Lidia Plartus, founder of The GPT Lab, has received a ‘Brand of the Future’ award for her work helping consultants and entrepreneurs apply artificial intelligence within project environments.
Her consultancy brings together two decades of experience in transformation programmes and business analysis with AI-enabled tools designed to reduce administrative workloads, recover time and increase delivery output without additional staffing.
The Big Business Events award acknowledges her support for project professionals adopting AI, including the creation of intelligent project manager profiles and the integration of automation into structured workflows to improve efficiency.
Her expertise centres on connecting organisational objectives with technological capability.
“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.”
Following redundancy and major personal changes, she established her own business to create a sustainable career.
“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 views her previous experience in systems, tooling and organisational change as central to her current work.
“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 cautions against adopting AI without proper preparation.
“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.”
She stresses that strong processes must come before advanced tools.
“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]
