Alla Idrisova and the billboard that made leadership personal

Alla Idrisova was walking home along Prinsengracht with her daughter when they came across a billboard bearing a familiar face: hers. Her daughter stopped, looked and turned towards her with a proud smile. For someone whose work involves boardrooms, technology and the language of organizational change, the encounter offered an unusually uncomplicated result. A child had seen her mother occupying public space.

Idrisova later described the moment as more meaningful than the poster itself. The campaign was Equals’ 2026 celebration of role models. Her participation put an Amsterdam founder and researcher among women whose working lives could become visible examples for somebody else. On the street, the intended audience happened to include her own daughter.

Leadership can acquire an impressive amount of furniture: a seat, a table, a corner office. Idrisova’s career keeps returning to the people allowed into those rooms, and to what happens once they arrive. The billboard briefly moved that question outdoors. There was no application form and no panel discussion. Her daughter could simply look up.

Before the invitation, the architecture

Long before she co-founded AI4ALL, Idrisova worked on the machinery of established businesses. Her corporate career included Philips, Genpact, Canon EMEA and PA Consulting. These were jobs concerned with processes, information, strategy and the difficult business of persuading different parts of an organization to work together. The vocabulary would later change. Her interest in the arrangement of the parts remained.

At Philips, between 2007 and 2012, her responsibilities crossed financial analysis, business intelligence and process ownership. She subsequently worked as a senior strategy consultant at Genpact. At Canon EMEA, where she was a European business architect from 2015 to 2019, her remit included commercial and customer-fulfilment processes, data strategy, systems migration and integration work.

Business architecture is an instructive starting point for this story. An organization has rules and dependencies as surely as a building has doors and corridors. A decision made in one department can close a route somewhere else. Read through that lens, Idrisova’s later interest in access and governance looks like a widening of the original assignment: examine how the structure works, then ask whom it serves.

Her education also crossed boundaries. She studied international economics and business at the University of Groningen, followed by an executive master in international and European relations at the University of Amsterdam. An INSEAD Executive MBA followed in 2016-2017. Economics, policy and management supplied different ways of looking at the same busy human apparatus. She would eventually take those questions back into academic research.

A sales app, and a habit of listening

In 2019, Idrisova founded Xtatio, a sales-technology venture. Its proposition brought customer feedback into the development of salespeople, using those responses to inform training and coaching. In a profession that rewards the pitch, she was building a product around what the customer had to say afterwards. The listening had a commercial purpose, but it was listening all the same.

Her public writing from that period gives the company a human scale. In a May 2020 conversation with entrepreneur Nienke Budde, published as part of Xtatio’s Future of Sales series, the subject was the balance between real life and online interaction. Idrisova’s accompanying note explained how the app could turn feedback from sales calls into tailored development. The product was being discussed through the experiences of people doing the work.

Another interview, with sales executive André le Fèvre, considered digital training and the changing responsibilities of sales leaders. Idrisova’s own biography at the end listed startup mentoring and executive coaching alongside kitesurfing and snowboarding. It is a pleasing interruption to the corporate prose. The founder had business models to consider, and apparently some wind and snow to catch.

The hive has more than one queen

BeeQueen gave her interest in women’s leadership an organizational home. She is its founder and CEO. Its work includes community building, training and consulting, and a platform called Hyve, intended to connect women’s networks with corporate diversity and inclusion initiatives. The practical problem is one of connection: communities have experience and relationships; companies have their own structures, priorities and resources.

Rather than treating each network as an island, BeeQueen proposes ways for those groups to work with corporate partners. There is something quietly ambitious about choosing coordination as the product. It requires attention to the space between organizations, where nobody automatically owns the job and useful conversations can disappear without anyone officially losing them.

Idrisova also hosts BeeQueen’s Inspiration Through Inclusivity podcast. Its published conversations include employee resource groups with Anjulie Gungadin, retaining women in leadership with Stuti Sethi, and power and support with Helen Tubb. An episode with fellow AI4ALL founder Oliviana Bailey brings the AI work directly into that conversation. Across the subjects, leadership becomes a matter of relationships that can be examined, rather than a personality bestowed on a fortunate few.

