April
Gittens

April Gittens (née Speight) began her career as a menswear stylist and visual merchandiser for brands such as Club Monaco, Saks, and Neiman Marcus. She graduated with a BS in Global Business & Public Policy from the University of Maryland and subsequently embarked on a career transition into tech. During her early years in tech, she served as a project manager for the Consumer Technology Association - producers of the international Consumer Electronics Show. Her work as a project manager spanned across several years with companies such as Lidl US, Impexium, and The Milken Institute.

To close out her former career in fashion, she completed her Masters in Luxury & Fashion Management at the Savannah College of Art and Design - with a focus on the luxury automobile and luxury marijuana sectors.

In her spare time, she began to learn Python in hopes of becoming a data scientist. With a change of heart, she chose to focus on AI assistants, chat bots, and conversational design. Her early work in this space was shared on the stages of SIGNAL, Twilio’s annual developer conference. April became a Twilio Champion and was later awarded the Twilio Doer award in 2019.

Always curious and always learning, she witnessed a life changing demo at a Microsoft event that set her on a new path in Extended Reality (XR). In 2020, she joined the Cloud Advocacy organization at Microsoft as a Sr. Cloud Advocate for Spatial Computing. In 2020, she attended her first hackathon, MIT Reality Hack. In 2 days, her hackathon team created Spell Bound - an immersive speech therapy app for children with dyslexia and dysgraphia.

They were winners in two categories: Learning, Education, and Research and Health and Wellness + Medical.

From 2020 - 2022, April became a thought leader in the XR space promoting safety, diversity, and inclusivity in the design of XR experiences. She served as the former Director of Community & Education for the XR Safety Initiative (XRSI), advising partners on XR curriculum.

Internally at Microsoft, she worked alongside the Mixed Reality and MRTK teams. She created various XR samples, technical learning content, and was part of the team that won Silver in the 2021 Telly Awards for Remote Production – Non-Broadcast for Microsoft One Dev Question with April Speight. April also hosted the 2022 Mixed Reality Dev Days and worked in collaboration with the Microsoft Mesh team.

April has partnered in collaboration with brands such as Warner Bros., Pluralsight, and Codecademy. And has shared the virtual stage with prominent figures such as astronaut Stanley G. Love and Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Today, she resides in Los Angeles as a Principal Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. April specializes in Generative AI, with a focus on developer tools and education—helping AI Engineers build, test, and ship smarter using Visual Studio Code.