I spent thirty years finding the flaw. Then AI found me.
It was early 2025. I was still deep in contract management consulting, testing AI on evenings and weekends because I genuinely couldn’t stop. I found it fascinating that I could talk to it in plain language and get something useful back. It won me over, and it still does.
The surprise came just as fast. I’d expected AI to know its own limits. Instead I watched it slide straight past the point where it should stop, quietly taking over my thinking instead of sharpening it. Thirty years of being paid to find the flaw meant I caught it early, and I wasn’t about to hand a machine my judgement, my ideas, or the standards my name carries.
So that became the real work: put AI to serious use, and keep my own judgement firmly in the seat.
See how The Read works →Where a single sentence could cost millions.
I read every sentence for what it is trying not to say.
Blame the psychology. I studied it alongside German literature, to learn how to stand beside someone when the ground feels unsteady, and it taught me to hear what people mean beneath what they say. Commercial work never trained that out of me.
A fine instinct in a contract negotiation, and less charming over dinner.
I led teams across media, sales and IT contract management, with power of attorney and budgets and sales targets in the three-digit millions. Alongside, I helped whole teams through change, and learned that people cope best when they help shape it rather than have it done to them. It’s why I later trained as a systemic leadership coach, and it’s still how I work with people.
International groups brought me in to negotiate the contracts behind their technology programmes, across public transport, defence and security, biopharmaceutical manufacturing and commodities, and to argue the hard cases in front of executive boards from the Gulf to Norway. Confidential data ran through every file, so protecting it simply became how I work. The stakes kept it that way: senior decisions, real money, my reputation on every project.
The same holds with AI now, and it’s why I care as much about what you keep out of it as what you put in.
So I finally gave in to the island.
By 2022, at 54, I left Germany for Cyprus, on my own.
It wasn’t an escape. This island had drawn me in years before, and the part of me that has always loved a change of scene went with it.
Building a life somewhere new taught me more than I expected about what it takes to rebuild. Four years later, I am doing it again, this time with my work.
I’m building the room
I couldn’t find.
I looked everywhere for it: somewhere made for women exactly like me, with decades of expertise behind us, learning to put AI to work on real tasks without being patronised or rushed. It didn’t exist. So I decided to build it instead.
That meant winding down the contract management consulting I’d run for years, and turning fully to AI. After three decades spent on other companies’ priorities, they are finally mine, and it’s the most alive my work has ever felt.
A tech course would teach you the tools.
Here you can be expert in your field and new to AI at the same time, without anyone judging you for it. You say the part you have not worked out yet, and you leave with the nerve to use it on work that carries your name.
Right now I am taking the first eight women through The Read, one at a time. Each brings her own field, her own standards, and one workflow worth changing first.
One at a time is the point. Nothing here comes off a shelf, and nothing is built for the average of eight women. What you get back is shaped around your work, your standards and the way you already think.
Workshops come next, and I’m looking forward to these.
Each one takes a single topic. I teach it, and then we work: you put it to use on your own tasks, and I’m right there to answer your questions and help you through the tricky parts.
This is where the room begins: you practise alongside women who work the way you do.
The first workshop is on me. If you’d like to come, put your name on the waitlist and I’ll write to you as soon as the date is set. Being on it simply means you hear first.
Every engagement starts with you, long before it reaches a tool.
What follows are the five commitments I keep to. Each came from my work, and one or two from getting it wrong.
I start from the expertise you already have.
You’ve spent decades becoming the person other people check with. Being newer to AI takes nothing away from that. So I start where you actually are, expert in your work, and fit AI to it, rather than you to the tool.
I build one shift properly, not ten half-way.
Everywhere else the reflex is to do more with AI. Mine is to do less, on purpose. I look for the one piece of work where a change is genuinely worth what it asks of you, and where AI can help without putting your name at risk. The rest can wait. One workflow that holds beats ten that only look clever.
AI handles the heavy lifting. The judgement stays yours.
Everything I build has a clear line running through it: the point where AI stops and you take over. AI can run your workflows, pressure-test a strategy, and catch the blind spot you’d have walked past. Weighing what a decision costs the people in the room, and knowing your best clients, stay with you. I build around that.
You can maintain what I build, on your own.
Underneath every workflow sits your own base of knowledge: the standards, examples and background AI needs to work the way you do. It’s written in plain language, so you can read it, change it, and still understand it a year from now. A workflow only feels truly yours when you can look after it yourself.
You don’t have to love AI to use it well.
Your scepticism is welcome here. It’s the instinct that keeps your work good, and it’s exactly what using AI well asks for. I’d rather you stayed doubtful and checked than trusted it too soon. I also know the other side, the pull to love it a little too much, because I felt it myself: on low-energy days early on, I handed it more than I should have. So I build your workflows to hold your line on the days you’re least able to.
That’s how I work. I’d like to hear about yours.
Let’s look at your week together… and some random facts about me.
People who’ve worked with me tend to reach for the same few words: warm, direct, honest. I’ll tell you the awkward thing in the room, and I’ll tell it kindly. When I don’t know something yet, I say so, then go and find out. I take the work seriously. AI and myself, not so much.
Away from work, I’m happiest on hidden trails across the island, usually ending up somewhere beautiful and not quite where I meant to be. My all-time favourite, though, is a swim in the sea in the early morning.
I’m also running a long, losing campaign to convince my Cypriot tax advisor that something this simple surely can’t be right. After decades of German bureaucracy, I appear to have developed a genuine mistrust of anything that makes logical sense. She’s endlessly patient, and only occasionally raises an eyebrow.
If you’d rather get a feel for how I work before we talk, start with something small.
A free place to begin.
The Expert’s Pass is a free second read for your drafts: a project you set up once inside Claude or ChatGPT, in about ten minutes, and keep. It catches what AI invents, where it drifts from your voice, and what dips below your standard, before any of it goes out under your name. It starts from a short check for sensitive information, so you can use it on real client work.