Six years in, The WIE Suite's Dinner for Visionary Women has become a fixture at the Cannes Lions Festival for the women shaping media, business and culture at the highest levels. This year's gathering, held in partnership with Statusphere, brought together an intimate room of leaders for an evening built on candor over ceremony.
The night opened with this year's featured speaker, Forbes CEO Sherry Phillips, who offered a clear-eyed read on the trends reshaping media today, from how audiences are consuming information to what trust looks like in a landscape defined by constant change. She emphasized that while last year was all about AI, she noted that this year's theme is about being human-centered. "What I'm seeing this year is back to human at the center, IRL, and the narrative around human-led " Sherry said, "if we're all using AI responsibly, then we're the creators. And everyone here in this room is a creator."
Then dinner kicked off with a welcome toast from Statusphere founder and CEO Kristen Wiley alongside The WIE Suite founder Dee Poku. The two spoke to what makes the partnership work: a shared belief that women rise fastest when they rise together, and a shared commitment to building spaces where that can happen honestly rather than performatively.
Now in its sixth year, this year's table included:
The evening's impact showed up almost immediately in the reflections that followed. Ajaa Long, Managing Director at Meta, described the dinner as a beautiful moment brought together with care, and said the evening left her inspired by the conversations, connections and unguarded laughs.
Alicia Lebeouf, Head of Retail & Ecommerce at Meta, reflected on how far the gathering has come, calling the women she met as interesting as they were accomplished.
Reflecting on the broader moment since, Dee Poku pointed to a shift she believes the industry has yet to fully reckon with. Women are quietly driving the fastest-growing new economy in the world, projected to hit $1.34 trillion by 2033, and the conversation has not caught up to who is actually behind that growth.
"We should be talking about women executives as the new influencers," Poku said in a recent reflection. "We are not choosing between the boardroom and the platform, we're combining them. Social feeds and major stages are becoming the same stage. The content and ideas coming out of that combination are driving trends, sales, and the growth of entire platforms. Not as a side effect of visibility, but as the actual strategy."
