Work with Abi
I spent twenty years helping the biggest companies in the world listen to billions of people. Now I help the people those companies weren’t built for.
The people who find this work tend to share a profile: they lead organisations, build independent practices, or shape strategy at the intersection of AI and human intelligence. They come from companies like Google, Spotify, McKinsey, and Edelman, and from solo practices, non-profits, and early-stage ventures on four continents.
What they share is that they’ve outgrown the dominant AI narrative and they’re looking for the structural conversation underneath.
If that’s you, here’s how we go further.
AI Education
The Billion Person Focus Group® Intensive
I teach a practice called Listening Craft — using AI as a medium for hearing what people are reaching for but can’t yet say. The methodology at the centre of that practice is the Billion Person Focus Group®, taught as a two-day weekend intensive through Maven.
Participants learn to build their own intelligence architecture — a Village of AI systems, knowledge bases, and multi-model workflows designed around the craft of listening rather than the mechanics of extraction. The methodology works on any platform. It doesn’t depend on a single model, a single company, or a single subscription. You own everything you build.
The methodology was designed for practitioners who work independently — founders, consultants, fractional leaders, solo researchers — as much as for teams inside organisations. You don’t need a department. You need a practice.
Lightning Sessions
I run free Lightning Sessions — live, interactive, 30-60 minutes — where I demonstrate the methodology on a real question in real time. No slides. No theory. You watch the practice work, and you decide if it’s what you’ve been looking for.
If you want to see Listening Craft before you commit to the intensive, this is where to start.
Team Training & Mentoring
If you lead a team or an organisation and need to make AI decisions that don’t flatten your culture or your people’s intelligence — this is the engagement for that.
I’ve mentored and advised over 500 founders and teams globally through programmes including Google for Startups, Techstars, and AllTechIsHuman. That work taught me something: the teams that thrive with AI aren’t the ones that adopt it fastest. They’re the ones that design the relationship on their own terms.
I work with leadership teams, research teams, strategy teams, and innovation functions to build Listening Craft into how they work. Not a one-off workshop. A sustained engagement where your team learns the methodology, builds their own intelligence architecture, and develops the practice of using AI as a medium for hearing rather than a machine for producing.
This looks different for every organisation. Sometimes it’s training a research team to use the Billion Person Focus Group methodology on their own questions. Sometimes it’s mentoring a leadership team through their first AI strategy that centres listening over automation.
What stays the same: your team ends up with a practice they own, infrastructure they control, and a relationship with AI that makes them more intelligent — not more dependent.
Speaking & Keynotes
I speak about what I write about — but live, and with the room in the conversation.
Recent and upcoming talks include:
‘The Large Listening Medium’ — why the insights industry built tools that speak when it needed a medium that hears.
‘What Your Tools Can’t Hear’ — the hidden history of research methods and the fork the industry faces now.
‘We Raised an Orphan and Called It Intelligent’ — what happened when we built an intelligence and forgot to teach it how to listen.
My audiences tend to be senior leaders, founders, and practitioners navigating the AI transition — people who are past the hype cycle and looking for the structural conversation underneath.
If you’re organising an event, a conference, a panel, or an internal session and the AI conversation needs a different voice in it — let’s talk.
Advisory & Consulting
Before I became a writer, I was a practitioner. Nearly two decades leading research, insights, and strategy for organisations including Google, Meta, Apple, Uber, Microsoft, eBay, Nike, Burberry, P&G, Unilever, Nestlé, Diageo, and American Express.
I know how large organisations think about data, about users, about AI adoption. I also know what they miss.
Most AI consultants help you adopt tools. I help you design relationships with intelligence — sovereign systems that you own, that deepen over time, and that hear what off-the-shelf tools can’t.
I take on a small number of advisory engagements — typically founders, leadership teams, agencies or organisations at a decision point with AI where the standard playbook isn’t enough. If that’s where you are, let’s talk.
Get in touch
If something here speaks to what you’re building, I’d like to hear about it.
If you’re building something that matters and the AI conversation around you feels like it’s missing the point — it is. If you’ve been looking for the third path between worship and rejection — you found it.
I read everything. I reply to what resonates.