From being in the room to owning it: Genpact’s Shalvi Chitkara on women, AI, and career courage

The numbers have been cited so often they risk becoming wallpaper. Women hold fewer than a quarter of roles in the global AI workforce. Leadership representation drops further still. Boardrooms that greenlight AI strategy remain overwhelmingly male. And yet, as every new wave of technology reshapes what work looks like and who gets to define it, the urgency of changing those numbers only intensifies.

At SheSparks 2026, that urgency had a room. Moderated by Shivani Muthanna, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships and Content at YourStory, the session ‘Owning a Seat at the Table: Women Leading in the Age of AI’ brought together founders, corporate leaders, and early-career professionals for a conversation that refused to stay theoretical. The guest was Shalvi Chitkara, Global Tech and Agentic AI Leader at Genpact, 27 years into a career built on deliberate reinvention. The question on the table was deceptively simple: How do women move from being in the room to actually owning it?

Investing in yourself is non-negotiable

Chitkara’s career defies the modern mythology of relentless job-hopping. She has spent 27 years at Genpact, a fact she acknowledged tends to prompt raised eyebrows. But what kept her was not inertia. It was the freedom to reinvent. She joined intending to build a career in finance and never held a single finance role.

Around year 13, she hit a wall. “What am I doing to myself? What am I learning? What value am I creating?” That reckoning pushed her into strategy and technology, what she called “an unknown unknown”. What followed was a deliberate pattern. A pivot every two to three years into unfamiliar territory, each leap compounding her range. It is that range, she argued, that now allows her to lead agentic AI at global scale.

The throughline of her advice was unambiguous. Investing in yourself is non-negotiable, and it is nobody else’s job. “You don’t invest, you don’t pivot, no one else will do it for you. They’ll all be nice to you, but it’s your responsibility.”

The real gap is confidence

When Muthanna raised the pipeline question, globally, women make up roughly 22% of the AI workforce, and that share shrinks further at leadership levels, Chitkara was direct about where the real leak is.

It isn’t opportunity. It isn’t promotions, which she sees as direct outputs of performance. It is confidence, and the self-doubt that often masquerades as diligence.

She described a pattern she has observed repeatedly. When a new technology wave arrives, women in her network tend to say they need one more course before raising their hand. Their male counterparts, often knowing less, simply step forward.

“Technology moves so fast,” she said. “By the time you feel ready, the moment is gone.”

From being in the room to owning it

Her own turning point came during a CXO meeting early in her career pivot. She sat in the room knowing the answer to the question on the table and said nothing. Later, she watched a mentor deliver that same answer to wide acclaim.

“I was just being in the room versus really owning it,” she said. “That was the point I decided: enough.”

Closing that gap was not instant. It took four to five years of deliberate effort, reading daily, forming independent views, and training herself to speak before she felt certain.

Why representation in AI building matters

On AI itself, Chitkara pushed back on the idea that women’s role in the technology is primarily about empathy and adoption. Those qualities matter, she said, but the more urgent issue is representation in the building.

If women are absent from the teams training AI models, those models will inevitably reflect whoever is in the room.

She was equally sharp on why enterprise AI so often stalls. The bottleneck is not capability; it is adoption. And adoption fails when the human experience is treated as an afterthought.

Mentors advise. Sponsors act

The sharpest exchange came on the question of mentors versus sponsors. Chitkara was candid. Mentorship, in her experience, has limited impact. A mentor offers perspective. A sponsor fights for you when you are not in the room.

She described four sponsors who shaped her career, two of whom, she said, argued for her at CEO level in conversations she never witnessed. That invisible advocacy, she believes, is what women in senior roles now owe others.

Her closing ask to the room was operational, not inspirational. “Be a sponsor. Sponsor one woman. The 25% can become 50% very, very easily.”