Jen Elena Romano ties AI careers work to social impact

Jen Elena Romano, a San Jose entrepreneur and former CMO, is using her new AI-powered career platform Cura to help early-career workers find opportunity and help employers reach overlooked talent. Her work blends business growth, education, and equity as AI reshapes how people enter the workforce.

Why it matters: - Jen Elena Romano is betting that career access and social impact can be built into the same business model. - Her new platform, Cura, targets early-career workers who often lack networks, guidance, and practical preparation. - The work lands at a time when AI is reshaping hiring, skills training, and workforce development. - Romano’s approach puts ethics and bias mitigation at the center of that shift.

What happened: - Romano, a two-time founder, award-winning strategist, keynote speaker, and former chief marketing officer, was featured by Influential Women for her work at the intersection of business growth and social impact. - In 2024, Romano founded Cura, an AI-powered career readiness and workforce development platform based in San Jose, California. - Romano has spent more than two decades working with business, technology, education, and social impact efforts. - Her client and organizational work has included Google, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Crisis Text Line.

The details: - Cura is designed to provide accessible career resources and professional development. - The platform also builds partnerships with employers to help identify and develop overlooked talent. - Romano says the platform is meant to bridge the gap between education and employment. - She focuses on first-generation and underrepresented talent that often enters the workforce without established pathways. - Romano says AI can improve lives and change outcomes when it is applied intentionally to social impact problems. - She also says AI systems can reproduce bias because they are trained on existing information. - Romano argues entrepreneurs need to build ethical guardrails into product development from the start. - She says her worldview was shaped by immigrant parents and by lessons in patience, perseverance, grit, and resilience. - Romano describes the best career advice she received as: be interested rather than interesting. - She says professional progress often comes from genuine relationships rather than rigid formulas. - Romano recalls cold-calling Wells Fargo in her twenties, building rapport with an assistant, and eventually securing a meeting. - She says the relationship continued beyond that first interaction. - Romano encourages young women to focus less on the most popular jobs and more on what problem they want to solve. - She believes a meaningful mission can help people persist even when a job is imperfect. - Romano defines humility as recognizing strengths and weaknesses, not staying quiet or invisible. - She says people generally have a small set of things they are especially good at and should build around those strengths. - She believes teams work best when people with complementary skills collaborate around a shared mission. - Romano serves on the board of Sacred Heart Nativity School in San Jose. - Her board work supports students from low-income communities through school and into college. - Romano holds a Bachelor of Science in English from James Madison University and a Master of Science from Marymount University. - She is also a graduate of the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Program. - Romano is associated with the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the Santa Clara Bronco Accelerator Program, and Sacred Heart Nativity Middle School. - Readers can find more information through her Influential Women profile or Cura.

Between the lines: - Romano is positioning career development as both a business opportunity and an equity issue. - The emphasis on first-generation talent reflects a broader market gap in access to mentorship, networks, and employer visibility. - Her message to entrepreneurs is that AI’s social value will depend on how intentionally it is designed and governed. - Her advice to young women centers on agency, not just career optimization.

What's next: - Cura appears aimed at expanding its employer partnerships and helping more early-career workers move from education into jobs. - Romano is likely to keep using speaking, mentoring, and board service to advance her workforce and education mission. - Her public message suggests more AI-enabled tools built around equity, access, and responsible innovation.