A businesswoman who is helping project management consultants and entrepreneurs to navigate the brave new world of Artificial Intelligence has won a ‘Brand of the Future’ award.
Lidia Plartus founded The GPT Lab with the aim of using skills honed over two decades in project transformation and business analysis combined with AI technology to reduce administrative workload by 30–40%, recover over 10 hours a week, and increase project delivery capacity by 20–30% without extending working hours or adding headcount.
The Brand of the Future award from Big Business Events recognised Lidia’s agency for its ability to help project managers embrace technology and use it to their advantage, such as through creating AI-powered project manager personas that give leaders back time to focus on strategy, not admin, and blending AI and operational insight to build smarter workflows and scalable efficiency.
Lidia is well versed in bringing the AI and the real worlds together and helping them integrate.
“My background is in projects and transformations but more specifically bridging the gap between business and technology,” she said.
“Too often, business talks business, IT talks IT, and neither of them talk each other’s language.”
When Lidia was made redundant three years ago and her marriage broke down, she found herself forced to forge a new career using the skills she had accrued during two decades in project development.
“I was made redundant, in a volatile job market which provided its own opportunities. After a couple of short contracts in the construction industry, I sussed out within a year that the job market is not something I can rely on, so I decided I had to figure out what I am going to do as a business to sustain myself.”
“It turns out 50-year-olds like me, have been almost written off by employers so I decided to build my own AI agency.
“My family unit was disintegrating at the same time, my husband left to be with somebody else, and I did not have a stable income. I had to sell the house and decided to focus on building my AI business.”
She realised that her experience building AI systems gave her an advantage in helping businesses navigate the challenges and opportunities of emerging technologies.
“It is a complete new chapter from all perspectives, but it is building on skills I already have – I understand technology, I understand software, I understand tooling, I understand change and transformation, the way people work, and how technology and people can achieve synergies.”
Lidia claims too many businesses are rushing to embrace AI without really understanding the potential benefits and pitfalls. “Everybody is running towards automations and agentic AI but they are not actually mastering the fundamentals,” she added.
“From experience with other projects and other transformations I have managed, if you do not cover the foundations, gaps will show later on in unpredictable ways, creating chaos rather than seamlessly achieving results.
“With AI, you either get too scared and get left behind or you run too fast and you run into problems. It is like riding a bicycle – at first you have your stabilisers and it is when you get the confidence that you are able to go fast.”
Lidia says it is also important to realise that AI is not a magical fix for struggling businesses.
“I have been an analyst for 20 years and I see issues before they happen – the issue I see is that people are going for these fancy tools before they are ready and they are not going to work for them,” said Lidia.
“No complex technology will solve a broken system. You must fix those first. A simple tool that solves a problem is better than a complex tool that creates problems.”
For more information and to contact Lidia, visit her LinkedIn profile or email [email protected].
