Yvette Schmitter

Yvette Schmitter built her first computer as a little girl, from parts the world had thrown away. She salvaged boards and mismatched pieces from a junkyard and carried them to the one place she could work unseen: the floor of her bedroom closet. A library book sat in one hand and a flashlight in the other. She hid there because a little Black girl taking machines apart ran against what the world believed such girls could do. In the dark, she taught herself to read the patterns until she understood how the machine worked. That start shaped a conviction she still carries: the people an industry overlooks often see most clearly what it has missed.

3 decades later, she leads Fusion Collective, an independent emerging technology and AI governance, audit, and assurance firm founded on one principle, that the auditor cannot also be the vendor. She and her team stand between people, and the harm algorithms can cause. They’ve audited hundreds of AI systems and helped protect more than two million people from tools built by too few, for too narrow a slice of humanity.

The girl forced to hide on the floor of her closet earned her way into the classroom. A BS in Engineering from Tufts University and a master’s from NYU anchor her formal training, with later postgraduate work at Harvard, MIT, Yale, UC Davis, and Emory. From there her experience ran through some of technology’s largest rooms. She directed one of the largest cloud migrations in AWS history and served as a Digital Architecture Partner at PwC, with earlier leadership at Deloitte and Ernst & Young. Certified as an ISO 42001 Lead Auditor and ISO 27701 Privacy Information Management, she advises not-for-profit organizations working with UK Parliament on AI regulation as well as US Congressional leaders. A TEDx and keynote speaker, she hosts The Code Breakers Podcast, and her work has appeared in Forbes, CIO Magazine, Business Insider, and The New York Times.

The work became personal when an AI tool “”corrected”” a photo of her, a Black woman in technology, by replacing her face with that of a well-known Asian male figure in the field. A pipeline with no diverse voices produces that outcome at scale. Yvette builds the systems that catch it and makes the case for who belongs in the room while there is still time to shape what gets built.

Two disciplines keep her perspective sharp. A daily Stoic practice trains her attention on what she can govern and what she can set down, and a tattoo reading memento vivere, remember to live, serves as a standing instruction. Solo travel across more than 88 countries taught her the rest. Sitting as an outsider in room after room showed her how much a fresh vantage reveals, and it confirmed the instinct she first formed on that closet floor: the view from the edge of a system is often the clearest view of it.

She comes from a long line of women who made something out of what they were handed, among them a great-grandmother who ran a juke joint during Jim Crow in the Florida Everglades and turned survival into community. Yvette works in that same tradition. In Kintsugi, a broken piece is repaired with gold, and the break becomes the most beautiful part of the work. That’s what she sees in the people this industry has overlooked, and it is the work she has chosen.