Stare Down the Bull EP 4: Why Who’s in the Room Matters: Judy Spitz on AI, Bias & Breakthrough Tech
By Susan Hunt
December 1, 2025
In this conversation, I’m joined by Dr. Judy Spitz, a visionary in AI and speech recognition, a longtime Verizon leader, and the founder of Breakthrough Tech, the nation’s largest AI talent accelerator.
Judy shares her journey from the earliest days of applied AI to the technology-driven executive suite, the leadership lessons that shaped her 30-year career, and the bold decisions that helped her “stare down the bull” at every stage.
We explore the systemic barriers that keep women and overlooked talent out of tech and the powerful, scalable solutions Judy is building to change the future of AI.
- Early speech recognition and AI were built by people trying to model the human brain and Judy was at the center of that movement.
- Leadership is a jungle gym, not a ladder, and taking big risks is often the key to advancement.
- Bold mistakes can be career-making if you have leaders who protect, coach, and champion you.
- The path to CIO was 20 years in the making, built through consistent excellence, courage, and visibility.
- Breakthrough Tech closes gaps in the tech talent pipeline by connecting overlooked students with real-world opportunities.
- AI bias is rooted in who’s in the room and who gets to shape training data, products, and decisions.
- The future of ethical, fair AI depends on broadening access, literacy, and representation.
When I sat down with Dr. Judy Spitz for this episode, I knew we were going to cover a lot of ground. She has decades of AI innovation, leadership lessons from the executive suite, and her transformational work with Breakthrough Tech. What I didn’t expect was just how clearly her journey reflects the evolution of AI itself.
Judy started her career studying how humans understand and produce language, amd cognitive science long before AI was cool. Then a small phone company called NYNEX (now Verizon) hired her to help computers do the same thing.
She joined one of the earliest AI labs in the country, surrounded by people building machine vision, expert systems, and the first speech recognizers. None of them knew how big AI would become but they knew they were building the future.
Judy’s rise to CIO wasn’t an overnight success story. It took 20 years, a lot of risk-taking, and more than a few “rookie mistakes.” She talks openly about the moments that felt career-ending, and the leaders who backed her instead of throwing her under the bus.
Those experiences shaped her leadership philosophy:
- hire people smarter than you
- champion your team relentlessly
- always understand the customer before the technology
Today, her work at Breakthrough Tech may be her most important contribution yet. By connecting overlooked students, women, Black and Latina students, and talent outside elite universities, with real-world AI experience, she’s building a more representative tech workforce from the inside out.
And that matters. Because as Judy reminds us, the biggest determinant of whether AI uplifts society or harms it isn’t the algorithms, it’s the people in the room deciding what those algorithms optimize for. Her message is both urgent and full of hope: the future of AI is still ours to shape.
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