Let's skip the part where
I only list my credentials and
hope you're impressed.
You've read bios like that. Probably written one. The kind that sounds like a LinkedIn profile had a baby with a press release: technically accurate, emotionally vacant, and about as compelling as a terms and conditions document.
So here's a different version. The true one.
Let's be honest. If you've typed "how to use AI in my business" into Google recently and immediately felt worse about yourself. You're in the right place.
The internet will happily sell you seventeen tools, four masterclasses, and a productivity system designed by someone who apparently doesn't sleep. What it won't do is ask: what do you need? And who do you need to stay, through all of this?
That's where I come in.
I'm Esmarie. I started in law. Two decades across commercial firms in South Africa and the UK, then a decade embedded in Mauritius's financial and legal sector. I also spent time at Virgin South Africa helping establish the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship in Johannesburg, which taught me more about people than any boardroom or office ever did.
Here's a thing about lawyers: they are, as a profession, allergic to change. They love precedent. They cite things from 1987 with tremendous confidence. So when AI arrived and I watched an entire industry collectively pretend it wasn't happening. I recognised the pattern. I'd seen it in boardrooms too. Brilliant women, decades of hard-won expertise, sitting at tables where AI was being discussed about them rather than with them. With a flooding of tech-bro preachers, rushing towards an imaginary finish line, I felt lost and unrepresented in the AI revolution.
I decided that wasn't going to be my story. And it doesn't have to be yours either.
I moved early. I built deliberately. I now hold dual Microsoft and Anthropic AI credentials, and I've built a number of SaaS ventures, two of which are SmartJoe (Mauritius's first AI-powered company secretary platform, because compliance shouldn't require a small miracle) and Tributes.ai, a white-label AI solution for funeral homes and grieving families. Yes, I work across the full spectrum of business and life admin. Incorporating your business to honouring your people. Consider it covered.
I'm South African Chapter Lead for AI-Powered Women, an MIT-anchored leadership platform with over 5,000 members across 50+ countries. I sit on multiple boards as a Non-Executive Director, which means I see, up close and repeatedly, what happens when the women in the room aren't armed with the tools shaping the decisions being made in it. I also lead STRIDE, a walking mastermind for women in leadership in Mauritius. We walk. Movement is a strategy, not a metaphor. And also, fresh air makes everything clearer.
I built DAINTY on one conviction: the women who have spent years mastering the human side of business are precisely the women who should be leading the AI era. Not despite their experience. Because of it.
My NLP Practitioner training means I don't just understand what people say they want. I understand how they're wired to make decisions, avoid change, and finally, finally move. Two decades of watching brilliant women talk themselves out of their own timing will do that to you (myself included!).
Everything I teach sits at the intersection of AI strategy and the psychology of how humans change, rooted in a deep understanding of the corporate world. You don't need more tools. You need the right ones, in the right order, held by someone who understands that you're not a workflow. You're a person with a business to run, a career to grow and a reputation to protect.
The window is open. I'm a few steps ahead. And I genuinely built this so you don't have to figure it out alone.
Come in. We walk, we laugh, and occasionally, we change the trajectory of a career.
"This isn't about replacing you with AI. It's about making you irreplaceable because of it."
Esmarie Swanepoel