The same concern extends to speaking. In January 2025, BeeQueen held an event on confidence and voice, with Idrisova, Dasha Dollar-Smirnova and a panel of contributors. Her speaking portfolio also includes an interview about generative AI and regulation, and an INSEAD interview about how her worldview changed. Giving people a platform, in this part of her work, has its literal meaning too.

Four founders, an office after hours

AI4ALL’s beginnings have a more modest menu than the usual technology origin myth: cold pizza and warm wine. Four expat women were gathering in offices after hours, bringing experience from different fields and a shared concern about who would influence AI. They learned together before opening the circle to others. It is an origin story in which participation precedes polish.

The founders are Idrisova, Oliviana Bailey, Karen Harriss and Jana Wilhelmus. The Netherlands-based nonprofit dates its founding to 2024; Idrisova’s own professional chronology records her AI4ALL role from January 2025. Its current team lists her as co-CEO. Shared leadership is visible in that list, where all four founders hold co-CEO titles.

The organization runs workshops, mentoring, entrepreneurial support and community events. Its public account of its first year reports more than 365 people taught through five practical programs, over 50 events and more than 80 volunteers. Those figures describe the collective work of the foundation. They also give the after-hours meeting a tangible sequel: people showing up to learn, and other people making that possible.

Idrisova had already been working in this territory. At the Inclusive AI & Skills Conference in Brussels in March 2024, she was presented as head of community and the AI ecosystem in the Benelux for Women in AI, as well as BeeQueen’s founder. Her speaker biography connected digital strategy, entrepreneurship and women’s representation in boardrooms. AI4ALL brought those interests into another shared institution.

Who writes the rules of the room?

Her doctoral work at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam investigates corporate governance, board dynamics and women’s leadership. Her education record dates the research from 2024. Alongside it, she facilitates sustainability leadership education through Emeritus for INSEAD Executive Education and has worked as a learning coach on executive programs. She moves between people studying organizations and people trying to run them.

That combination matters because the questions travel in both directions. A boardroom can supply a research problem; a classroom can make an experienced executive reconsider an assumption. Idrisova’s academic and coaching work includes cases, workshops and projects that connect ideas to actual organizational decisions. Her subject is close enough to practice to be inconvenient. It concerns how authority is exercised by people who already possess it.

In a September 2025 conversation with John Lunn, she discussed the Queen Bee phenomenon: the idea of a senior woman who withholds support from other women. Her interest lies in the structures surrounding that behaviour, including competition for scarce recognition. She asks what changes when leadership itself becomes more collaborative. The question shifts attention towards the conditions an organization creates.

She also spoke about the time that volunteer initiatives consume, and the difficulty of sustaining them without institutional backing. Good intentions still occupy evenings. Communities need support to continue doing their work. Her desired direction was expressed in a brief phrase: “more about listening and learning rather than controlling.” It is a demanding ambition for a profession so accustomed to giving instructions.

“More about listening and learning rather than controlling.”

Alla Idrisova · Do Radio, September 2025

A boardroom, a classroom, a street

Idrisova’s governance work includes BoardCompanions and advisory roles with Retulp, Chemreclaim and Remake Society. Her board portfolio connects social enterprise, circularity and organizational oversight. These commitments bring the question of participation into decisions about resources, responsibility and long-term direction. A place in the room matters partly because decisions leave the room and affect people elsewhere.

Her recent writing follows that thread. In April 2026, she published reflections on boards moving from oversight towards stewardship, following ChangeNOW in Paris. Later that month, she wrote about capital, control and generational dynamics in family businesses. The subjects extend beyond AI, but remain recognizably hers: how power moves, how organizations change, and who gets to influence the next version.

For the Equals campaign, she described herself as a mother, engineer and dreamer. Her advice to young women was direct: “you do not have to shrink yourself to fit into any room.” She spoke of competence, curiosity, courage and purpose. The campaign portrait carried a professional identity; the accompanying words offered permission to take that identity seriously.

Back on Prinsengracht, her daughter’s smile supplied a response that no governance diagram could quite capture. Idrisova has spent years working with processes, founders, executives and communities. On that walk, the work was legible at a glance. A woman her daughter knew was up there, in public, connected to technology and leadership. The possibility had acquired a familiar face.