My AI Leaders Journey
I joined the AI Leaders program with one goal: build a healthy foundation in AI.
Over the course of my career, I kept noticing the same gap. Customer service leadership needs to develop processes and improvements with a heavy emphasis on automation — making those processes as efficient as possible. I had plenty of experience documenting current-state processes so product and engineering teams could transform them into automation. But I knew there was a piece I was missing. I could hand off the “what” — I didn’t yet have the language for the “how.”
Walking In Nervous
If I’m honest, the first couple of days made me nervous. In the chat rooms, I saw people with heavy technical backgrounds, and I was coming in with 8 years in customer service — not a single line of code to my name. I’d walked in viewing AI as this big, scary,f technical world that wasn’t really built for someone like me.
If I’m honest, the first couple of days made me nervous. In the chat rooms, I saw people with heavy technical backgrounds, and I was coming in with 8 years in customer service — not a single line of code to my name. I’d walked in viewing AI as this big, scary, technical world that wasn’t really built for someone like me.
That changed fast. Once the actual training started, I realized my background wasn’t a liability in that room — it was the niche that was actually needed. In my conversations with Plato, reviewing the “personality” it was building around my profile, I got a real confidence boost: my background did have a place here
That changed fast. Once the actual training started, I realized my background wasn’t a liability in that room — it was the niche that was actually needed. In my conversations with Plato, reviewing the “personality” it was building around
What I actually learned
I learned the real framework of how AI works — not just how to use it, but how to make it follow our needs with intention. I expanded my thinking on ethical usage. And I got honest with myself about where my own technical stack still had gaps.
Principle 01
Ethics
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Trust, but verify
During Foundation 5, I ran an exercise that changed how I think about AI outputs permanently. I asked Claude to pull Cook County property records for a specific address. It returned accurate, sourced information — but it also told me exactly what it couldn’t access: private ownership details restricted from public pull. It didn’t fabricate. It didn’t guess. It told me its limits and pointed me to the government website directly. I went and verified it myself. The information held up. That moment taught me something I now build into everything: AI is only as ethical as the process around it. The tool didn’t make the decision — I did. My standard for HerMovement is the same. AI-generated outputs are never taken at face value. Every recommendation, every automation, every customer-facing message gets cross-referenced before it goes live. That’s not distrust — that’s accountability.
Applied in HerMovementPrinciple 02
Agency & Adaptability
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Meet people where they are
One of the clearest insights from this program was that AI responds to the signals you give it — and that means the way you prompt it is as intentional as the way you speak to a customer. I saw this come to life when I built the studio partner performance report for Good Girls Pole. The output wasn’t generic. It was specific to the studio, the data, the market, and the goal. The language felt like it came from someone who understood the situation — because I built the prompt to reflect that. That’s what agency means to me in an AI context: the operator still drives. I decide the tone, the goal, the guardrails. The AI executes inside that frame. And adaptability means I’m always adjusting that frame based on what the customer — or the studio partner — actually needs to hear.
Applied in HerMovementPrinciple 03
Efficiency
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Build the infrastructure first
Efficiency without a foundation is just speed toward the wrong outcome. The biggest operational insight from this program was about unique identifiers — the idea that you cannot trace a customer journey, measure funnel performance, or personalize at scale without a consistent way to attach data to a specific person across every interaction. I knew this instinctively from my Amazon escalation work. Seeing it named and systematized in an AI context made it click differently. In HerMovement, this means every member interaction — from first discovery to booking to post-class follow-up — is designed to attach to an identity. The automation tools aren’t just efficiency plays. They’re only efficient because the underlying logic knows who it’s talking to. AI doesn’t save time when it’s built on a broken foundation. I learned that early, and I built HerMovement with that in mind from day one.
Applied in HerMovementMy Personal AI Ethics Criteria
Before any AI tool earns a place in my stack, it has to pass four criteria. These aren’t guidelines I found online — they’re principles I built from experience and apply to every platform, workflow, and automation I design. Flip each card to read what it means and why it’s non-negotiable.
Section 1: WordPress AI Capabilities
Part of my learning in this program wasn’t just conceptual — it was applied. I documented four AI capabilities I actively implemented inside WordPress, each one chosen intentionally based on what the platform needed and what I was building toward. These aren’t tools I read about. They’re tools I vetted, tested, and used. Flip each card to see what it does and why it earned its place in my stack.
The Capstone:
HerMovement
Now that the program is finished, I’m proud of what HerMovement became. The app itself is one side of it — but the automation working behind the scenes to support both the studio owner and the consumer is the more powerful half.
Building the actual app taught me one set of skills. But the part that mattered most — the part I’d call the heart of the whole project — was the thinking behind how the automation treats each person in their journey: the perception, the logic, the judgment calls baked into every touchpoint. We had a specific lesson in the leadership track that forced me to sit with this directly, and it became my favorite lesson in the entire program.