One night, in a room full of powerful, deeply technical women, a simple prompt changed everything.
Individually, everyone input the prompt into their Large Language Model of choice: "Based on what you know about me… generate an image of what you think I look like."
The pictures flooded in, and not one of them looked like us.
That moment wasn't a glitch. The system was working exactly as designed.
Because the systems we rely on every day have never been neutral. For decades, decisions across medicine, technology, finance, and leadership have been shaped around a narrow baseline of what is considered credible, capable, and worth building for.
Artificial intelligence doesn't know who's capable. It just knows what's common. And those patterns?
AI learns from them. And then it scales them.
In The AI Gap, Erica Rooney takes you inside the systems already shaping how work is evaluated, how leaders are recognized, and how opportunity is distributed. Drawing on real-world examples across industries, she reveals how past decisions become data, and how that data begins to define what happens next.
This book will change how you see the system.
How you move inside it.
And how you influence what it becomes.
Because this moment isn't theoretical. It's already in motion.
And this is where the next great leap forward begins.
