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Rene Clayton

CEO | AI Strategist | Founder at Byte Strategy AI

St. Petersburg, Florida, United States

AI Solution Architect | Agentic AI | Product Innovation | Thought Leader | Responsible AI Governance | Keynote Speaker | Board Member

Available For: Advising, Authoring, Consulting, Speaking
Travels From: St. Petersburg, Florida
Speaking Topics: AI, Automation, Agentic AI

Speaking Fee $5,000 (In-Person), $1,500 (Virtual)

Rene Clayton Points
Academic 10
Author 228
Influencer 37
Speaker 0
Entrepreneur 20
Total 295

Points based upon Thinkers360 patent-pending algorithm.

Thought Leader Profile

Portfolio Mix

Company Information

Company Type: Company
Business Unit: Technoloy
Minimum Project Size: <$1,000
Average Hourly Rate: N/A
Number of Employees: 1-10
Company Founded Date: 2024
Media Experience: 9 years

Areas of Expertise

Agentic AI 33.43
AI 33.35
AI Ethics 30.21
AI Governance 30.20
AI Orchestration 64.74
Business Strategy 32
Cybersecurity 31.55
Generative AI 30.46
Innovation 31.88
Leadership 30.89

Industry Experience

Financial Services & Banking
Professional Services

Publications & Experience

1 Academic Certification
AI Leadership Institute
AI Leadership Institute
August 01, 2025
Grow your AI Consultancy & learn by doing with our AI Leadership Masterclass, Live Learning Labs & top rated certifications!

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Tags: Agentic AI, AI, Generative AI

29 Article/Blogs
Gemini 3.0 Changes Everything, The Rise of Autonomous AI Agents
Linkedin
November 18, 2025
Amazing News! The release of Google Gemini 3.0 Pro on November 18, 2025, represents a defining inflection point in the trajectory of artificial intelligence, signaling a decisive industry pivot from generative text interfaces to autonomous agentic workflows. This transition is not merely an iterative performance upgrade over the Gemini 2.5 architecture but a fundamental restructuring of how artificial intelligence interacts with digital environments, developer tooling, and enterprise operations.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

THE NEW REALITY FROM MONEY20/20 USA: TRUST, EXECUTION, AND THE END OF AI THEATER
Linkedin
October 28, 2025
From October 26-29, over 11,000 financial services leaders descended on The Venetian for Money20/20 USA, and the transformation was palpable. This wasn't the usual "AI will change everything" hype cycle. This was battle-tested operators sharing production numbers, deployment architectures, and hard-won lessons from scaling AI in the real world.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

OpenAI DevDay 2025: Welcome to the New AI Platform Era
Linkedin
October 13, 2025
ctober 2025 will be remembered as the month OpenAI transformed ChatGPT from a revolutionary chatbot into something far more ambitious: a platform ecosystem rivaling iOS and Android, but built for the generative AI age.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

When HubSpot Meets AI: The Quiet Shift Happening Inside Your CRM
Linkedin
October 12, 2025
This summer, HubSpot became the first CRM to launch a deep research connector with ChatGPT, fundamentally changing how teams interact with their customer data. The integration allows you to ask natural questions about customers, sales trends, or marketing performance and receive context-aware insights in seconds. This isn't automation for the sake of efficiency. This is an intelligence meeting intent.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

Ethical AI in 2025: Trustworthy Transformation
Linkedin
September 26, 2025
Artificial intelligence adoption is accelerating at an unprecedented rate in 2025, touching nearly every industry and redefining how businesses operate, innovate, and compete. However, amid this rapid ascendancy, a profound and complex challenge has emerged, how to govern AI ethically, responsibly, and sustainably.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

$530M later, here's what GenSpark AI actually delivers vs. what the pitch deck promised…
Linkedin
September 22, 2025
If you follow technology, you’re likely familiar with the constant stream of new AI tools hitting the market. Every day brings a new announcement, making it difficult to distinguish truly groundbreaking technology from clever marketing hype. It’s a landscape where promises are big, but verifiable details can be scarce.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

How AI is Revolutionizing Mortgages and Real Estate in 2025: Real Results, Real Impact
Linkedin
September 17, 2025
The mortgage and real estate industries are undergoing a seismic shift driven by Artificial Intelligence, with transformations that are no longer just predictions but real, measurable outcomes by 2025. From lightning-fast loan approvals that slash weeks off traditional timelines to AI-driven insights that personalize property recommendations like never before, the future is here and accelerating quickly

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

Tech-Savvy & Future-Ready: How Women Can Lead the Next Wave
Linkedln
September 11, 2025
As a woman that has grown up in tech and IT, I have typically been one of the few women in the room. Even in 2025, there is such a need for more of us to lean into technology roles. We bring a different perspective, our insights and creativity.

