Co Founder,
Kalido
Across the globe, women are redefining this new age of change with their relentless and transformative roles in innovation, ethics, leadership, and advocacy, determining the trajectory of global innovation.
To bring Saudi Arabia into the picture; which was once perceived through a parochial lens on gender rights, is now turning the narrative on its head by creating a vivid ecosystem for women to lead in AI. Through well-structured programs, cross-sector collaboration, and deliberate policy vision, Saudi Arabia has emerged as a surprise leader in AI-driven gender inclusion.
South Asian region, especially India, is at the intersection of a generative AI leap, with organisations, government working to empower and promote women to lead the Gen AI revolution.
The Elevate Moment: Vision Meets Execution
The Elevate Program stands as a remarkable instance of Saudi Arabia’s initiatives through its collaboration with Google Cloud. The initiative seeks to equip more than 25,000 women in tech and AI with skills while simultaneously fostering leadership abilities and enhancing their visibility and network connections. Saudi Arabia recognizes that AI progress requires reinforcement to make representation effective. Through its amalgamation of capacity building, mentorship, and high-tech exposure programs, Elevate develops a future-ready female workforce that is already making contributions on both local and global stages.
Such structured interventions go beyond mere tokenism. They go by the national comprehensive vision of Saudi Vision 2030, which views AI as not only being used for economic diversification but as being a social equalizer as well. In this ecosystem, tech companies such as Cisco have aligned their Middle East AI strategies with Saudi Arabia’s gender goals, launching initiatives that ensure women are key stakeholders in the digital future.
The key difference? Scale. Saudi Arabia’s edge has been national alignment with corporate commitment. For India, the pathway forward lies in scaling what’s working, bridging access gaps, and building institutional pipelines that are inclusive by design.
Global Recognition, Local Roots
These efforts are paying off. The number of women participating in AI has risen significantly in Saudi Arabia, making it the world leader. This achievement has not been a cultural compromise, but rather combines global competitiveness with local empowerment. In Saudi Arabia, women who have been trained in AI programs are not only participating in the development of AI, but also defining its use in governance, health care, and urban development.
What this shows is an important lesson for South Asia: that top-down support and bottom-up mobilisation must be two sides of the same coin. Structural change must be catalyzed both by national vision and community-driven action.
South Asia: A Region Ripe for AI-Led Gender Transformation
South Asia has long been synonymous with brilliance. Indian women are blazing trails in AI right now, starting generative AI companies and exploring unexplored territories—Visual Language Models, for example. Different organisations are equipping South Asian women to lead and participate in the Gen AI revolution by forming a community of women that embrace technology by fostering a supportive ecosystem that helps women scale new heights in tech careers.
The AI Kiran initiative in India, co-led by the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor and powered by partners like Verix and Ink Women, is a promising step in this direction. AI Kiran’s commitment to celebrating and empowering women in AI marks a cultural shift—from inclusion as an afterthought to inclusion as a design principle.
After all South Asia has brilliance in abundance, and all these efforts reflect a growing recognition that women are at the forefront in the AI future.
The Power of Platforms and Partnerships
The common theme utilizing the Saudi Arabian playbook is creating purposeful partnerships. It simply illustrates that with organizations like Google Cloud and Cisco-Collaboration and Investments, the Saudi gender positioning for AI is all about bringing together cross-sector partnerships. South Asia has the startup development, government space, research lab opportunities, and diaspora networks to create the same kind of opportunities.
Different platforms and organisations are acting as connectors for ministries, private industry, and academia as collaborative partners to co-create AI opportunities for women. More importantly, regional bodies like SAARC or BIMSTEC a South Asia AI Charter for Women could institutionalize shared gender goals across the subcontinent.
Not Just Coders, But Changemakers
The Saudi Arabian emphasis on leadership rather than merely technical competence is another insightful observation. Many of the women emerging from Saudi’s AI programs are not just engineers—they are entrepreneurs, product leaders, and policymakers. The goal is not merely to “train women in AI” but to transform AI through women.
The goal is not to increase participation for numbers’ sake. It is to ensure women are driving decisions on how AI is built, where it is applied, and who it ultimately serves. South Asia is poised not only to nurture women in AI, but to enable women to transform AI. This is about more than representation. It’s about building an AI future whose values reflect the diversity and depth of the people shaping it.
A Shared Future, A Global Responsibility
AI is borderless—and so must be our response to inclusion. While Saudi Arabia is geographically West of South Asia, the directional lesson is clear: when vision, willpower, and infrastructure converge, gender equity in tech isn’t aspirational—it’s achievable.
In South Asia, the “what works” is comprised of programmes and initiatives like AI Kiran and learning from elsewhere. This also means meaningfully including the major players or “tech giants” as partners, and not just vendors, in co-designing a collaborative and inclusive initiative. It also means investing in government initiatives that generate scholarship opportunities for women in AI, productive capacity-building workshops, or that invest as funders in women-led research.
What we need now is scale, synergy and, sustained support. By institutionalizing partnerships, we fund women-led research, and we embed a commitment to inclusion and working through what it means to meaningfully introduce different ways of knowing into AI policy and practice, we can shift from “pockets of success” to a regional movement.
This is therefore an incredible opportunity. When there is an alignment of intent, infrastructure and imagination, South Asia can become a region that empowers women in AI – and indeed empowers AI through women – and can also show what inclusive innovation can look like.
– Author is Sanjay Varma, the Co Founder of Kalido
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