I didn't study this transition. I made it.

Thirty years of helping others change.

My career has been spent at the centre of change - at Oracle, PwC, IBM, EY and BCG, and then in MD-level leadership in private banking at Julius Baer, where I led Agile Transformation. I've helped large organisations reinvent how they work, and coached the people inside them through it.

Looking back, the red thread running through all of it was never the systems or the org charts. It was people - helping them grow, find their courage and do their best work.

Then it was my turn.

In 2025 I left corporate life and founded Eighty20, a coaching, advisory and transformation practice with purpose at its core - including 20% pro bono coaching for social purpose. Today I coach, advise and invest in start-ups, including as a business model “dragon”.

Making that move myself taught me what it really takes: letting go of a title, backing your own judgement, and building something without the safety net of a big organisation around you. It's exciting. It's also lonely without the right people and the right structure.

I don't just talk about AI. I use it every day.

AI isn't something I study from the sidelines. I use it actively in my own work every day - including agentic AI that plans and carries out multi-step tasks, not just answers questions.

I build custom AI capabilities and tools and put them in the hands of the people I support, so they can work smarter and move faster. One recent example: an AI coach that guides students on a professional programme through a major written assignment - asking the right questions and helping them structure their own thinking, rather than writing it for them. At Sparksli, we deploy tools like this to support you on your journey.

I also write about what I learn - LinkedIn articles on topics such as AI governance and the critical thinking it takes to use AI well.

I've done it myself so I can show others how. That's the heart of Sparksli's AI-enabled approach: you learn AI by using it on your own business, with someone beside you who has already done it.

The programme I was looking for didn't exist.

I found coaching that went deep on the person but stopped short of the business, and accelerators built for young tech founders. There was no founder accelerator for experienced professionals like me.

So I built one: the depth of great coaching, the practical rigour of a real incubator, and AI woven through the whole journey - human first, AI enabled.

And I built it the way I'll help you build yours - by applying the Sparksli process to myself: starting with who I am and what I value, shaping the idea, stress-testing it against the market, and using AI at every step. Sparksli is its own first case study.