🎊 AI Spotlight: Ajantha Suriyanarayanan 🎊

We’re excited to present Ajantha Suriyanarayanan, Founder & CEO, MentalLoad - in the FemTech, ParentTech, and Mental Productivity industries at MentalLoad as this week’s AI Spotlight. 

Let’s dive into our interview with Ajantha and see how she is using AI.

1. Share your AI origin story

It started as a parenting hack. When my then 2-year-old declared war on broccoli, I sought help from invisible powers: AI-generated images of Elsa munching greens. Victory was swift. Broccoli became her favorite vegetable. Every Spring Break, we take our kids to a national park. The whole family is involved in decision-making, so naturally tons of preferences come in for places, activities, food, etc. It's a complex thing to sort out. So I started relying upon AI platforms to help analyze optimal options for us based on our criteria, and to plan the drive from point A to B, figure stops out along the way for food. This simple yet impactful use let AI do the boring foundational stuff, and helped me have a fun holiday without the stress of planning every detail myself. Half a decade ago, before everyone was breathlessly name-dropping AI, my team was quietly exploring whether it could read contracts and spare humans the torture of legal jargon. Back then, people hesitated. Now they can't adopt it fast enough. Funny how quickly "maybe someday" becomes "why didn't we do this sooner?"As Harvard Professor, Rembrand Koning's study shows, women are 25% less likely to adopt AI in their work. I was in that bucket (not deliberately). Until AI became my work. I am building my startup - MentalLoad - to deliver an agentic AI companion for women to unburden a bit of the massive mental load they carry everyday.  

2. What three AI tools have been most game-changing for you? 

I appreciate how some tools have democratized one's ability to do things that were thought to be beyond reach. Examples:

• Claude: This has become one on which I rely heavily. I use Claude to co-edit my articles and blog posts. It understands my voice and helps me keep my emotions in articles while gently helping me précis an epic into a 2-minute read. I didn't think I could afford a personal (human) editor, but here we are with a free version.

  
  

• Replit: None of us in my household is an engineer or can code. Yet, my 8-year-old built an app on her own vibe coding on Replit using my old Mac. This stunned me. In fact, I've used it generously to build early versions of MentalLoad to see how it feels before solidifying the concept.

  
  

• Tactiq: I'm an avid notetaker during meetings and obsessively organized about them. However, maintaining eye contact and a cohesive conversation while still taking my notes became cumbersome when 90% of the day is just meetings. Using Tactiq as my AI notetaker has been brilliant, where it not only transcribes the call well, but also enables me to mark important comments live. Post-discussion, it gives me an accurate summary of the discussion, and breaks action items down by the individuals in the meeting. Easy peasy. 

3. If you were just starting your AI journey today, where would you start? 

I'd start by understanding the limitations of AI.

• It's not my best friend. It's not my therapist. It's a tool - a fantastic tool.

• As I tell my 8yo, it can't do my homework for me. It can help me do it. It's a tool. 

• It learns from me - so the stronger my input (aka prompt) is, the better the outcome.

Then I'd explore innocuous things like:

• Getting ChatGPT to give me the best recipe for chai, and enjoying the back-and-forth of teaching it to say "chai", not "chai tea latte".

• Getting Perplexity to 'tell me what I need to know' on a subject - e.g. politics, technology, K-pop.

• Finally, for those tired nights when you want to make up fun stories to put your kids to sleep, but are dead tired and have zero creativity left in you - ask Gemini to generate one! 

4. Share the spotlight: Name 3+ women leading in AI we should all follow. 

• Lakshmi Jayaraman - Co-Founder and CEO of MOSaiC

• Nicole Doyle - Founder and CEO of Aspir

• Bhavya Mihira - Founder of Clime 

5. As a woman in AI, what do you want our allies to know? 

Women are using AI to build practical solutions for long-experienced problems by women. Join us - be an ally, and champion the building and scaling of these solutions. Ask questions about the product, process, market, or solution - but please - don't ask about who is caring for the kids while we're blazing trails with our work in the AI frontier.  

Want to be the next in AI Spotlight? It’s a great opportunity to share your voice with our community! Fill out the WxAI AI Spotlight Nomination Form for your chance to step into the AI Spotlight and to share your voice with the Women x AI community.