What fireworks, toilet paper, and AI have in common

I usually start by warning people about two things: I speak fast, and my accent is thick. If you can’t understand me, you’re allowed to stop me and say, “Nam, slow down.”

I also have a reputation for running over time, which tells you something important about how my brain works. I care deeply about ideas, stories, and connections, and once I get started, it’s hard to stop.

A nonlinear career I never tried to “smooth out”

Before Monzo, I worked at Klarna in risk management. Before that, I was at the London School of Economics in organizational development.

Before that, I ran my own business in luxury fashion while working alongside the NHS at the same time: absolute opulence on one side, absolutely not on the other.

I helped launch London Fashion Week. Before that, I took a six-year career break and traveled across Southeast Asia. Before that, I worked at Renault in manufacturing. Before that, I did my MBA. And before that, I spent about ten years in India working in hospitality operations.

It’s a long, nonlinear career across multiple sector, and I built it at a time when career breaks weren’t really a thing. I took them anyway, happily.

I share all of this because if you had told me at any point earlier in my life that I would end up working in a bank (in finance) I would have laughed.

If you knew me in school, you’d be even more surprised. Monzo happens to operate in the finance space, but at its core, it’s a tech company. And I never thought I’d end up anywhere near technology.

I nearly flunked math, and I remember exactly how that felt

I nearly flunked math.

I got fifty-four in math in my tenth standard exams, which is roughly the GCSE equivalent of a grade five. It wasn’t great.

When I got my result, my dad (who is genuinely a supportive, amazing human) was devastated:

“Fifty-four? This is an embarrassment. You’re not going to go anywhere.”

I went into the bathroom, crying, tears streaming down my face, and then I looked at myself in the mirror and started laughing.

I was laughing because I thought:

“Great. I never have to do math again. I’ll never be assessed on math again.”

That, of course, was a lie.

When spelling becomes the only feedback you get

To make matters worse, I struggle with spelling, but only in English. Any phonetic language I speak or write is completely fine. If it sounds a certain way, that’s how you write it.

English doesn’t work like that. I have no problem reading, so I was never diagnosed with dyslexia. The simple truth is that I’m not great at writing.

That had consequences.

Any time I delivered work that involved writing, I felt deeply self-conscious. I felt unintelligent.

The first feedback was never about my ideas or my thinking. It was always, “Nam, spell-check this,” or “Nam, fix that spelling.”

Instead of critiquing my reasoning, people critiqued my mechanics. If you’ve ever experienced something similar, you know how dehumanizing that feels. You start to believe you don’t belong in the room.

Why I moved countries to learn how to think

When I was twenty-seven, I moved to the UK to do my MBA. I chose the UK very intentionally. I had options in the US and Australia, but I wanted to learn how to think.

The UK education system excels at teaching critical thinking, something I didn’t have the opportunity to develop in India.

At the time, there wasn’t even a post-study work visa, so I came here knowing I might have to leave. It was a gamble, but it was one I needed to take.

My first meaningful AI moment wasn’t ChatGPT

That’s when I had my first meaningful interaction with AI.

It was Grammarly.

For the first time in my professional life, I wasn’t being criticized for spelling. I was being critiqued for my ideas. That shift was revolutionary. It changed how I showed up. It changed how confident I felt. It changed how I thought.

That’s when I started to understand something fundamental: AI is a muscle. If you don’t use a muscle regularly, it weakens. Eventually, it stops working.

It’s exactly like going to the gym. If you haven’t been in a while, January first is painful. Your muscles hurt because you haven’t exercised them. AI works the same way. If you don’t practice, you don’t build strength.

2023: the year fear showed up in my work

In 2023, I wasn’t feeling strong at all.

I was working at Klarna when ChatGPT launched. There was a data scientist on my team (incredibly smart, very direct, not particularly warm) who told me flat out:

“Your job is going to become irrelevant in the age of AI.”

He was probably the fifth person on the planet to use ChatGPT. He was obsessed. I was offended. I thought it was rude, dismissive, and frankly wrong. And it immediately triggered fear.

What toilet paper taught us about control

That fear is where many people in organizations still are, especially in operational roles. The fear that your job is going to disappear. And here’s the thing about human beings: when fear shows up, rationality leaves.

We’ve all seen this before. During COVID, we collectively decided the thing we needed most in the world was toilet paper. Not medicine. Not food. Toilet paper.

To the point where governments had to issue public announcements reassuring people that toilet paper factories were still running. COVID had nothing to do with toilet paper. It had everything to do with control.

When uncertainty surrounds us, we cling to whatever small thing makes us feel safe. AI has created that same feeling of uncontrollability. And so people freeze, resist, or panic.

