When You See Us, You Can Be Us | Linda Calvin | AGI School’s Out Saturdays

Hey, welcome to, I'm going to call this a special edition of the AGI Saturday Schools Out podcast, where we're working on preparing students for their future, not our past. Last week here in Indiana was Indiana Women in Tech Week, and my guest today, I tried to get on last week, and I didn't get a chance to, so I'm so honored to have the founder of of Indiana Women in Tech Week. Linda Calvin with me today. Linda, tell the audience who you are for those who don't know the woman and the legend.

Well, I'm Linda Calvin, grew up in the state of Indiana, have a long career in tech, started my tech career on a help desk, system support. This is Linda. And worked at Dow Chemical for the ag business, Dow AgriSciences for many years. I did a short little stint as a prosecutor, as a civil prosecutor for the city of Indianapolis. But then went back into the private sector, worked for a company that I think is now known as a Primo again, but it was Teradata Marketing Applications. I was a director of internal comms. Then I spent some time also for the security business in Stanley Black & Decker. leading global digital IT, mobile app development and policy, as well as the communications leader for the offices of the CIO. I spent some time as a vice president of the School of IT for Ivy Tech Community College, which that was an exciting, very exciting role over all the programs in the school of IT in the state of Indiana. It was exciting. From there, I left and I went to a nonprofit, a national nonprofit funded by Melinda French Gates Pivotal Ventures called Reboot Representation. And our founding mission was to double the number of Black, Latina, and Native American women graduating with computing baccalaureate degrees. From there, I went to Western Governors where I was vice president and the School of Technology over Cyber, Cloud, and IT. I'm a founder of Indiana Women in Tech Week, which is one of my greatest achievements, and also a regular speaker and president and chief thought leader for Transcend Consulting. So that is me in a nutshell.

We might have a couple of things in common. So do you know Chrissy Koger or Adam Staples from Aprimo?

The Chrissy sounds familiar. That name sounds familiar.

Yeah, Chrissy Spinell. I think they both worked for Aprimo. So I work for a company now called Chakra AI Solutions. Out of Fishers, we're a startup. We do business process consulting, trying to help small to medium-sized businesses figure out their processes and then see where artificial intelligence might fit in there. And then I come in, and if they're going to be a Gemini shop or an Anthropic or OpenAI or Microsoft, Like I come in and try to build some scaffolding for them. So you're not really just tossing the licenses out, but building some skills or gems or projects and some agentic workflows to help make it easier. But Primo is definitely a name I have heard many times. And I think you and I have something else in common because I was looking at one of your posts. And one of your pet peeves is people using AI to generate LinkedIn posts. Hello messages. Was that what I was kind of getting out of that? My biggest one is when people just automatically, as soon