Learn, Unlearn, Repeat

Learning starts when you leave your comfort zone

For Inez, this mindset has shaped her career from the very beginning.

Originally trained in engineering rather than communications, she deliberately stepped into an unfamiliar world. At just twenty years old, she travelled alone from Singapore to New York with only $400 in her pocket, determined to learn from the world's leading creative agencies.

That journey eventually led her into advertising and laid the foundation for a career defined by curiosity rather than certainty.

"It's not good enough to incrementally shape my mindset with new knowledge. I literally need to break my own mode of thinking and rebuild a new one."

The real competitive advantage: learning—and unlearning.

One pivotal moment came during a business trip to Shanghai, where meetings with Alibaba and Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) fundamentally changed how she viewed digital growth.

From e-commerce to social commerce, from TikTok Shops to generative AI and agentic workflows, every new wave required abandoning old assumptions before adopting new ones.

"The ability to learn and unlearn at tremendous speed and be bold enough to strategically apply these new learnings has been critical."

Rather than seeing agility as reacting faster, Inez describes it as stretching your thinking into entirely new ways of understanding.

AI is exciting—but it's still early.

Today, Inez's role is centered on helping Unilever become an AI-centric organization.
Her team is transforming how content is created across global beauty brands, enabling social-first production at a scale and speed that simply wasn't possible before.
Interestingly, she doesn't see AI and social media as separate transformations.

"The culture of social-first play is actually intersecting with technology at exactly the right time."

As platforms increasingly reward creative quality over paid reach, brands need a constant stream of relevant, culturally nuanced content.
Generative AI helps make that possible, not by replacing creativity, but by enabling it to move at the speed consumers expect.

While AI opens enormous opportunities, Inez is equally realistic about its challenges.
Organizations are still learning how to manage infrastructure, governance, costs and entirely new talent models.

"Every day I'm learning new things. We are learning new ways of optimizing the infrastructure, the system and making sure we're hiring the right agentic talent."

For her, AI transformation is not a finished playbook. It's an ongoing learning process.

Great leaders simplify complexity.

Throughout her career, Inez credits several leaders for shaping her thinking.
Some taught her how to ask sharper questions. Others demonstrated how empathy and strategic clarity can coexist.

One lesson stood out above all others when discussing successful AI leadership:

"The one cut-through approach is simplicity."

Instead of getting lost in the complexity surrounding AI, the best leaders repeatedly return to fundamental questions:

What problem are we solving? What outcome are we trying to achieve?

The technology changes almost daily. Good strategy does not.

Keep learning from everywhere.

Even as one of the leaders driving AI transformation at Unilever, Inez continues looking outside her own organization for inspiration.

She points to companies like Coca-Cola that are building scalable AI-powered content ecosystems and believes the fastest way to evolve is to continuously learn from others rather than trying to reinvent everything yourself.

"We're constantly learning from the markets, constantly learning from different functional leaders. That gives us accelerated speed in learning, unlearning and applying it strategically."

For Inez, curiosity isn't simply a personality trait. It's an operating system.

My takeaway 

In a world transformed by AI, the greatest competitive advantage isn't knowing more, it's being willing to continuously learn, unlearn and simplify.

And if you have any questions to our contributors or me, just let me know.
Gordon

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