One common thread at some of the companies seeing the most success with AI: Woman CEOs

These women-led companies come from all corners of the economy, ranging from aerospace and defense to banking and retail. They account for 18% of the AIQ list, compared with women running just 11% of all companies on the Fortune 500 list in 2025.

AI use cases that have been deployed by these businesses have varied greatly. Financial giant Citigroup’s (No. 38) recent AI efforts have included retraining 175,000 employees on how to write better prompts to generate more impactful results from large language model queries. Insurance provider Progressive (No. 22) is using AI to help sort through hundreds of thousands of job applications. And a recently launched AI-powered tool at Albertsons (No. 30) can carry on a conversation with consumers shopping online, suggesting grocery items to consider buying, which has proved to lift total basket size.

Rounding out the list of women-led companies on the AIQ 50 are financial analytics firm S&P Global (No. 12), aerospace and defense giants General Dynamics (No. 21) and Northrop Grumman (No. 43), mining company Freeport-McMoRan (No. 31), and health insurers Centene (No. 27) and Elevance Health (No. 35).

Gail Boudreaux, the president and CEO of Elevance Health, says that her vision for AI is fairly simple and straightforward. “Make health care easier, more affordable, and more personal,” she says.

Some generative AI use cases that Elevance Health has deployed include tools that make it easier for customer service representatives to retrieve the information they need to answer client questions. Elevance Health is also using AI to automate the transcription summaries of these calls and to scan for any issues that may have arisen during the call. The AI tools then offer up tips on how to improve a representative’s future ability to handle similar requests.

“We have AI-enabled productivity tools that are used by more than 60,000 associates to help reduce repetitive tasks, so teams can focus more on supporting our members and providers,” says Boudreaux. 

She also cited an AI certification that’s offered to employees through a partnership with OpenAI, giving staff formal acknowledgement of their AI fluency, which ranges from foundational skills like prompt engineering to more advanced AI-enabled work tasks.

Women tend to be “high adopters,” leaning into past technology trends like social media, and Fortune’s data may signal that this consumer-driven behavior is perhaps being mirrored in the corporate setting.

“What you’re seeing is that the women-CEO-led companies are showing up to adopt new technologies, in some ways that are consistent to some of the consumer adoption behavior we’ve seen in other technologies,” says Lareina Yee, McKinsey Global Institute director and a senior partner at the consultancy.

Yee is a founder and leading author of McKinsey’s 10-year research project on women in the workplace, which found that women make up 29% of C-suite positions as of 2024, up from 17% in 2015. But progress has been far slower for women in entry-level, manager, and VP positions.

There is also a mixed picture when looking under the hood of the AI race. Most of the largest AI startups that are building the large language models or other systems to propel this technology advancement, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Databricks, are overwhelmingly cofounded and led by men. Early data shows that women-led AI companies pull in very little funding from venture capital (though former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, which raised $2 billion in July, is a notable exception), mirroring the general trend across the entire economy.

More encouragingly, women in tech have cornered the chief financial officer role. At OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, and Salesforce, a woman serves as CFO.

“And so even though the CEO may not be a woman in all of those companies, the CFO is a pretty powerful role,” says Yee.

At S&P Global, President and CEO Martina Cheung said the company has made incredible progress upskilling the company’s workforce. An internally developed AI assistant, called Spark Assist, debuted last year and within the first months, 14,000 employees had already used the tool, accounting for 30% of the workforce. In 2025, that figure increased to more than 65% globally.

Externally, S&P Global also made some of the company’s research available to customers with a subscription through Microsoft Copilot, and separately, announced a collaboration with Anthropic to integrate S&P Global’s datasets with Claude. This data is also only available for S&P Global subscribers, not part of any of Anthropic’s broader training data.

“This space is moving quickly, and we are moving quickly with it,” says Cheung.

Sarah Franklin, CEO of AI-powered HR platform Lattice, says both genders are starting at the same point when it comes to adoption of generative AI. “There’s no one in this world who has 10 years of agentic AI experience,” says Franklin. “I don’t care if you are a man or a woman.” 

She notes that corporate leaders can also learn from past failings. Social media is a form of technology that was mostly built by men, and it wasn’t until years later that studies began to reveal how harmful it could be to users, including mothers and teenage girls. 

“I think it’s an incredible opportunity for women to ask the right questions of, how should we responsibly bring AI into the workforce and into our homes and into our lives?” asks Franklin. “We don’t want to end up with a bad, dystopian outcome.”

Update: This article has been updated to include comments from S&P Global CEO Martina Cheung.