Smart Girl Summer #2 - with Léo(FxF Co-Founder)

Part of Female x Finance's Smart Girl Summer — a series where the women we admire share how they're investing in themselves while everyone else slows down. This week: our own co-founder, Léonie.

If last summer you'd asked me what I thought about AI, I'd have given you the polite founder answer: "It is the future, obviously — we're watching it closely." Which is what you say when you don't actually understand something yet.

This year I decided that wasn't good enough. Not for me, and not for the 82,000 women in our community. In March I went all in on AI. Downloaded Claude, talked to people who are all in on AI, listened to them, didn’t understand a word, but just started doing it.

And one thing I learned? Working with AI is so much easier than you think. Because if you don’t understand something you just ask it, and ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or whatever you’re using - just gives you the answer.

Now I can’t imagine a life without my AI toolkit.

1. My morning brief. Every day starts with the same thing: Claude hands me a brief of yesterday's meeting action points, which emails got handled, which ones have been sitting too long, and the non-urgent stuff that shouldn't slip through the cracks. It sounds small. It gave me back the two things I never had enough of — focus, and a clear head walking into the day.

Want to set-up your own morning brief? Join my online session next week Wednesday.

2. Wispr Flow, for literally everything. This is my not-so-secret weapon. I'm so much better when I talk than when I write — always have been. I used to walk out of a meeting and start venting all my ideas to a colleague: here's what happened, here's how I think we should play it, this is what we should add to the proposal.

Now I vent to Wispr Flow. It captures everything I say and feeds it straight into Claude, and because it's connected to all my tools, I'll have a pitch deck starting to build itself before I've even sat down. It's faster, and it works with how my brain actually operates instead of against it.

Audio to text is literally a game changer for me, I just talk to AI all the time. I first used the free version of Wispr Flow, but after 14 days couldn’t live without it. Worth the hype!

Wispr Flow turns your voice into clean, professional text inside any app. Emails, Slack, client updates — speak once, send without editing. 4x faster than typing.

Try Wispr Flow free

3. The productivity tool in Claude

Here's the honest thing about me: I'm a deeply Type B person. I'm not naturally the color-coded-calendar, everything-in-its-folder type. (I wrote a whole post about what it means being a type B founder — link below.)

For years I thought that meant I'd always be a little chaotic. What I've realized this year is that the systems can be Type A so that I don't have to be.

I discovered Claude plugins, which are comprehensive extension packages that configure Claude for specific roles or workflows.

Then you probably still think, okay that is too difficult. I thought the same. But just look it up in Claude. Go to settings > plug-ins > browse anthropic plug-ins.

I chose the productivity plug-in and just started playing with it.

What happened? It asked me my goals for that quarter, helped me stay on track and everyday it updated a kanban board with my tasks based on my calendar email and slack messages.

AI cleared the noise so I could spend my time on the two things only I can do — bringin in new clients and leading my team. Everything else, I learned to delegate to the machine.

The lesson I'd tattoo on every ambitious woman's forearm: work smarter, not harder isn't a poster on the wall anymore — it's a skill you can actually learn. And the women who learn it this year will have an unfair advantage over the ones who wait until it's "safe."

There's a lot of fear right now that AI is coming for our jobs. Some of that fear is fair. But I think most people are bracing for the wrong thing.

AI is going to commoditize competence. It can already write the CV, build the deck, model the scenario, draft the memo. So the question stops being "can you do the work?" — the machine can do a version of the work. The question becomes: who trusts you enough to give you the opportunity in the first place?

That's the thing AI can't fake. It can match you to a job description. It cannot vouch for you. It can't walk you into the right room, make the introduction, or stake its reputation on you. As competence gets cheaper, trust and judgment get more valuable — and those are profoundly human, profoundly relational assets.

So the counterintuitive move for your career in the AI era isn't to out-robot the robots. It's to double down on the things they'll never have: your network, your judgment, your ability to make people believe in you. Your relationships are your résumé now.

So when we say Smart Girl Summer, and we talk about AI — I don't just mean "learn the prompts." I mean:

Move from user to architect. Don't just consume the tools. Understand them well enough to shape how they're used in your world. Get in the room - step forward to lead your AI task force even if you don’t feel ready yet. We’re all learning on the job!

Let AI carry the noise so you can carry the weight. Offload the admin, the inbox, the notes. Protect your energy for the work that's actually yours and that will make you visible. 

Invest in the un-automatable you. Your network, your reputation, your ability to pitch yourself and read a room. That's the moat. (Check out our upcoming events, or pitch an event in your city!)

I spent this year afraid I was behind on AI. What I actually learned is that the women who win the next decade won't be the ones who used AI the most. They'll be the ones who stayed the most human while everyone else outsourced their thinking to a chatbot.

That's the smart move. Let's become smarter this summer together, by setting up your AI tool-kit and focus the rest of the year on building your network!