Fireworks, a two-year-old, and the shift from fear to curiosity

I saw this same dynamic play out in my own home.

My daughter is two. She is the light of my life. We’d just celebrated Diwali and Guy Fawkes Night, and fireworks were going off outside our window. She was terrified. “Mama, scared,” she said. “Cuddle.”

Of course we cuddled. But my husband and I realized that if we just kept comforting her without explaining anything, she might grow out of it eventually, or she might not. Instead, we leaned into curiosity.

We explained fireworks using something she understood. A matchstick. A match does nothing until you strike it with the right pressure. Fireworks are the same. They’re not mysterious monsters in the sky, they’re a reaction.

She’s not fearless now, and that’s good. A little fear keeps her safe. But she understands. She doesn’t need reassurance in the same way anymore.

That’s the shift organizations need to make with AI, from fear to curiosity.

AI has a longer history than most of us realize

To do that, you need to understand its history. AI didn’t suddenly appear in the last decade. In 1964, a scientist at MIT created a program called ELIZA. It used a simple psychiatric script.

If you said, “I’m feeling stressed,” it responded, “Why do you think you’re stressed?” It didn’t understand anything. It mirrored language.

And yet people felt understood.

So much so that the scientist’s secretary once asked him to leave the room so she could talk privately with the computer.

Over decades, AI evolved from rules-based logic to pattern recognition to large language models trained on vast amounts of data. Everything we use today (GPTs, gems, chatbots) sits on top of those foundational models.

Now we’re moving into agentic AI. Systems that don’t just respond, but take action. The models are richer, more vibrant, more capable. And we have a responsibility to translate what this means to our communities.

The moment AI stopped feeling theoretical to me

For me, the real shift happened when I started using AI in risk management. I needed to teach younger audiences how to think about risk strategically, not as a checkbox exercise.

So I used dating as an analogy. Red flags. Yellow flags. Green flags.

I had no idea how to turn that into content. I’m not a social media person. I’m an operations person. So I asked ChatGPT for help. It helped me storyboard, plan lighting, think through structure. What would have taken weeks took hours.

That’s when I realized something crucial: if you know the end goal, AI can help you build the steps.

Instead of making me obsolete, it made me more valuable.

When the limits you set on yourself start to disappear

The limitations I’d placed on myself (math, coding, building) disappeared. And that matters, especially because people teams are largely made up of women.

The UN estimates that 20%of jobs globally may be replaced by AI, and 30 to 40% of those roles are women-centered administrative jobs.

This is not a crisis, but an opportunity.

AI adapts to how you learn. It uses analogies, case studies, and examples. And the more I leaned into it, the more I saw my role shift from efficiency to transformation.

Why HR’s advantage is context, not administration

I’ve never had a formal HR qualification. I landed here sideways. But curiosity allowed me to blend my commercial background with people work. AI accelerated that transition.

HR’s real power lies in context. We understand the business horizontally and vertically. We’re close to the problem and close to leadership. AI can’t replicate that. It needs it.

HR was born during industrialization. We’ve never had a tech-driven transformation at this scale before, one that touches everyone.

I no longer see my role as administrative or regulatory. I see it as building people products and experiences that help humans become their best selves.

That shift unlocks commercial value.

We can coach leaders, influence culture, drive performance, and impact revenue. Not by handing over data, but by integrating insight, judgment, and humanity.

Innovation thrives where resources are limited. That’s why I run a tiny side business. It forces me to build tech stacks, research deeply, and become multidimensional. That learning feeds directly back into my work.

Protecting what makes us human in an AI-heavy world

Protecting human intelligence in this process comes down to a few things. One is reperception, the ability to decide what information matters. That comes from critical thinking. Tools like Pinterest remove that thinking. Your wardrobe doesn’t.

Adaptability matters because everything we know today will change. Deep thinking matters because insight doesn’t come from speed. At Monzo, Fridays are meeting-free. That’s my thinking day. Not productivity. Thinking.

Taste and judgment matter. So does multi-disciplinary expertise. And we need to acknowledge AI burnout. Sometimes the cognitive load is too much. Step back.

AI won’t take your job because it doesn’t have context. It removes repetition so you can do what matters.

The organizations that succeed won’t be the ones that wait. They’ll be the ones that experiment, learn internally, and build cultures of curiosity. Leadership has to model “we don’t know, let’s learn together.”

AI is just a tool, like Excel. Capability is what matters.

We get to decide what our value becomes next

As people professionals, we get to decide our future value. No futurist is doing that for us. This is a moment of access, especially for women. I can build and code now.

I nearly failed math. That still amazes me.

Become an Insider member (you don't have to pay a thing) to access exclusive content and templates designed for the modern people leader.