About

I've been a knowledge worker for 25 years. Most of that time inside the Microsoft ecosystem, building solutions, managing projects, watching smart people lose weeks to coordination, admin, and follow-up that should have taken hours. Nobody named it. It was just how work worked.

When I started AI advising, I did what everyone does first: I taught the tools. AI productivity, prompting and context engineering. I watched rooms full of capable people nod along and then go back to exactly the same patterns.

Nothing stuck. The AI tools weren't the problem. The workflows underneath were.

That's when I stopped recommending tools and started mapping work. Every knowledge task has three phases: capturing information, manipulating it, and refining the output. Most people use one AI tool for all three. That's like using a paring knife to debone a fish.

Now I work directly with leaders and their teams to redesign how work flows, so AI lands in the right place, the grunt work shrinks, and people get back to the decisions only they can make.

I'm the founder and principal of Rowan Advisory. I also co-design and deliver the AI Residency with Otago Business School. I work directly with every client and I'm accountable for the outcomes.

If something I've written here resonates, I'd welcome a conversation. rachel@rowanadvisory.co.nz