Most careers pick a lane. This one crossed them deliberately: newsroom, committee room, research desk, trading floor, lecture hall. Each room taught a different way of reading the same events, and the value sits in holding all of them at once. The map starts from today and walks back; each stop is where a lens was earned.
AI runs on energy. Energy runs on geopolitics. Geopolitics is moving faster than most institutions can read it. The route below is where the lenses that hold all three together were earned.
The practical version: read an institution's needs from the inside, place it in its industry, place the industry in its geopolitical environment, and connect the whole to the flows that actually move it: energy, capital and compute. The newsroom taught verification at speed. Parliament taught how decisions land. Amnesty taught standards of proof. Cambridge taught why structures outlast slogans. ADNOC taught what AI adoption takes inside a large institution, and what kills it.
One conversation can cover what usually takes five advisers, because the five advisers are the same person.
Senior Adviser, Anthesis Group (from 2026) · independent advisory · Forbes contributor
Geopolitical intelligence and AI-informed advisory for DFIs, sovereign funds and energy companies. A Forbes column on the AI-energy nexus. Briefings for the governments of the US, UK, France and Germany. Every lens on the route, in use on the same problem.
Stanford / DeepLearning.AI · Oxford Saïd · Google Cloud · LSE AI simulator
Adoption strategy earns more trust when you have done the coursework. Machine learning with Stanford and DeepLearning.AI, AI foundations for business at Oxford Saïd, generative AI leadership with Google Cloud, and an AI constraint simulator built for LSE teaching. Enough hands-on work to know what the systems can and cannot do.
Senior Specialist, CEO office, Global Trading · AI focal point, Downstream
Inside a major Gulf energy institution, energy, capital and geopolitics stop being separate subjects. Worked on operator-first AI adoption across trading and downstream: executive-approved, trader-tested, built with the front office rather than imposed on it.
PhD, political sociology, Cambridge · Visiting Fellow, LSE European Institute
The Revolutionary Configuration Matrix: how a movement or a state is built structurally predicts its durability better than the ideology it advertises. The lens for every "is this regime as solid as it looks?" question a client asks.
Regional researcher
Digital surveillance, civic space and Turkey's disinformation law, investigated to a standard newsroom deadlines never allow. Human-rights research is where evidence discipline becomes non-negotiable.
Senior broadcast journalist · deputy editor
The same newsroom, a different reader. Stories look different once you have sat where decisions land. In 2016 the analysis called the Turkish incursion into Syria before it happened; the US Intelligence Community later queried the method.
IWM Vienna · ECFR · Middle East Institute · SWP Berlin
Four fellowships across three continents. Where a reporter's instinct got tested against method, and a fast read had to become a defensible argument that survives peer review and a sceptical minister alike.
Specialist Adviser, Foreign Affairs Committee
The first crossing: from reporting on decisions to shaping them. Turning sprawling geopolitical questions into something a busy committee could actually use, and leading its official field visit to Turkey.
Senior broadcast journalist & correspondent
A decade reading Turkey, the Kurdish question, Syria, Iraq and Iran up close, in English and Turkish, for World Service, Newshour and Newsnight. You stop being impressed by titles and start watching what actors do under pressure.
Reporter
The first newsrooms, reporting in English and Turkish from Ankara. Where the habit started: ask the next question, and treat what a source says and what they want as two separate things.
BSc Philosophy, Middle East Technical University, 2004 · MSc Media, Politics and Communication, LSE, Chevening Scholar, 2008
Philosophy first: arguments taken apart until only the load-bearing ones remain. Then the LSE on how media, politics and power actually interact. The habit of asking what a claim would need to be true predates every job above it.
Turkey, the Gulf, Kurdish dynamics and Eastern Mediterranean security, briefed to the US, UK, France and Germany, with a prediction record the US Intelligence Community has queried.
AI adoption designed with operators rather than imposed on them, built inside ADNOC, signed off at executive level and tested on the trading floor.
Country and counterparty risk in portfolio terms: differentiated 12 and 36 month outlooks, sector-level calls, succession as the structuring lens on elite decision-making.
Your institution read against its industry, the industry against the geopolitical map, and both against the flows that move them: energy, capital and compute.
I work with a small number of clients at a time. If your question sits anywhere on this map, it is probably one I have already been paid to think about.
How I work with clients Get in touch