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.
From commercial law to AI
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 people, 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.
Then I spent ten years in the regulated environment, inside Mauritius's financial services sector. In that world, "we'll figure it out later" is not a compliance strategy. Every process has to be written down, auditable and defensible. It turns out that is exactly the standard AI needs too.
Why I built DAINTY
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 developed 9+ bespoke AI tools that I teach and implement in SMEs and businesses today. Real tools, running in real businesses, on Monday mornings.
I'm also on an LLM training journey with DTI, shaping how people interact with large language models: how they ask, how the model answers, and where it goes wrong. Doing, not talking about doing. It means that when I build an agent for your business, I know how it thinks from the inside.
I sit on the AI Collective Steering Committee in Cape Town, and on multiple boards as a Non-Executive Director, which means I see, up close and repeatedly, what happens when the people in the room aren't armed with the tools shaping the decisions being made in it.
I also host In Our Stride, a podcast and a mastermind. On the podcast, founders and business owners walk me through what lives in their heads and how they're building AI into the way their businesses run. The mastermind is where we do it together, every week.
I built DAINTY on one conviction: the people who have spent years mastering the human side of business are precisely the people who should be leading the AI era. Not despite their experience. Because of it. That goes double for every founder and business owner who built a business on relationships, judgment and trust, and now carries all of it around in their head.
NLP, psychology and how people change
My NLP Practitioner training and Diploma in Psychology mean 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 people talk themselves out of their own timing will do that to you (myself included!).
How I work now
It's also why my work starts with people. NLP was built by studying how experts think and making what they know teachable. Before anything gets automated, I get what your business knows out of the heads it lives in: yours, your team's, and the systems nobody has touched since 2019. Then I build the AI and automation that run on it. Start with the free AI Readiness Check, or see where to start.
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."
- Law. AI. People.
- 20+ Years
- Community Builder
- Africa
- MIT Network
- Builder of Things
- Occasional Walker