From Corporate Burnout to AI Entrepreneur: My Story

I left a career in corporate finance after fifteen years. I am not going to sanitize that transition into a clean narrative arc of vision and courage, because that would not be honest. The honest version includes exhaustion, doubt, a lot of uncertainty about whether I was being brave or just reckless, and a period of genuine confusion about who I was outside of my professional title.

It also includes AI, which entered my life not as a career strategy but as a life preserver.

What burnout actually feels like

Burnout is not just tiredness. Tiredness resolves with rest. Burnout is a specific combination of exhaustion, cynicism, and the loss of a sense that what you are doing matters. I had hit all three. I was competent. I was succeeding by conventional measures. And I felt, increasingly, like I was executing a script in a play I had not chosen.

The standard advice about burnout — take a holiday, find a mentor, clarify your values — all of it felt abstract in the face of a very concrete structural reality: I was in a well-compensated, demanding job that left no space for questioning whether I should be there.

Where AI entered

I discovered AI tools, initially, as a productivity aid. I wanted to get the same amount done in less time, creating margin. What I found was something more interesting: AI was extraordinarily good at the tasks I was doing mechanically, which left me increasingly clear about which tasks actually required me.

That clarity was uncomfortable. The tasks that actually required me — contextual judgment, client relationships, genuine strategic insight — were tasks that my organization was not particularly set up to reward. The tasks that AI could do — reporting, analysis, documentation, first-draft production — were the ones consuming most of my time.

I started to wonder what a business would look like if it were built around the former rather than the latter. The answer to that question became Managing Disruptions.

What I would tell myself

The fears were real. Financial instability is real. The loss of professional identity is real. The vulnerability of starting something new without the protection of an established institution is real.

What I underestimated was the cost of not leaving — of continuing to pay the toll of misalignment, slowly, indefinitely. That cost does not show up in your bank account. It shows up in your presence, your creativity, your ability to give your best to the things and people that matter most to you.

I do not know what the right answer is for you. I know that the question is worth asking honestly, and that AI — by clarifying what actually requires you — can be a useful instrument for that honesty.