One of the pleasures of building the Digital Divas programme each year is watching the event slowly take shape through the people who agree to join the conversation.

The questions facing women in business today feel different to those we were asking even a few years ago. Artificial intelligence has moved from novelty to necessity. Career paths have become less linear and more experimental. Financial decisions seem to require more information, more context and more confidence than ever before.

This year's programme reflects those conversations.

Among the women joining us on stage this August 28th are two speakers tackling some of the biggest questions facing professionals today: how we work and how we remain distinctly human in an increasingly automated world.

🚀 Shivani Ghai

The Work Shift: Careers, AI & Reinvention

If there is anyone qualified to speak about reinvention, it is Shivani Ghai.

Her professional journey has included aerospace engineering, management consulting, strategy, leadership development, project management, entrepreneurship, facilitation and higher education, as well as a stint as a certified yoga teacher. It is the sort of career path that would once have looked unusual and increasingly looks like the future.

Today, Shivani lectures at the UCT Graduate School of Business while also running her own consultancy focused on leadership, strategy and human development. Along the way she has been recognised as one of the world's top MBA students, served as class president at UCT GSB and helped lead the South African team that won the prestigious John Molson MBA International Case Competition.

Her session, The Work Shift: Careers, AI & Reinvention, asks one of the defining questions of our time: what skills will still matter when artificial intelligence can perform more and more of the tasks that once defined professional expertise?

The session explores the disappearance of traditional career ladders, the rise of portfolio careers and professional reinvention, and the growing importance of adaptability, communication, judgement and creativity in an AI economy.

For anyone trying to make sense of increasingly unpredictable career paths, it promises to be one of the most timely conversations of the day.

🤖 Esmarie Swanepoel

AI Tips, Tools & Workflows You Can Use Right Now

Much of the public conversation around artificial intelligence focuses on productivity and automation.

Esmarie Swanepoel is interested in something slightly different: how AI can strengthen the uniquely human capabilities that create value in the first place.

A Microsoft-certified Generative AI strategist, Anthropic specialist and corporate advisor, Esmarie operates at the intersection of business strategy, governance and emerging technology. Her background spans commercial law, psychology, corporate strategy and software development, and she currently serves as Director and Head of Corporate & Immigration at Temple Corporate Services while leading South Africa's chapter of AI Powered Women.

She is perhaps best known for her philosophy that AI does not replace expertise so much as expose it. Strong judgement, clear thinking and original insight become more valuable, not less, in an AI-enabled world.

Her workshop, AI Tips, Tools & Workflows You Can Use Right Now, takes a practical and deliberately hands-on approach to artificial intelligence. Attendees can expect real-world workflows already being used by founders, executives and professionals, alongside frameworks for identifying and protecting their unique advantage in an increasingly automated economy.

The session also introduces Esmarie's HUMAN Framework and the idea of building an AI "sparring partner" — using artificial intelligence not as a replacement for thinking, but as a tool for refining ideas, improving judgement and strengthening decision-making.

Join us at Digital Divas 2026

One of the things we enjoy most about Digital Divas is the collision of perspectives that happens when founders, executives, operators, creatives and technologists all find themselves in the same room.

Shivani and Esmarie both bring a very different lens to the questions shaping work and business today, and we suspect their sessions will spark conversations that continue long after the event itself has ended.

We're looking forward to welcoming them to the Digital Divas stage this August.

Join us at Digital Divas Summit 2026 on 28 August at Innovation City Cape Town as we explore what comes next and how to navigate it together.

Get your ticket here.