CEO: Brain eBox | Workplace Learning Solutions | Host of the HR on the Brain Podcast | CEO: Lead with Sheree | Speaker | Passionate about developing leaders | Get in touch: sheree@thebrainebox.com

You’ve built a reputation for delivering great L&amp;D work - facilitating training, designing programs, and running onboarding. People trust you to get things done.But to grow into your next role, it’s not just about great work anymore.Now, it’s about influence, alignment, and leadership.You’ve got great ideas, but they’re not always landing.You want to be seen as a strategic partner, but you’re still treated like a service provider.You’re ready to grow, but what you need isn’t tucked inside another course.You need real-world support from someone who understands what L&amp;D excellence looks like - and how to lead it.That’s where I come in.I’m Sheree Comninellis, L&amp;D Executive and mentor for emerging L&amp;D leaders.I help L&amp;D professionals like you step into leadership.If you’re ready to lead, start here:📬 Executive Moves — my 5-minute weekly leadership edge for ambitious L&amp;D professionals.Each edition gives you:📌 1 bold insight to reframe how you lead📌 1 practical move you can apply immediately📌 1 growth resource to help you go deeper➡️ Get Executive Moves here: https://dashboard.mailerlite.com/forms/589169/98676779613423573/share.💡 Want to go further?Join the waitlist for The L&amp;D Professionals Collective - a monthly membership that helps you grow your confidence, visibility, and strategic influence, so you can be recognised as ready for L&amp;D leadership.Inside, you’ll get monthly live sessions, coaching, and practical tools designed to help you bridge the gap between delivering learning and leading it.➡️ Learn more and join the waitlist here: https://leadwithsheree.com/ldprofessionalcollectivewaitinglistMore about me:I live in Cape Town with my wife and beautiful children. I love historical fiction, good coffee, and my all-time favourite series is Gilmore Girls.

Sheree Comninellis (she/her)

Product Manager @ Flexa Careers

I thrive in messy and ambiguous situations where you need to move fast and figure things out as you go. An eclectic background demonstrates my aptitude to up skill fast, my appetite for growth and my ability to adapt.
At UnlikelyAI, I lead client engagements for neurosymbolic AI solutions in financial services, accountancy and insurance where the stakes are too high for the probabilistic outputs generated by LLMs. I run discovery, scope technical solutions and translate between what the technology can do and what the business needs. 
Before this, I was Head of Product at Flexa where I owned the full B2B2C product lifecycle. I've founded two businesses and have a PhD in exercise physiology - the analytical rigour carried over even if the domain didn't!

Dr. Ailish McLaughlin

Every real opportunity I've ever had came from someone I know.

A person I met. A virtual coffee someone said yes to. Someone who pointed me in the right direction when I didn't know what the right direction was.

I joined SoundBoard because I wanted to return the favour. To be that advice and guidance for someone else who needed it.

But in the two events I've been a part of so far, I've got just as much as I've put in. Probably more.

Last night was a supper club full of inspiring leaders. And what really struck me was how open everyone was. Often rounds of introductions can feel a bit superficial. These were personal, real and honest. And that openness carried into the conversation itself which was full of deep chats, empathetic ears and seasoned advice.

A testament to what Eimear and Dave are building. And a community I'm really honoured to be part of.

Solutions Lead @ UnlikelyAI | Enterprise AI for Regulated Industries | Product and Technical Pre-Sales

When I was stuck on homework as a kid, my mum never told me to try harder.

She told me to go do something easy. Pack my bag for the next day or do my reading. Something that didn't need much brain power. And then to go back to the hard thing. 

It almost always worked. My brain needed the space to quietly process the complex stuff in the background. And the easy tasks gave it that space without fully disconnecting. 

I still use this all the time. 

When I can't get going after a long week, I'll start with the small stuff: tidying my calendar, responding to Slacks, organising my to do list. It builds momentum. And once I've started, it's so much easier to keep going. 

When I'm stuck on something complex, I'll switch to a few quick tasks to give my brain a rest. I almost always come back with a clearer head. 

And on the hard days, the ones where life outside work makes deep focus feel impossible, that busy work is a relief. A way to still be productive without demanding too much from myself. 

Busy, manual work gets a bad reputation. But it's been one of my most reliable productivity tools for years. 

Which is why the push to automate all of it with AI gives me pause. 

Yes, we can go for a walk or fold laundry (because AI can't do that yet, unfortunately). And that does give your brain a break. 

But there's something about staying connected to the work, while giving your brain space from the hard parts, that matters too. 

I'm not saying we shouldn't outsource busy work, I do it regularly. I'm just surfacing what we might quietly lose in the process.

AI doesn't make you stupid. But it can quietly encourage your brain to stop doing the work itself.

And that's worth paying attention to.

I'm launching a podcast for people who use AI and want to get the most out of it. But who also worry about the consequences.

The first episode drops next week. We're talking about how to use AI without letting your brain go on autopilot.

Details coming soon.

So many of the conversations I have about AI come down to the same thing.

The gap between what it promises and what it actually delivers.

And this gap exists for a reason. Most AI systems are built on large language models. And LLMs are probability machines, not truth seekers. They predict the most likely next word based on patterns in data. Which makes them incredibly useful for some things. And fundamentally unreliable for others.

