Mentoring for AI driven products and management
Bring me a situation rather than a tool question.
Most executives have an opinion about AI and I have a practice.
The Mentoring Offer
AI driven products and management
Most of the people I help have to make AI work inside a real organisation, where the consequences are real and where legal, privacy or a board can stop them. That is the ground I know: AI and machine-learning products, data and analytics, customer experience, product management, and the coaching that goes with taking people through the change.
I built at Booking.com, where nothing shipped without data and anyone with a clean experiment could touch anything, and I work now at Danone, where the product is infant and medical nutrition and some lines simply do not move. Moving fast on evidence and refusing to break the things that matter are not opposites, and holding both at once is most of the job.
I also build private AI setups, mine and other people's: a system that holds your own expertise, your rules and your past decisions, so that you and your team stop starting from zero every time. Not for you if you want a ranking of which tools to buy.
Mentoring is the offer now. Coaching is a future upgrade.
The Silence
A few years ago a colleague with years of experience went silent in a meeting when someone demoed an AI tool, and I recognised the silence because I had been in it myself at Booking.com, when we built machine translation and automated the hotel descriptions and people asked us straight out whether we were replacing them.
That silence is not a failure. It is the threshold of a relationship, and it is the question underneath most AI programmes that stall.
Where I Can Help
Bring me a situation rather than a tool question.
The clearest fit is an AI initiative that has stalled in legal, privacy or security review and needs a shape that answers the objection rather than an argument that beats it, and close behind it are the two decisions that follow:
what to standardise centrally and what to let teams run, and whether an adoption plan survives contact with a board before it goes rather than after.
The quieter version is usually the one that decides whether any of it works, and it looks like a team that has gone silent since the tools arrived, an expert who has stopped contributing and whose knowledge you cannot afford to lose, or your own practice if you are senior and privately unsure whether you are using these things well.
The Triage
Three questions that change everything
Before you can work differently, you need to see your work differently.
What does the human need?
Some things require presence. Empathy, trust, the kind of attention that can't be simulated. We identify what only a human relationship can provide.
What can the AI handle?
Not everything deserves your energy. The repetitive, the predictable, the scale problems — let the machines carry those. Free yourself for what matters.
What requires you?
Your specific combination of experience, judgment, and intuition. The thing no model was trained on. That's where your value lives.
The Gardener
Not a consultant.
A gardener.
A consultant comes in, tells you what to do, and leaves. A gardener walks through the landscape with you, helps you see what's already growing, and shows you where to plant next.
WerkAnders works like a gardener. No frameworks imposed from outside. No "best practices" that ignore your soil. Instead: careful attention to what's actually there, and the patience to let the right things grow.
The bamboo grove at Arashiyama wasn't planted in a day. But someone had to know where to start.
The Ecosystem
Three domains, one vision
The Session
You can bring anything:
a question, an observation, a deck, an idea, something you are excited about or something you are afraid of.
We agree at the start what you want to walk out with, and we close on next steps you chose rather than on a report I write afterwards.
Not for you if you want a tool recommendation or a demo of what is possible. Come with something real and unfinished.