My year in ai, innovation and reinvention​

In September this year I hit my goal of 100 pounds of weight loss, using AI as my accountability buddy, thought partner, and coach. That journey became the book “How to Lose Weight with the Help of AI,” which hit Amazon bestseller status and proved that 200+ beta testers weren’t just being kind, there’s genuine hunger for accessible, human-centered AI applications.

Speaking became a through-line: the inaugural Ubuntu Network conference in January, DTX London with my “People Over Process” session, stages in Dublin and Edinburgh, invitations to international events I wasn’t able to accept, but were exciting none the less. Each one reinforced that people are desperate for someone who speaks their language, not Silicon Valley hype, but kitchen-table pragmatism.

In December, to celebrate paying my tax bill in full, I used AI to plan and manage logistics for a spontaneous trip to Venice. Not because I’m a travel blogger, but because I wanted to prove that AI could give ordinary people access to experiences previously requiring either wealth or extensive time. It worked beautifully, and even helped me find my 12 years olds lost mobile phone, not once but twice in just one weekend.

I’m halfway through a degree-level apprenticeship in Commercial Innovation and Change, which at my age and stage feels both audacious and exactly right. I’m also developing the Emerging TEC Incubator with key partners including Google and the University of Hertfordshire, set to launch Spring 2026. Sixty to eighty businesses annually will get support that democratizes access to innovation, because if we only back the “usual suspects,” we’re missing the best ideas.

The Wire, my big project at work hit 1,000 members last week…my original prediction and secret goal for the end of the year. Watching that community grow proved something I’ve long believed: people don’t want another course; they want connection, accountability, and a place to figure things out together.

And perhaps most quietly meaningful: I celebrated 30 years in business. Three decades of building, failing, learning, and refusing to accept that innovation belongs only to the young, the funded, or the traditionally credentialed.

But here’s what the highlight reel doesn’t show:

My London flat was trashed and getting it back on the market became an unwelcome distraction and money pit. These aren’t footnotes—they’re the reality of building anything meaningful while life continues to life at you…nothing prepares you for the joys of midlife hey?

This duality mirrors AI itself: immense possibility alongside genuine complexity. The same technology that helped me lose 100 pounds and simplify my business, also requires emotional labour, constant learning, and navigating a landscape where hype often drowns out practical application.

2023 saw me face a devastatingly painful shock redundancy which left me on my knees, financially and spiritually. Joining a startup where the founder was both delusional and it turns out fraudulent…an employment tribunal in my favour hasn’t got me the cash I am owed (yet), but it does validate my experience.

2024 was the year I swallowed my pride and chose security and safety over adventure, leading to renewed confidence in my abilities as a coach, strategist, innovator.

2025 has been the year that I found balance again, not through miraculous overnight success, but through consistent experimentation, community building, and leveraging technology to punch above my weight class.

Innovation isn’t about having the perfect conditions, it’s about making moves despite imperfect ones. The people succeeding with AI aren’t necessarily the most technical; they’re the most willing to experiment, fail publicly, iterate quickly, and bring others along.

We’re in a fascinating moment where adoption is driven by emotion more than logic. People’s resistance to AI isn’t about capability, it’s about identity, fear of judgment, and deeply held beliefs about what “real work” looks like. Understanding this matters more than understanding the technology itself.

Community trumps content. High-touch, hybrid models, physical and digital spaces where people can process, experiment, and support each other, are where real transformation happens. Not in another $7 course promising overnight results.

I’ve watched this demographic, my peers, struggle with AI adoption more than any other group. It’s not about technical capability; it’s about professional identity and decades of being told that shortcuts equal cheating, that struggle equals virtue, that “real” expertise means doing everything yourself.

But economic pressure, watching younger colleagues advance, and seeing peers quietly succeeding will shift this. Gen X women have 20-30 years of deep domain expertise that, combined with AI, becomes unstoppable. They’ll stop apologizing for using tools and start dominating their fields. I’m watching it happen in my community already, the moment someone gives themselves permission, everything changes.

I’ve explored building SaaS myself. I’ve watched the explosion of AI coaching apps, productivity tools, and “revolutionary” platforms that are essentially the same AI wrapper with different branding. The market is approaching saturation, and most will fail, not because the technology doesn’t work, but because they’re built on assumptions rather than real user needs.

The bro-culture approach of “ship fast, monetize faster, scale or die” ignores that behaviour change requires trust, time, and human connection. Apps can facilitate transformation; they can’t replace the messy, non-scalable work of actually supporting humans through change. The survivors will be those who understand this distinction.

This isn’t nostalgia; it’s pragmatism. As AI handles more transactional work, the value shifts to interpretation, application, and collective sense-making. People don’t need another tool—they need spaces to figure out which tools matter and how to use them in their specific context.

The Wire, (Oxford Innovations Community Platform that I helped build) hitting 1,000 members isn’t just a personal milestone, it’s proof that people will commit to communities that offer real support over scalable content. 2026 will see a flight to quality: smaller, more intentional communities where the ratio of support to noise is high. Physical meetups, regional hubs, and hybrid models will outperform purely digital platforms.

I’m not building a unicorn. I’m building something sustainable that serves real people solving real problems. I’m leveraging AI not to replace human connection but to create more of it—to handle life’s logistics so I can focus on strategy, to draft content so I can refine messaging, to analyse patterns so I can serve my community better.

2026 will be about deepening, not just expanding. The Emerging TEC Incubator launches. The next books in my Everyday Innovation series come to life. The Wire evolves. And I’ll keep showing up, on stages, in communities, online and off—proving that ordinary people who understand at a visceral level how technology can both help and hinder are exactly who should be leading this revolution.