In regulated industries, this is where AI ambitions fall apart. When you need to audit the output, defend it to a regulator, or trust it enough to act on it, probability isn't good enough.

We wanted to go beyond the anecdotes. So we surveyed 1,000+ senior leaders across the UK to find out where AI is genuinely being useful, where it's falling short, and what trust actually looks like in practice.

On March 12th, we're sharing the results for the first time at AI Trust Forum 2026.

It's our first in-person event and it's limited to 150 seats. An evening of unreleased national research and candid conversation with senior peers from the likes of Lloyds, NatWest, JP Morgan, Deloitte, Grant Thornton and Novartis.

If you're accountable for AI strategy, ROI or transformation impact, you need to be there.

Thursday 12 March. Uncommon, Holborn. Drinks from 5pm, presentations from 5:45pm. Registration closes March 5th.

Link to apply below. Or DM me for more info.

I don't need AI to manage my inbox or be my personal assistant. But it has still transformed how I work.

Sorting emails takes me time, but it's not what slows me down. What slows me down is staring at an empty document trying to figure out where to start. And for that, AI completely clears the hurdle. Brainstorming, creating first drafts, structuring ideas and building out technical documents is where it unlocks real capacity for me.

But, in the echo chamber that is LinkedIn, if you don’t have 78 agents sorting every facet of your life, it can feel like you’re not doing it right.

I spoke to someone recently who's early in their sales career. Most of their day is spent writing outreach emails. But most of the AI use cases they'd been hearing about were things like personal assistance and task automation.

None of that mapped to their actual work. So their assumption was that they were failing with AI. When in reality those use cases are just completely irrelevant for them.

AI is for everyone. But not every use of AI is.

And to be honest, it’s worth remembering that if you’ve ever even touched chatGPT, you’re among the top 16% of users in the world…

If there's one thing the Anthropic/Pentagon/OpenAI saga has made clear, it's that AI will be used on us whether we like it or not.

Anthropic refused to allow mass surveillance and got blacklisted for it. That tells you everything you need to know about how institutions are thinking about utilising AI.

The only real defence? Understanding how it works. Not necessarily at a technical level. Just enough to engage with it intentionally rather than passively.

Once you understand that AI is a prediction machine, not a truth machine, things start to click. Hallucinations make sense. The impact of biases in training data becomes clear. And a healthy level of skepticism isn't paranoia, it's just good practice.

Episode 2 of Trust Issues drops tomorrow. We're joined by Rajasree R., a product lead for agentic observability at a major bank, who does an incredible job of breaking down jargony AI terms into something that actually makes sense.

We cover how AI learns (and why it's surprisingly similar to how we teach children), why hallucinations happen, and what agentic AI actually is.

Tune in to Trust Issues wherever you get your podcasts.

I think about AI a lot. How to use it better, but also what it means.

For our work. For our kids. For our brains and our biology.

Those two things coexist. And I don't think I'm alone in thinking like that.

I wanted somewhere to have both conversations at once. How do I get the most out of this? But also, what's the impact going to be?

Nuanced, but not overly technical. Thought provoking, but not all doom and gloom.

Ep 1 of Trust Issues dropped today (link in comments) and I'm pretty thrilled with the initial feedback. I'd love to hear yours too!

AI podcasts are either overly technical or overly tech-bro. But Trust Issues is something different.
 
It's a place to hear from people who really know AI, talking about the stuff that matters: how it works, how to use it well and how you can actually influence the direction it takes. 

All delivered with humility and hopefully a few laughs too.

Episode 1 drops tomorrow. I'm joined by Paru and our guest Florence J. to talk about when to actually use AI and how to stop it rotting your brain in the process.

Just one of the amazing things to come out of the conversation was the VERB framework. 

Florence uses four dimensions to decide whether a task is right for AI:

Value - how valuable is it for me to do this myself? 
Enjoyment - do I actually like doing this? 
Risk - what happens if it goes wrong? 
Burden - how much effort does it take?

Low value, low enjoyment, low risk, high burden? Hand it to AI.

Everything else? Start with a human.

Tune in to Trust Issues (wherever you get your podcasts) tomorrow for nuggets like this and so much more.

There are new AI tools dropping every single day. Inevitably, this leads to an onslaught of businesses, people and content that capitalise on this for clicks and likes.

Neither of these things are a problem. In fact they are an expected side effect. LLMs unlock capabilities that were previously impossible, and they also make it easier than ever before to build new applications.

But every post that reminds me there are 17 AI tools for creating a perfect image increases my anxiety that I'm falling behind. And that of someone who knows I don't even need one image creation AI tool.

All of these tools run on the same underlying technology. And knowing how that technology works and how to get good outcomes from it translates across all of them, if and when you might need to use one.

I've found that getting a good answer from Claude for a question uses many of the same skills needed to vibe code an app or prompt a video editing tool. 

And this gives me faith that the principles will keep on principling, regardless of the tool.

No alternative text description for this image

taplio

The Battle

Sheree Comninellis (she/her)

Dr. Ailish McLaughlin

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreDr. Ailish McLaughlin's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Sheree Comninellis (she/her)

Dr. Ailish McLaughlin

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Dr. Ailish McLaughlin's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreDr. Ailish McLaughlin's LinkedIn Performance