Democratizing access to technology is more than just a mission—it’s the key to unlocking innovation, opportunity, and progress.
Karen Topping Cone has dedicated her career to expanding global access to technology, ensuring that enterprises, entrepreneurs, and underserved communities can harness its power to drive meaningful change.
Karen’s journey began with IBM World Trade, where she played a role in opening IBM’s first offices in Russia and China during a time of historic global transformation. She later took on a leadership role at Gartner, which included launching gartner.com in 2000 to broaden access to technology research and insights. In the wake of 9/11, she spearheaded an initiative to provide open access to Gartner’s disaster recovery research, ensuring that businesses and communities had the knowledge they needed in a time of crisis. Under her leadership, Gartner expanded to over 100 countries, democratizing access to vital technology expertise.
At Microsoft, Karen led the Worldwide Financial Services Industry, advocating for cloud adoption at a time when regulatory concerns threatened innovation. Recognizing the hesitancy of financial institutions and regulators to embrace the cloud, she co-founded the Financial Services Cloud Advisory Council, bringing together 14 of the world’s largest financial institutions. With support from Microsoft product, legal and corporate affairs teams, Karen and her CTO, Sean Foley, provided objective education and expertise on how cloud computing could enhance security, scalability, and accessibility. Their work led to global regulatory updates that enabled financial institutions—both large and small—to adopt cloud technologies, democratizing financial innovation and accelerating Open Banking initiatives.
Today, Karen continues to drive change as a board director and venture partner at Mastersfund, supporting women entrepreneurs in launching and scaling groundbreaking companies. One such company is Fyrii, an early-stage company accelerating Open Banking adoption through highly secure API integration, orchestration, and standardization, reducing costs and time-to-market for financial services innovation.
“Democratizing access to technology empowers us to harness the combined potential of the world’s human population with AI computing models and data analytics that are key to unlocking our toughest problems and addressing essential questions we never knew to ask.” — Karen Topping Cone
Karen’s success is rooted in three key strategies: leveraging evidence-based results to demonstrate how expanding access to technology benefits businesses and underserved communities, investing in early-stage innovators by funding and mentoring high-potential startups to drive widespread adoption of breakthrough technologies, and building strong alliances and partnerships that create industry-wide collaborations to scale opportunities, ensure sustainability, and promote inclusive growth.
By expanding access to technology and empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs, Karen is proving that innovation thrives when more voices and perspectives are included. Her work is a testament to the power of technology to not only transform industries but also to create a more equitable and connected world.
About #empowHER50 campaign
This campaign celebrates women leaders at Microsoft, past and present, who have been instrumental in democratizing access to technology, opportunity, and growth. By honoring their contributions over the last half-century, this campaign highlights stories of resilience, innovation, and inclusivity. Through digital spotlights, a commemorative coffee table book, live recognition events, and more, the campaign inspires collective action toward achieving equitable societal goals. To learn more about empowHER50, please visit https://womenincloud.com/empowHER50
To learn about Microsoft 50th celebrations: https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-50/
