - stories of setbacks, mistakes that felt unrecoverable, and outcomes that seemed like failures.  We’ve been doing this because we want all of you in our community to know you’re not alone - this happens to all of us. We truly believe that you can learn some of the most import...

Welcome to B The Way Forward Interludes - a series of conversations that don’t necessarily fit in our regular season, but are just too good to not share.

Dr. Timnit Gebru is one of the leading voices in AI research calling for more responsible and inclusive AI systems.  Or, as she puts it - “a technological future that serves our communities instead of one that is used for surveillance, warfare, and the centraliza...

Welcome to B The Way Forward Interludes - a series of conversations that don’t necessarily fit in our regular season, but are just too good to not share.

Heard something about AI Lately? Have those two letters shown up in just about every app you use - whether you want them to or not? Yeah. Same. These days, it seems like  you can’t go an hour without hearing that Artificial Intelligence is going to radically rema...

At 16, Shellye Archambeau already knew she wanted to be a CEO. And early in her career at IBM, after closing a massive deal with RiteAid, it felt like she was well on her way. But then, at the last minute, the deal fell through. Shellye felt utterly defeated - until a conversation with her husband helped her realize that there had been a failure … but that didn’t mean she was a failure.

Shellye went on to have a thriv...