I am Managing Director of Humaine, leading the agency’s growth across South Africa and the UK. My role sits at the point where client relationships, commercial strategy, retail expertise and Human-AI systems meet.

I spend most of my time helping retail brands and B2B organisations move from fragmented operations to smarter, more scalable marketing systems. Not selling them a platform or a campaign. Building the operational infrastructure that makes modern marketing actually work.

For the past 20 years, my obsession has been the shopper. How they think, how they move, what actually shifts behaviour at the point of purchase. That took me through running retail sales and marketing teams for large global corporates, then into building and leading my own retail creative agencies across South Africa and East Africa for close to 17 years. As Managing Director of 34° and 34° Kenya, I worked with some of the largest FMCG brands on the continent. As Retail Director at King James Group and Accenture Song South Africa, I worked across a portfolio that included Walmart, Puma Energy, Motus and Sportsman’s Warehouse.

What AI did was not change the question. It changed what was possible in answering it. The deep understanding of shopper behaviour, retail dynamics and campaign thinking that took two decades to develop can now be operationalised faster, smarter and at a scale that simply was not available before.

That is the foundation Humaine is built on. Human intelligence and experience, multiplied by AI systems that actually work in practice.

So the question I come back to every day is a simple one: can we help organisations grow faster without making things more complicated?

I believe we can. And the evidence is building.