Five Women Shaping Hawai‘i’s Tech Future

Technology is changing how Hawaiʻi does business, delivers services and prepares for the future, and these five women are helping lead that transformation. Their paths into tech look different: government and higher education to telecommunications and AI. But they share a willingness to challenge established ways of thinking and help shape what the technology sector will look like in Hawaiʻi for years to come. Meet five proven leaders who are pushing the industry forward.

SU SHIN
Hawaiian Telcom

Su Shin didn’t take a traditional path to the top of Hawaiʻi’s telecommunications industry.

A graduate of McKinley High School and a product of Hawaiʻi’s public education system, Shin studied journalism at the University of La Verne outside of Los Angeles before beginning her career as a TV news reporter in Hawaiʻi. But after starting a family, the demanding schedule of local television news prompted her to reconsider her priorities.

She moved into public relations, eventually joining Hawaiian Telcom in 2013. There, her responsibilities expanded from communications to marketing, community engagement and eventually operations.

That experience gave her a broad understanding of the company and ultimately prepared her to become its first female president in 2020.

“It certainly was not the career path that I ever imagined for myself, nor did I plan it,” Shin says. “But maybe sometimes, that’s the best way for these things to happen.”

Today, Shin is leading Hawaiian Telcom through a dramatic transformation that began long before she became president: The company’s massive shift to fiber optics, or what Hawaiian Telcom has named Fioptics.

In 2021, Hawaiian Telcom accelerated its investment and announced an ambitious goal last year: making Hawaiʻi the first fully fiber-enabled state in the country.

Shin says about 90% of the state currently has access to Hawaiian Telcom’s fiber-optic services and expects near full completion by the first quarter of 2027, with remaining work concentrated on parts of Oʻahu and Hawaiʻi island.

Compared to standard copper wires, a legacy product, fiber optic cables send information as pulses of light through thin strands of glass, making the transmission of data much faster.

But the significance, she says, goes far beyond high-speed internet.

“Fiber optics is a really transformative infrastructure in Hawaiʻi,” she says. “It is foundational to how people live and work.”

Fiber connectivity supports everything from distance learning and telehealth to business operations, public services and emergency coordination.

Shin emphasizes that access to Fioptics will also help narrow Hawaiʻi’s digital divide by making high-speed connectivity available to rural and Neighbor Island communities that are often left behind.

“It’s no longer about if you happen to live in urban Honolulu, then you have access to high-speed internet and can fully participate,” Shin says. “Rural communities, while they’ll still continue to be rural, they’ll no longer be remote, because they’ll be connected just like the rest of the state.”

That sense of connection is also central to how Shin approaches leadership. She says Hawaiian Telcom employees carry a deep sense of responsibility toward the communities they serve, especially during recent natural disasters like the Maui wildfires and Hurricane Lala.

And despite becoming the first female president of Hawaiian Telcom, Shin says she’d like to be remembered for her work.

“I want the lasting measure of my leadership to be the impact that we create for Hawaiʻi,” she says.

Her unconventional path, she adds, is part of the message she hopes other young women see.

“There isn’t just one prescribed path into technology or executive leadership,” Shin says. “And mine certainly is an untraditional path.”

ELLEN NG
Inoa

Ellen Ng is betting Hawaiʻi can do more than adopt the next wave of emerging technology, it can help shape it.

Ng has spent more than 15 years working in technology around the world, from Singapore to South Korea and eventually the United States. But after moving to Hawaiʻi about a decade ago, she began looking at new technology through a different lens: How could it become a tool for economic development in the Islands?

That question eventually led her to the Hawaiʻi Technology Development Corp. (HTDC), where she worked on programs designed to help local businesses adopt emerging technologies.

During the Covid pandemic, Ng ran an e-commerce and digital marketing program that helped more than 100 Hawaiʻi manufacturers establish online platforms so they could sell directly to customers during the shutdown.

She also worked on the Digital Currency Innovation Lab (DCIL), which produced what Ng describes as Hawaiʻi’s first digital-asset regulatory framework. Although the framework did not pass through the Legislature, Ng sees the project as an example of how Hawaiʻi can get ahead of emerging technologies rather than simply react to them.

“DCIL was actually a great example of how Hawaiʻi can lead,” she says. “We were one of the first in the U.S. to actually create that regulatory sandbox to figure out a good framework for digital assets.”

Ng eventually left HTDC to launch Inoa, her consulting, advisory and implementation company focused on emerging technologies. Her work includes blockchain, digital currency and AI, helping local Realtors adapt to changing technologies and how they will affect the real estate industry.

For Ng, blockchain is more than cryptocurrency. She describes it as a shared database of transactions with three defining characteristics: data is difficult to alter once recorded, the network is decentralized and transactions are transparent.

