Glass Cliff? Not Lisa Su and Fei-Fei Li. They create their own terrain.

Issue 2900 -October 20, 2026

The Grace Hopper Celebration is canceled, and the internet is acting as if the sky has fallen.

The news is ricocheting around the web like a billiard ball run amok. The organizers say their usual sponsors didn't come through and ticket sales were weak.

Welcome to my world. Welcome to the world of every women's conference in 2026.

Everyone has a theory. Some blame the inclusion of men in recent years. Others blame the weak economy.

Here's what I saw running Take The Lead's Power Up Conference this year: companies stopped sponsoring conferences and buying their employees' tickets because their courage ran out. A few years ago, they were beating their chests about DEI and women's advancement. At the first whiff of political pushback, some revealed they never meant it. The rest decided to feed the crocodile and hope it eats them last; Winston Churchill's picture of an appeaser.

Whatever the reasons, there is always a way to make something important happen. Leaving speakers and would-be participants high and dry sends women one more devastating message: you're losing ground in AI, and no one cares.

You go virtual. You partner with other organizations that are struggling too, and mass your strengths. You find the donors in the haystack. The mission is worth fighting for.

Grace Hopper deserves better. She helped create COBOL and built the first compiler, and her fingerprints are all over modern computing. But most important, she saw beyond the obvious and the expected. She didn't just see around technology's corners. She drew new maps.

Which brings me to the good news of the past few weeks. It never gets the attention the bad news does.

First, AMD CEO Lisa Su became the first woman to lead a company with a market cap over a trillion, with a T. That's no small milestone, and it brings a new level of respect from the business world and the media.

Second, she got there by taking a struggling company, in danger of becoming irrelevant in microchips, and turning it into one of the largest in the industry, ahead of Intel though behind Nvidia. Her advice: "running toward the hard problem." Not just the problem, the hard problem.

That is how she creates her own terrain. Women are too often handed the top job when an organization is already in crisis and the odds of failure are highest. That's the glass cliff, and it's real. Su took that kind of job. She didn't fall off. She built new ground under her feet.

Third, she's still at it. AMD is acquiring World Labs, the company founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li. As Fortune put it, this is "an extremely rare AI deal between two of the women at the very top of this industry." Li’s latest endeavor creating spatial intelligence (as if your head wasn’t already spinning with AI innovations, wrap your mind around it in 3-D) is another game changer. 

In her 2026 MIT commencement address, worth watching in full, Su told graduates to make their own luck and insisted that human judgment must direct AI, not the other way around. “Society doesn't just need people who can operate AI tools, she said. It needs people with purpose, judgment, courage, and ethical direction,” she said—and that warms my heart.

I'm wishing Su and Li great success, and the chance to do great good by showing how to lead like a woman and win. This could signal that the game is changing for ownership and leadership of major companies, and for how our culture thinks about women and wealth.

But it must not be a one-off. I see glass cliff jobs as opportunities to be taken, and women like Su prove they can be massively successful. Still, that's necessary, not sufficient. Women doing the work isn't enough. Without greater gender parity, meaning more women like Su and Li building and training AI and making top-level decisions about its use, all the cultural biases we've worked to overcome will be baked into it. We know that's already happening. There's no time to waste.

Yes, this moment feels urgent and disruptive. Of Take The Lead's nine leadership power tools, “Carpe the chaos” the one people request most in my trainings. I had to learn it on the job: how to take the energy of chaos and turn it into forward movement for myself, for innovation, and for my organization. It's a mindset that can change the game. And turn a class cliff into a monumental opportunity to shine.

This is such a moment. Then again, almost every moment in tech right now, especially in AI, is such a moment. It's exactly the moment courageous women who know their power are made for.

My favorite Grace Hopper quote sums it up: "A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are for."

 PS. This is the second in a series of three on women and AI. Here's the first. Does the good news outweigh the bad? Tell me. And please share examples of women who haven't just survived the glass cliff but stayed on top by creating their own terrain. I know I haven't seen them all, and I want to help create and support more of them. 

Lisa Su’s MIT commencement speech 2026.

GLORIA FELDT is the Co-founder and President of Take The Lead, a motivational speaker, and a global expert in women’s leadership development and DEI for individuals and companies that want to build gender balance. She is a bestselling author of five books, most recently Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good. Honored as Forbes 50 Over 50, and Former President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she is a frequent media commentator. Learn more at www.gloriafeldt.com and www.taketheleadwomen.com. Find her @GloriaFeldt on all social media.