As a computer science Master's student at Ohio State in 2014, Aakriti Srikanth planted her stake in the field of AI when she won a $100,000 competition for utilizing IBM Watson technology to match university students' personal preferences to campuses' many available activities. Since then, the Indian immigrant has been a female figure in the technology space, heading AI product management at IBM and building AI product marketing from scratch at open-source enterprise-software developer Red Hat.