Those characteristics, she says, could have implications well beyond digital currencies. In real estate, blockchain could potentially shorten the timeline for property transactions, while cryptocurrency could increasingly become a way for buyers to purchase property.

Ng also consults Realtors on AI and how it’s changing the way businesses reach customers. Ng says real estate professionals are already asking how they can remain visible as consumers increasingly use AI tools to find information instead of traditional search engines.

“Realtors are coming to me saying, ‘I have clients that want to buy property with crypto. How the heck do I go about it? What should I say to them?’” she says. “There’s definitely going to be an increasing demand for these different emerging technologies.”

While she acknowledges Hawaiʻi may not become another Silicon Valley, Ng believes the state should focus on areas where it already has advantages, including ocean technology, aerospace and defense, energy and healthcare.

She also sees an opportunity for Hawaiʻi to become a leader in technology policy and regulation.

Ng points to ALOHAnet, an early computer networking project developed in Hawaiʻi that influenced the development of modern computer networking, as an example of the kind of influence Hawaiʻi can have.

Her challenge for the state is to find the next big thing to ensure Hawaiʻi has a role on the global tech stage.

“I think there’s opportunity here,” Ng says. “We have to play to our strengths and be very specific in which sectors we’re looking at to develop solutions around them.”

SANDRA FUJIYAMA
Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship

Hawaiʻi cannot have a successful technology industry without an innovative workforce, and Sandra Fujiyama is helping to build the pipeline.

As executive director of the Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship (PACE) in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Shidler College of Business, Fujiyama works to ensure students develop the skills, industry experience and relationships needed to navigate a technology-driven economy.

Fujiyama was born and raised on Maui before earning a biochemistry degree and law degree from UCLA. She spent more than 15 years in California practicing intellectual property law, but when she returned to Hawaiʻi, she realized there wasn’t much of a market for IP lawyers.

Instead of seeing it as a dead end, Fujiyama saw an opportunity to “reinvent herself.”

That mindset eventually led her to the University of Hawaiʻi’s Office of Innovation and Commercialization, where she worked on patents, technology commercialization and entrepreneurship programs before joining PACE.

Today, technology is central to finding success in the workforce. Fujiyama says PACE has long incorporated technology into its entrepreneurship programs, including the Talk Story with Tech Pros series, which brings technology professionals, from software engineers and UX/UI designers to founders, together with students.

“It was a way for our students to see what tech careers look like and how there’s so much variety out there,” Fujiyama says. “You’re not limited to just a software company. There are tech positions and opportunities everywhere, you just need to find them.”

AI has added another layer of urgency, she says. PACE began incorporating AI into its programs in 2025, launching an applied AI speaker series for students to understand the basics of the evolving technology.

Then, PACE introduced an AI Innovation Program. Five student leaders helped build and lead the program, identifying AI tools they wanted to explore and then teaching workshops and holding open office hours for other students to experiment with them.

Fujiyama sees that kind of hands-on experimentation as essential.

“There’s always been a baseline of tech expertise you needed to have to go into any job, let alone one in the tech sector,” she says. “But now, you definitely have to have AI competency no matter what.”

Another critical part of Fujiyama’s work is connecting students directly with the technology and business challenges they will encounter in the workforce. Through PACE programs, students work on real-world problems presented by industry partners, developing solutions that often directly lead to internships and other career opportunities. As AI has become increasingly important across the workforce, it’s now being incorporated into many of those challenges.

PACE is currently working with UH leadership to scale that model across the entire system. At the same time, Fujiyama says PACE is integrating AI into faculty professional-development programs to ensure that it is taught in classrooms.

For Fujiyama, the ultimate goal is not just to teach students how to use the newest technology. It is giving them enough real-world experience to discover where their skills can take them.

She says that is the role PACE can play in Hawaiʻi’s broader technology ecosystem: facilitating the talent pipeline, giving students opportunities to try, fail, build relationships and find their path.

“There are many aspects to a robust technology sector, but a skilled workforce is incredibly important,” Fujiyama says. “PACE is important to ensuring students have the necessary tech skills to become successful innovators and entrepreneurs.”

GLORIA NILES
University of Hawaiʻi

Gloria Niles is leading the University of Hawaiʻi into an AI-powered future.

She began at UCLA as a pre-med kinesiology student before eventually earning a doctor of chiropractic degree with postgraduate training in neurology. She later moved into education, earning a master’s degree in education with a focus in online teaching in the late 1990s, when the field was still in its infancy.

Her interest in technology deepened while working with students with autism. She used tablets and assistive technology to help nonverbal students communicate and later focused her doctoral research on how technology could support communication among students with autism from multilingual families.

