Erica Rooney

Erica Anderson Rooney has spent more than fifteen years in HR, close enough to the decisions to see why one name went forward and another did not. What stayed with her is how often excellent work goes unnoticed because nobody is speaking for it.

She started in fitness and wellness at Verizon, moved into human resources, and became Chief People Officer at Blue Acorn iCi. When Infosys acquired the company for $125 million in 2020, she sat through the interviews, prepared the files, and worked the due diligence. She still holds the Chief People Officer seat today, as fractional CPO at Walk West.

She founded ERA Advisors and HER Collective to change who gets seen. HER Collective is the room she could not find when she reached the C-suite: real AI skills, executive and life coaching, and a network of women who meet live every week and refuse to accept the status quo. Her SNAP and AI Continuum frameworks are taught to thousands of women through CHIEF, WICT, and Fortune 500 leadership programs, and she leads AI training for corporate teams.

Her newest book, The AI Gap (2026), an Amazon bestseller in Career Advancement and gender studies, names the problem she keeps returning to: the compounding distance between the people shaping AI systems and the people being shaped by them. Her first, Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors (2024), was endorsed by Mel Robbins, and she hosts a podcast of the same name. She also co-hosts the Telly Award-winning AI Voice or Victim and serves as North Carolina Regional State Lead for Women Applying AI.

The View From Where Careers Get Decided

AI is moving into hiring, performance reviews, promotions, and pay, the same calls Rooney spent her career helping people make. The women most affected by those systems are rarely the ones building or buying them. Her work is aimed at that distance. She teaches women to understand the tools, use them well, and have a say in how they get built, before those systems start making the call on their careers.

The people building AI right now are deciding whose work gets seen for the next decade.

Background

• Bachelor’s degree in Health Education and Behavior and Master of Science, University of Florida
• Former Chief People Officer, Blue Acorn iCi, through its 2020 acquisition by Infosys
• Earlier roles at Verizon and bioMerieux
• Host, Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors; co-host, AI Voice or Victim (Silver Telly Award)
• CHIEF; Women Applying AI (North Carolina Regional State Lead); Marble Collective; WE-C (advisor)
• Speaker at SXSW, CHIEF, SHRM, and the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center
• Featured in Forbes, SUCCESS Magazine, and CBS

At the Summit

Two degrees from the University of Florida make this one a homecoming, and a family one at that. Her great-grandfather has a building named for him on UF’s campus, and he wrote the university’s motto: Civium in moribus rei publicae salus, “the welfare of the state depends on the character of its citizens.” A century later, Erica makes the same case about AI. The welfare of the system depends on the character of the people building it, and when those people all come from the same few rooms, the systems inherit the same blind spots. She will speak to what leaders can do now to keep human judgment in the decisions that shape careers, and how women can claim a real hand in shaping the tools. Session details to be announced.