Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey is revolutionizing how parents and entrepreneurs interact with artificial intelligence. As a tech industry veteran with over 20 years of experience and the founder and CEO of Mother AI, LeBlanc-Godfrey is dedicated to making emerging technologies approachable for busy parents while helping Black women founders leverage AI to grow their businesses.
The former Google executive shared insights about her journey from tech leader to founder and how she’s creating pathways to help both parents and entrepreneurs thrive in an increasingly AI-driven world.
What was the aha moment that inspired Mother AI?
I’ve spent my entire career in some form of tech. I have my degree in electrical engineering. I spent over a decade as a Google Exec at Google, and it was my kids who came home and told me that their friends were starting to use AI, starting to use Chat GPT, that one of their teachers said that they were banning AI. And that is when I perked up because we’re not going to ban this innovative technology that is literally changing our world in real time.
I went on the hunt for resources specifically for parents, about how to have conversations with your children about AI, about being responsible ethical AI users, and there was little to nothing that existed in that moment. And I said, Hey, let me start a company that’s going to stand in the gap for that.
I knew that if I, who was steeped in tech, for my entire career wasn’t sure how to navigate AI with my kids. Then there is a whole swath of the world, in terms of parents, and particularly moms, who just didn’t know how to have this conversation. And it needed to be me, it needed to be someone that looked like me that has my background. That is the mother of 3 kids spanning elementary, middle, and high school, aged kids that will be able to share my journey in hopes of inspiring and getting other moms connected in on what is happening with AI today.
How do you ensure AI is approachable and practical for everyday parents and caregivers?
That’s me sharing how I am having these conversations in relatable and digestible ways. We know with parents and even with founders, as we’re sitting here talking about this upcoming conference that the to-do list is extremely long. AI, along with other emerging technologies, can just seem so distant and seem like we need so many hours and so much, a degree even, to be able to understand all the acronyms. And I wanted to dispel all of those myths, and show practical ways that all of us can incorporate or integrate AI into our daily lives, whether it’s our parenting life, our personal life, or our professional life, whether it’s corporate or as a founder-entrepreneur.
How can busy mothers make AI practical and digestible?
It starts with a chatbot. AI is a technology that has been integrated into products and services. If you’ve checked your email, if you’ve checked the weather, if you’ve used maps to find a location somewhere, if you’ve gone on Netflix and binged a show and then clicked on another show that it recommended. All of these things are AI. So I want to dispel that AI is just this new thing that hit the scene. What has changed, is what I like to say, is the user interface of it.
It’s no longer through a product or service. It actually is something that you, the consumer can engage with directly. And so that’s the form of a chatbot, and whether it is Gemini or Claude, or ChatGPT, these are things where you can open up a browser and start talking to this chatbot, in the same way that you would talk with a girlfriend, a colleague, even a therapist.
Homework is where I found the most incredible opportunity as a parent, to not only engage with AI to support my children’s learning journey, but I’m also role modeling to them how I’m using AI. My son, for instance, he’s in 3rd grade. They don’t do math the way that we used to math. They don’t carry the one, they’re not using the same terminology that we used, and so I could go into a chatbot and say, hey? Using this curriculum, tell me how to add 200 plus 300, and now it’s giving me step by step instructions in the same language that he’s hearing at school.
Now he is able to get the answer, without the frustration of ‘they don’t teach it that way’, and all the meltdowns that can happen. AI becomes that translator between the classroom and home, and so to be able to be a part of my children’s learning journey, no matter whether it’s 3rd grade math or a high school essay, AI has allowed me to engage with it and then share that learning with my kids in real time.
How do you use AI for test preparation?
My middle school daughter, lots of tests that come up, and so I’ve shown her, take a picture of your study guide, upload it, and then ask it to recreate a mock exam four different ways. She pressed print, and then now she has additional ways to study and prepare for a test, and so, if I don’t do anything else with AI. I think for me as a parent, it helps in terms of the mental load of trying to understand their work and explain it to them in the little window of time, between school and bedtime. That alone is time saving, but it collapses time on so many things, where you need a thought partner, where you need to figure out how to frame a conversation, whether it’s with your child or with the child’s school, or a teacher or a healthcare provider.
What has been the most rewarding feedback you’ve received with Mother AI?
For me, it is the aha moments that parents get, of, ‘wait! I didn’t even know that was possible.’ The possibilities have been a big win for me, and they come to me after workshops that I have for parents and be like this changes the game for the amount of time it collapses, it collapses days of work into hours, and hours of thinking and planning into minutes. That sort of time collapse is so incredibly impactful for parents who are juggling so many balls in the air.
How do parents raise digitally literate children without feeling overwhelmed?
We may be able to sidestep all the Tiktok dance things that our kids are doing, but becoming responsible and ethical digital citizens is not something that we can stick our head in the sand on.
AI and technology, social media, all of these things are just constant headaches, constant things that we have to consider and worry about. And so with Mother AI, yes, we’re centering AI, because it’s such a poignant topic in this moment, but it spans to your point that digital literacy, understanding the impact of your digital footprint, what you should and shouldn’t share to become critical thinkers of the things that you are watching on the internet or on social media. To think, is that actually true? Let me check the source. Let me go somewhere else and cross reference that information. These are the types of conversations that I have with my kids, because now social media becomes their news, they’re not watching TV to get it.
The importance here is to be able to go on the journey with them. To know, listen! You don’t have all the answers. They don’t have all the answers, but they can work together to figure it out. And I think that’s an incredible perspective that I want parents to take away. This is not the moment to have all the answers, go on that journey with your children to figure it out. And that will help them learn that they, too, can question, be uncertain. But what are the ways that we find an answer that we feel comfortable with?
What are you looking forward to at Road Map to Billions?
First of all, there is a shared mission around economic empowerment through technology. We both recognize that technology just isn’t about innovation. It’s about creating pathways to generational wealth and economic freedom. I’m so excited for us to be able to partner together, the space that I’m taking up for the conference is really talking to founders about how they can thrive, using the technological tool of AI to accelerate that growth, so that they can get that 1 billion dollar business, and have that ecosystem where resources are sometimes limited. Whether it’s financial, whether it’s having people resources, that AI can step in and fill that gap in ways that we have not even fathomed, to be so accessible to us in this moment. I want founders to know that there is support there, that they can and will be greater than the counterparts that we’re up against, as black women are only 1% of founders getting money, and AI is one of the levers that they can pull in order to reach the levels of success that they have mapped out for themselves.
Where can people find more information about you and Mother AI?
My handle on all social media is mother_a_i. I have a weekly newsletter that you can find and sign up, for at itsmotherai.com, and I am a LinkedIn AI voice, top LinkedIn AI voice, and so you can follow me there for all my stories and shenanigans about bringing my own kids on this journey of digital literacy.
