Women Leading in Tech: Erica Rooney
In the lead-up to the 2026 Summit for Women in Tech, we’re sharing Women Leading in Tech Executive Spotlights to celebrate the achievements of female tech leaders across our state.
We’re proud to feature Erica Rooney, founder of HER Collective and fractional Chief People Officer at Walk West, who brings more than 15 years of corporate HR experience to her work helping women navigate leadership, technology, and career growth. A passionate advocate for closing the AI gap, she leads AI training through HER Collective, the North Carolina chapter of Women Applying AI, and is the author of The AI Gap, with a mission to help more women gain access to AI and positions of power. At this year’s Summit for Women in Tech, she will join a conversation on “To AI or Not to AI,” exploring the possibilities of AI while asking an equally important question: what should remain human?
More About Erica
I am the founder of HER Collective and a fractional Chief People Officer at Walk West. I spent 15+ years inside corporate HR and made it to Chief People Officer, and then I built the room I could not find. HER Collective is a live weekly room for women who are damn good at what they do and done pretending they're not. We teach AI that shows up in your numbers, and then we do the harder work underneath it: what to ask for, what to put down, and who you are when the title is gone. Nine different industries show up on the same call every week and describe the same experience, which is how I know it was never anybody's industry. I also wrote The AI Gap and I lead the North Carolina chapter of Women Applying AI. The mission has not changed in years. Get more women into positions of power, and keep them there.
Biggest Influences
I came into technology through people. Fifteen years in HR, inside companies that shipped software, where every rollout lived or died on whether the humans trusted it. Then generative AI landed and I watched who got handed the tools and who got handed the cleanup. What really got me was learning how these models learn. They learn from what got written down. Cars were crash tested on a male body. Heart attack symptoms were studied on men. Women's work has gone unrecorded for generations, and now we are training machines on that record and asking them to decide who looks like a leader, who gets the loan, who gets the stretch assignment. I have a daughter, Halle, who is eight, and a son, Hudson, who is eleven. I am not willing to hand her a machine that learned the world without her in it. That is what pulled me in, and it is what I have been building ever since.
If you swap roles with another woman, who would it be?
Ever since I was a little girl, I've always loved wedding gowns. I think it would be incredible to have the opportunity to try a totally different career for a week and switch roles with someone who is a wedding gown designer. I always wondered what that life would be like!
How is HER Collective supporting women in the tech workforce?
HER Collective teaches one AI training session a month to it's members, and one AI Jumpstart a quarter (a 4 week class) to advance women up the AI Leverage Ladder.
In addition, we do pro bono webinars , trainings, LinkedIn Lives, and keynotes all with the mission to close the AI GAP and bring more women into the STEM field.
Thoughts on Success
Recognizing that "success" as we were taught, is not linear and that life is full of beautiful surprises.
Summit for Women in Tech Highlights
I will be speaking in a session with another woman discussing the idea "To AI or NOT to AI" where we will dive into the fascinating parts of AI, but also, what should remain human. This will be my first time at the annual Summit and I am looking forward to seeing all the different components of the conference. I'm excited to see my friend, Kristi Straw on the main stage doing her thing . This is so incredibly important, because we don't give women the platform. Tech conferences are dominated by men, manels (male panels) and are called "man-ferences" (Man conferences"). We need a place where we are represented. Representation breeds possibility.
Book Recommendations, Favorite Ways to Spend a Day-Off & a Go-To Quote
Book Recommendations
Oh so many... The AI Driven Reader by Geoff Woods, Temperature: Curiosity in the Age of AI by Lori Mazor, There's Nothing LIke This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift by Kevin Evers, and for funsies - the Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. And of course - the AI Gap, by ME!
Favorite Way to Spend a Day Of
I don't rest well... and right now, I nerd out over AI. So I love being able to sit at my computer, on my porch (even better if its a thunderstorm and I'm totally alone in the house - no kids, no distractions), and I get to build with AI.
If not that, then reading a fiction novel while curled up on the couch. I'm really a homebody.
Favorite Quote
It isn't a quote, but my mantra for this year. What is meant for me, cannot miss me.
Erica’s story reflects the importance of making space for women to lead, innovate and shape the future of technology. Her perspective on AI, representation and the balance between technological possibility and human connection is a reminder that closing the AI gap means ensuring more women have a seat at the table. Conversations like these are exactly what make the Summit for Women in Tech an opportunity to learn, connect and create more possibilities for women across North Carolina’s tech community.
Learn more about this year's Summit for Women in Tech, September 28-29, this year in Asheville, HERE!
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