I Lost My Career on Maternity Leave. AI Helped Me Build a Better One. How redundancy, resilience, and relentless curiosity led me from management consulting to running an AI agency
- Apr 7
- 3 min read
By Selda Seyfi
After twenty years in management consulting and a hard-won partnership at a boutique firm, I thought I’d built something secure. Then, while I was on maternity leave with my second child, I got the call no one expects: the market had tanked and my role no longer existed. No transition plan, no soft landing. Just a full stop on a career I’d spent two decades building.
I could have spent months chasing a lateral move at the same level - an increasingly difficult proposition in a shrinking market. Instead, I made a decision that terrified me: I would teach myself AI.
Not because I had a background in technology. I didn’t. But because I’d spent my consulting career studying how businesses adapt to disruption, and every signal told me the same thing: artificial intelligence was about to reshape the operating model of every industry I’d ever advised. If I was going to rebuild, I wanted to build towards the future, not away from it.
So I started coding. My first AI automation took eight weeks of work -eight hours a day, every day, fitting study into nap times and late nights after the kids were asleep. I cannot overstate how brutal those weeks were. I had no mentor, no roadmap, and two children under three. There were days I wanted to throw my laptop out the window. But consulting had taught me one invaluable skill: the ability to sit with a problem you don’t yet understand and keep pushing until the framework reveals itself.
When that first automation worked, something shifted. Clients responded. They didn’t care about my credentials - I didn’t have any.
They cared that I could identify an operational bottleneck and build something that actually fixed it. My consulting background wasn’t a liability; it was the differentiator. I understood business problems at a strategic level and could now solve them with technology.
Within months, I launched my own AI agency. Today, I’m approaching my first five-figure month. But the revenue isn’t really the story. The story is what I’ve learned about where AI is actually creating value, and what that means for leaders trying to stay relevant.
The industries most vulnerable to AI disruption aren’t the ones people expect. Yes, manufacturing and logistics will transform. But the greatest near-term disruption is hitting knowledge work: consulting, legal services, financial analysis, marketing - any field built on synthesizing information and producing recommendations. These were the industries I advised for twenty years, and the tasks that once took a junior team a week can now be completed in hours.
That doesn’t mean those professionals are obsolete. It means their value has to shift upstream - to judgment, relationships, and creative problem-solving that machines cannot replicate.
The leaders who will thrive are the ones who stop treating AI as a threat to be managed and start treating it as a tool to be mastered.
My advice to any founder or leader navigating this moment: don’t wait for the perfect conditions to upskill. I learned AI while sleep-deprived, mid-crisis, and utterly unqualified on paper. The barrier to entry has never been lower. The cost of waiting has never been higher.
Redundancy didn’t end my career. It ended the version of my career that was vulnerable to disruption, and forced me to build one that isn’t.
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