Who Is Asking

Every essay in this series arrives at the same place. Someone has to be there to ask. This is a short answer to who that is.

I write. I lead Women in AI Frankfurt. I am a former President of PWN Frankfurt. I run an eight-week programme for women navigating a career pivot. And I am, at the moment, doing the thing I teach.

Twenty years of my working life happened inside global organisations — ABB, Coca-Cola Hellenic, Sanofi. An MBA, a finance leadership track, then a move into People and Culture, building governance systems across more than a hundred countries. What I was actually doing, in all of it, was the same thing: finding where the lines were missing and drawing them. Connecting things that were sitting next to each other without touching.

That work is not finished. It has just changed rooms.

I came to most of what I know through questions I did not plan to ask.

The kind that arrive in a pause, when the schedule finally runs out of things to fill it with. The kind you find yourself asking at 2am, or in a garden, or in the middle of a conversation that was supposed to be about something else entirely. I have learned to take those questions seriously. They tend to know something before I do.

I am an Erickson Certified Professional Coach and a Positive Intelligence practitioner. What interests me now is learning, sharing, coaching, and the question underneath all three: how accomplished people change direction without losing themselves in the process. Not the pivot itself — pivots are just events. What interests me is who you are while it is happening, and who you find on the other side.

Where I am from

Lithuania, for the first half of my life. The second half has been split between Milan and Frankfurt, with working years in the Middle East and North and Central Africa. Those years taught me quickly that my way of doing things is a way, not the way, and that adapting is less about technique than about staying curious when the ground moves.

I grew up believing that everything is interconnected. That paying attention to what you cannot immediately explain is not a distraction from serious work — it is where serious work begins. I was a child who thought animals understood more than we admitted, that dreams carried information, that the world had more registers than the ones we were taught to read. I did not lose that entirely. I learned, for a while, to leave it in a different room. I am finding my way back to it.

I am married to an Italian. We have three children who are quite certain they are German. Ask me where home is and I will pause. My children have an answer I do not quite have myself.

On pivots

I have made many. From the outside a sequence of pivots can look smooth, each move sensible in hindsight, the whole thing reading as a plan. It is rarely experienced that way. A new role is exciting and it brings its own vertigo. A move is never one person's decision, because someone always has to follow. Nobody teaches you to be a parent. Nobody teaches you to lead. You are handed the title and expected to grow into it from the outside in, while the inside is still catching up.

What I have actually learned is not how to pivot. It is how to navigate. Stay curious. Explore before deciding. Adapt, and adopt what genuinely works. Keep going when the map runs out, which it does.

Which is also why I am careful with the word success. I would rather talk about being complete: knowing your gifts well, and knowing your shadows well enough that they stop quietly running things.

On AI

The essays are where I think that through rather than announce it. They are about artificial intelligence, but only in the way a mirror is about the person in front of it.

I came to AI in the summer of 2023, in a pause that felt accidental and now feels like arrival. What I found was not a tool that answered questions. It was something that asked me to think rather than to perform thinking. A mirror that revealed which questions I had never learned to ask — about myself, about what I was actually building, about the difference between a strategy that sounds right and one that is right for the person executing it.

What I keep returning to is this: AI is making our lives abundant, and abundance changes what is scarce. Attention. Judgement. Knowing who is asking. The interesting question was never how capable the machines get. It is what becomes more valuable about being human as they do.

I do not have a complete answer. I have a series of essays and a practice and the ongoing experience of sitting with the question rather than resolving it too quickly.

What I actually teach

The essays are occasional. The work is not. What I coach sits in a place almost nobody is looking at closely, and it is the reason this programme exists at all.

Nearly the whole conversation about AI right now is about hard skills. Tools, workflows, agents, automations. All of it real, all of it useful, and all of it learnable — or delegable, which is rather the point. AI is very good at that layer and will keep getting better whether or not any of us keep up.

The other half is barely being discussed. When the hard skills become abundant, the soft ones stop being soft. Judgement. Attention. Knowing what you actually want. Staying recognisable as yourself in work that increasingly sounds like everyone else's.

That intersection — mental fitness and AI, treated as one practice rather than two subjects — is where I work. There is a great deal of AI training available, and a great deal of coaching. Almost nothing assumes you need both at once, and in my experience you do.

The risk I care about is not that AI takes your job. It is quieter. That you hand over your thinking without noticing, and become very efficient at being no one in particular.

So the work is learning to use AI as a thought partner rather than a generic tool. One that helps you sound more like yourself rather than less. AI stays AI — an abundant source of everything that sits behind real feeling and real sense. You stay you.

And jobs are not only disappearing. This is also the era in which new ones get invented.

I write from Frankfurt, usually from the garden, in English with a Lithuanian ear and a German calendar. Frankfurt is my base rather than my subject. I work in English, and the people I work with are almost never in the same country as me.

The girl who believed everything was connected is still here. She is, it turns out, the one doing the asking.

What is here