Leading the next era of work: people, AI agents, and accountability for outcomes.

Karina helps leaders design how people and AI agents work together, with clear authority, quality standards, and accountability for outcomes. She brings 20 years of enterprise technology leadership, including eight years leading an AI and digital function in regulated life sciences. Her talks connect strategy, governance, and the realities of implementation: plain language for executives, practical detail for practitioners, and lessons from building.

Sessions

Sessions draw on enterprise leadership experience and hands-on work with AI agents, and each ends with something the room can use on Monday. Titles and framing adapt to your audience.

Faster Isn't Smarter: A Systems View of Decision-Making at AI Speed

Keynote · 45 min, or 90 min as a workshop

AI accelerates decisions and action while the ability to observe consequences and learn stays slow. The result is an organization producing more without improving, and often generating rework somewhere it cannot see. Leaders leave able to separate usage from outcomes, decide where AI should advise and where it should act, and widen an agent's authority only as evidence accumulates.

The exercise they take home: put the team celebrating an AI productivity win in a room with the team receiving its output. Ask what it takes to trust that work, where rework appears, and whether the outcome actually improved.

For executives, transformation leaders and AI program owners. Upcoming: AI Builders Global Conference, 14 and 15 October 2026.

Governance Is the Accelerator

Keynote or briefing · 40 min + Q&A

When AI governance becomes a series of approvals, people find ways around it. Karina tells the story of building one that did the opposite: generative AI spreading through a regulated business with no function owning the enterprise risk, three options put to senior leadership, and the decision to widen governance so the affected functions became the decision makers. A cross-functional task force wrote the responsible AI policy with no incremental headcount. The CEO approved it. It created the governance foundation for the enterprise Copilot deployment and subsequent AI use cases.

What they leave with: the council operating model, intake and decision rights, and lifecycle guardrails. Plus the reframe that carried it: from "how do we control AI" to "how do we enable responsible use while protecting customer information, the company and its strategic options."

For CIOs, CTOs, risk, legal, compliance and quality leaders, particularly in regulated industries.

Assistant or Agent: What Changes When AI Starts Doing the Work

Talk, panel or fireside · 30 to 45 min

When AI starts carrying out work, leaders must decide how to divide responsibilities, grant authority, assess quality, and handle exceptions. Karina explores how work changes when people and agents share a workflow, and what must be in place before an agent is trusted to act.

What they leave with: a test for which work belongs to an assistant and which belongs to an agent, and the conditions that have to hold before an agent is allowed to act.

Her most adaptable session, and the strongest fit for panels and moderated conversation.

Build the Thing You Are Governing

A hands-on AI agent workshop for leaders

Workshop · Half day, or 4 × 90 min virtual

Leaders build a bounded agent prototype during the session, then test it against what decides whether an agent can be trusted in a real workflow: explicit permissions, quality criteria, and escalation rules for when it must stop and hand back to a person. Karina spent eight weeks building the agent system that now runs her own work, and the workshop distills what that taught her about the components of one and its organizational impact.

What they leave with: a working prototype they built themselves, the permission, quality and escalation rules they tested it against, and a clear-eyed list of what their own organization is not yet ready to let an agent do.

For leadership teams, executive education cohorts and university programs. No coding experience required. Caps at 15 for hands-on delivery.

Topics I cover

The work of the future. As AI expands what teams can produce, leaders must become more deliberate about what deserves to be done.

Enterprise AI strategy. What to consider and why: organizational strategy alignment, human-centered approach, architecture direction, build-buy-partner, model and platform selection, pilot-to-scale decisions.

AI transformation. Sequencing a transformation that lands: where to start, what changes in the operating model and in the work itself, and what makes adoption hold after the launch.

Agentic AI operating models. Where agents act, how authority widens, what has to be observable first.

Measuring value. Outputs versus outcomes, leading indicators, and why a usage dashboard is not evidence of value.

AI literacy at scale. Champion networks, communities of practice, change leadership that survives the launch.

Women building with AI. Stepping back from AI is not staying safe, it is giving up control and a seat at the table where decisions are made. What changes when you build instead of watch.

Booking

For booking, reach out to karina.mikucka@gmail.com

Virtual or in person, based in Boston. Every session is tailored to the audience. Workshops cap at 15.

Background

2026 – · Independent advisory, Boston

AI strategy and transformation for mid-market regulated businesses. Advisor to an agentic AI cohort on program design and participant outcomes.

2018 – 2026 · Head of Digital Business Solutions · Foundation Medicine, a Roche company

Progressive leadership roles across product management, IT governance, digital business solutions, and AI transformation.

Enterprise AI strategy and enablement, governance, platform strategy, delivery. Scaling platforms and organizational capabilities. Digital transformation.

2013 – 2018 · Senior Director, Product & Project Management · New York Road Runners

Built the product and project function; multimillion-dollar digital initiatives including the NYC Marathon Runfographics.

Earlier · McKinsey & Company · Wolters Kluwer · Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi · Nature Publishing Group

Credentials · MS Information & Knowledge Strategy, Columbia University · BS Applied Mathematics & Statistics and BS Economics, Stony Brook University

MIT: Applied Generative AI for Digital Transformation; Applied Agentic AI for Organizational Transformation. Harvard HDSI: Agentic AI and AI Evaluation. Project Management Institute's PMP, ITIL 5 Foundations, ITIL 4 Strategist, ITIL AI Governance, Kotter Change Certification.