Lauren Ingram bets big on AI in developing blockchain’s first killer app

May 22, 2024 marked a special evening for women in the blockchain and future tech space. Running alongside the London Blockchain Conference (LBC) 2024, the Women in Blockchain panel event included roughly 50 female professionals and entrepreneurs in the tech space, a combination of the London Blockchain Conference attendees and locals.

In addition to providing an intimate networking opportunity for like-minded ladies, Lavinia Osbourne of Women in Blockchain Talks moderated a panel featuring Christine Leong of nChain, Divya Prashanth of JurnyOn and Lauren Ingram of Women of Web3.

Following the panel, CoinGeek Backstage had an opportunity to catch up with Ingram, who started the Women of Web3 in 2022 after she left Meta (NASDAQ: META). With a newborn baby in tow, Ingram was trying to figure out what she needed to learn to get a job in the tech world again.

“The more I learned about things like NFTs and tokenization and blockchain and the metaverse, I thought, oh, this looks really interesting. Maybe there’s a career in this,” she shared with CoinGeek Backstage.

Ingram saw the lack of women in this space as “quite severe,” citing that as of last year, nine out of 10 blockchain startups don’t have any women on their co-founding team. She realized there was an opportunity to change that.

“We’re starting to see more women at the top and more women applying for jobs within every level of business, so I think we’re finally on the right track. But that’s a reason for being as Women of Web3,” she said.

During the panel, Ingram explained there is a lot of jargon surrounding Web3 and said we must move beyond the buzzwords before we get to mainstream adoption.

“It’s when people use it without realizing it, that’s the moment we realize it’s fully here,” Ingram said.

“A lot of the time when we talk about blockchain, apart from the people that are truly building products that are based on blockchain, lots of it does feel like we’re talking about the future. And I do think the thing that will change that is some kind of killer application. And I think that’ll probably involve AI,” she predicted.

Ingram went on to explain the massive amounts of data generative artificial intelligence (AI) is creating and that we need a way to verify that information, which is where blockchain comes in.

“I think once people wake up to that and have that killer application or set of applications, that’s going to be where we see widespread adoption, where it becomes incredibly normal to use blockchain for us every single day,” she said.

When asked about the evening itself and why it’s important to bring motivated women together, Ingram described it as “really special” and “amazing to have so many women in one space that are connected to blockchain or Web3 in some way.”

“I think you do get a special kind of energy when you get women coming together that are normally in the minority at an event. And so when you put them all together in one room in the majority, they get this wall of noise that you can even hear outside. And I think that’s something really special,” she said.

In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek’s coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI.

Watch: Adding the human touch behind AI