That intersection of education and technology brought Niles to the University of Hawaiʻi at West Oʻahu, where she served as faculty and then moved into overseeing distance education.

In March 2026, she became the university’s Chief Academic Technology Innovation Officer, leading the entire 10 campus system’s approach to artificial intelligence, online education and academic technologies, serving more than 40,000 students.

Niles describes herself as “the resident academic in technology and IT.”

“I am an educator in a technology position,” she says. “That brings with me a lot of advantageous perspectives.”

“I can explain to the tech people the perspective of an educator and what the faculty side is,” she says. “And at the same time, I can work with faculty and explain to them the technology.”

That perspective is particularly important as UH President Wendy Hensel and her administration push to integrate artificial intelligence into classrooms and curriculum.

For Niles, preparing students for an AI world means more than teaching them how to write a prompt in ChatGPT. Instead, she wants students to learn how to use AI, while maintaining and strengthening their own critical thinking skills.

She wants classes to teach students to use AI as a “reflector” to identify weaknesses in their coursework, as an evaluator whose answers they must fact-check and as an opponent that can generate counterarguments.

“It’s teaching students how to still use their own critical thinking and to use AI as a tool to hone those skills,” she says. “We don’t want AI to take away critical thinking, we want it to reinforce it.”

Her goal is to make AI literacy a part of the UH curriculum, so students graduate knowing how to effectively and ethically approach it in the world.

“We need to tell people, ‘If you come to UH, this is how you will be prepared to deal with AI along with how to use it in your discipline,’” she says.

While she pushes the university to adopt AI, Niles also recognizes that there will be pushback and that it cannot be separated from Hawaiʻi’s values and identity. In response, UH is developing an AI values framework grounded in Native Hawaiian values to help guide how the university approaches the evolving technology.

Still, she believes the larger question facing higher education is no longer whether AI should be used.

“I don’t think the conversation is, ‘Should we use it or not?’” Niles says. “I think we’re past the point of ignoring it. It’s about how we use it effectively to prepare both our faculty and students.”

In an industry often defined by technical expertise, Niles’ strength may be defined by what she isn’t: a traditional tech professional.

She emphasizes that she’s an educator first and is using that perspective to shape how Hawaiʻi’s largest university system prepares its students for a rapidly changing technological world.

CHRISTINE SAKUDA
Office of Enterprise Technology Services

For Christine Sakuda, technology isn’t only about innovation, it’s also about leveraging it to make government work better for residents.

As Hawaiʻi’s state chief information officer (CIO), Sakuda oversees the Office of Enterprise Technology Services, which is responsible for the technological backbone of the state’s executive branch. Its work ranges from cybersecurity and digital services to data governance and artificial intelligence.

Sakuda joined Gov. Josh Green’s administration in 2024, after decades working in enterprise technology. Before joining the state, she served as executive director of Transform Hawaii Government, advocating for the modernization of and greater digital access to government services.

Now, her focus is on making the state’s technology systems more connected, cohesive and ultimately, easier for residents to use.

One initiative she points to is myHawaii, which allows residents to use a single login to access multiple state services across departments.

The larger challenge, she says, is that Hawaiʻi’s 18 executive departments and their programs have historically developed their own independent technology systems. That means information and user data do not always connect on the back end.

“The demand is at a place for the programs to be more integrated together,” she says. “One of our challenges and one of our opportunities is to try to integrate the programs together for more seamless access to the constituents.”

AI adds another layer to her work. With pilot programs already taking place, Sakuda sees significant potential for AI to help the government deliver services “more effectively, faster and more efficiently.”

“How can we start to leverage AI into our programs to help us improve our processes? How can we use AI to help us deliver services better to our constituents?” she says.

Still, she acknowledges that AI must be used responsibly and cautiously, especially when dealing with massive amounts of sensitive data.

“We take great pains to manage the taxpayers’ dollar very carefully, the taxpayers’ data very carefully,” Sakuda says. “And so it’s with cautious optimism that absolutely we want to use AI, but we want to use it in the smartest, right way possible.”

As the first woman and second Native Hawaiian to serve as Hawaiʻi’s CIO, Sakuda also sees her role as an opportunity to help cultivate the next generation of technology leaders.

“I really think that mentorship is part of my kuleana as a leader, to give back to my community and to my workers here within the Office of Enterprise Technology Services,” she says. “So how do we help raise up future leaders within Hawaiʻi who are grounded in place-based values to take care of our future communities?”

For anyone aspiring to a career in technology or executive leadership, her advice is straightforward: “Be courageous, listen to themselves, take chances and surround yourself with a good support network.”

Sakuda did not set out to become Hawaiʻi’s CIO. Instead, she says she followed her commitment to her community, and now works to leave the state’s technology infrastructure stronger than she found it.