Most organizations don’t have a skills gap. They have a measurement gap. They fund dashboards, AI workflows, and automation infrastructure and leave communication, trust, and influence to luck. The assumption underneath: those things can’t be trained. They’re either there or they aren’t. That assumption is wrong. And it’s costing companies more than they know. I’ve spent my career at the exact intersection where that gap shows up and where it hurts most.

At 15, I launched my first company: DGRwear, a sustainable fashion label built around traditional Greek knitting. The women who made those garments didn’t learn their craft from a manual or a training module. They learned through years of practice, feedback, and repetition through doing it wrong until they did it right. That was my first real lesson in how skills actually form. Not through information. Through deliberate practice. Years later I took that understanding into the engine room of a Fast 100 AI scaleup. At Aptivio, I ran global talent development from the new hire onboarding, the performance reviews, to the learning infrastructure. I had the mandate, the tools, I built the programs and measured the outputs. And I watched behavior not change.

Sellers completed the modules. Managers attended the sessions. Playbooks were built and distributed. Three months later, the same conversations were being lost the same way. Knowledge was transferred. Behavior wasn’t. That’s not a people problem. It’s a model problem. That observation became Dextego; an AI coaching platform built on behavioral intelligence and real-time coaching, because the gap between knowing your pitch and executing it under pressure is exactly where deals are lost and sellers churn.

My TEDx talk, Why Self-Awareness Is the Most Powerful Skill in the Age of AI argues that self-awareness isn’t a personality trait. It’s a trainable competitive edge. My book CEO Energy extends that thesis: what actually separates leaders who command a room from those who merely occupy it. The through-line across all of it: in a world where AI handles everything transactional, the skills that compound are human ones. The question I build around is how you make those skills measurable, trainable, and repeatable at scale.

Recognitions: Top 100 Powerful Women in Sales 2025 · TiE NJ GRIT Award 2025 · SalesIntel Top 300 Women in SaaS 2025 · 50 Female Founders to Have on Your Radar 2025 · Education 2.0 Young Leader Award 2024 · FACC Cross Cultural Educator Award 2024 · Top 100 Entrepreneur and Innovator 2024