Fresh-faced and eighteen, I left my family in Australia for the first time to live in Switzerland and work as an au pair. The internet made that possible and it expanded my world in ways I'll always be grateful for. It also dropped me into systems I didn't remotely understand. Looking back, I've come to realize that much of my life has been shaped by learning to navigate systems I couldn't yet see. Years later, someone said something that stayed with me: “You never asked for help, ergo not my problem.” This made me wonder whether we can reasonably expect people, especially young people, to navigate systems we know they don’t yet understand, or even know to question.

Professionally, I’ve spent more than fifteen years helping retail and technology organizations translate market opportunity into products, commercial systems, and customer value, including applying AI across products and organizations. My work has spanned early-stage growth, acquisition, integration, and global enterprise transformation. Again and again, I have found that technology is rarely the hardest problem; human alignment is. This realization didn’t come through effortless experience. The learning curve has often been steep, messy, non-linear, and deeply overwhelming. During some periods of transformation, the friction of human resistance and systemic inertia has made me question my own approach and confront how difficult it is to shift deeply entrenched cultures.

The question of human alignment became more personal when I became a mother. Like many new mothers, I disappeared down social media rabbit holes searching for answers. Instead, I found platforms remarkably adept at monetizing idealized images of women while struggling to understand those same female bodies in the context of motherhood and health. That exploration became Mamamuse, an exploratory cross-disciplinary platform, and fundamentally changed the questions I was asking. It also forced a hard, ongoing process of inner work. I found myself caught in a draining clash of realities: the profoundly invisible, relational energy demanded by motherhood contrasted sharply against what our society, culture, and economy structurally support and reward. Navigating that incongruence was, and still is, a deeply challenging personal process.

These experiences became the catalyst for looking closer at the human systems beneath the technologies: the relationships, incentives, governance and shared purpose that determine whether technology amplifies value creation or accelerates dysfunction. Today, one question sits at the center of everything I do:

What foundations must we build before intelligent tools amplify our potential rather than our weaknesses?

That question connects my work across organizations, education, art and go-to-market.