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Tags: AI Ethics, AI Governance, Innovation

The Small Business AI Revolution: How 60% Adoption is Rewriting the Playbook
Linkedin
September 07, 2025
While headlines focus on large corporations grappling with over-automation challenges, a different story is unfolding for small businesses. Recent data reveals that artificial intelligence is becoming a genuine growth engine for smaller enterprises, delivering measurable results without the complexity and risks faced by larger organizations.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

The GenAI Reality Check: What Your Business Needs to Know Right Now
Linkedln
September 01, 2025
The artificial intelligence areana has reached a critical inflection point. While global GenAI spending approaches $69.1 billion in 2025, a shocking MIT study reveals that 95% of enterprise AI pilots are failing to deliver meaningful results. This disconnect between investment and returns demands immediate strategic recalibration for business leaders, particularly in financial services, where regulatory compliance and operational efficiency are paramount.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

THE AI REVOLUTION IS HERE AND SMALL BUSINESSES ARE WINNING BIG!
Linkedin
August 20, 2025
The landscape of small business has fundamentally shifted, and the winners are clear. According to groundbreaking 2025 research from Salesforce's Small and Medium Business Trends Report and PayPal's comprehensive survey of nearly 1,000 small businesses, we're witnessing the most significant transformation in entrepreneurial history.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

Your First-Mover Advantage: OpenAI’s Game-Changing Agent Launch
Linkedin
July 25, 2025
OpenAI didn’t just introduce a new feature on July 17, 2025; they redefined what “digital work” or "better business" means. ChatGPT Agent isn’t another productivity tool. It’s truly a skilled virtual intern that can execute work across the web and your business stack. This isn’t fanfare. It’s already generating real returns for those who didn’t wait around.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

The $84 Million Question: Is "Ethical AI" the New Gold Rush? What if we actually paid for our training data?
Linkedin
July 22, 2025
Moonvalley, an AI video startup you've probably never heard of, just secured one of the largest funding rounds in generative AI this quarter. But here's the twist that has Hollywood executives and tech leaders taking notice, they're building their entire AI model on licensed content only

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

Ditching Google for My New Secret Weapon - Meet the AI ‘Swiss Army Knife’ That’s Changing Everything
Linkedin
July 09, 2025
If you’ve been following my work for a while, you know I love experimenting with tools that help me think, work, and create smarter, not just faster. Well, this month I finally found an AI assistant I can honestly call my “AI bestie”: Perplexity AI.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

Is Your Strategy AI-Proof? 5 Moves to Sidestep Irrelevance in 2025
Linkedin
July 08, 2025
Let's cut to the chase. In the time it took you to open this, another AI model probably learned a new skill. A little dramatic? Maybe. But consider this: a staggering 82% of companies now have a defined AI strategy in place for 2025, up from just 55% a year ago.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

The 20-Minute Career Hack That's Disrupting Business Today
Linkedin
June 11, 2025
While most professionals are grinding harder, a quiet revolution is happening in boardrooms across America. The secret weapon isn't another productivity app or management framework. It's something far more fundamental: strategic movement.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

While everyone’s distracted by ChatGPT, AI is silently reshaping trillion-dollar industries
Linkedin
May 26, 2025
Frontier AI models, those at the edge of capability, have evolved dramatically since November 2022(I personally say the before/after 11/22) . While early AI could generate content, summarize information, and classify data, today's frontier models exhibit reasoning capabilities that mirror human cognition, allowing them to understand context, formulate step-by-step plans, and make nuanced decisions with minimal human oversight.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

Work Reinvented: How AI Is Shaping Your Future!
Linkedin
May 19, 2025
The integration of AI is changing job roles and required skills. By 2030, some predict that close to 40% of the skills used in most jobs are expected to have changed, and more than 10% of knowledge professionals now hold job titles that didn’t exist just a few years ago, such as AI Engineer and Head of Automation. This is a pretty interesting shift, meaning that even if your job title remains the same, the nature of your work is undergoing a massive evolution.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

AI Beyond the Hype: Massive Insights from IBM Think AI 2025
Linkedin
May 13, 2025
The IBM Think AI 2025 conference is a pivotal moment, setting the stage for the future of AI in enterprise environments. From cutting-edge AI agents to the practical application of quantum computing, the event is a complete wake-up call for businesses still contending with how to make AI work for them. In this article, we'll break down the key takeaways and explore how these trends are set to transform business as we know it.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

The Business Impact of Teamwork and Collaboration: Top Trends for 2025
Linkedin
April 29, 2025
In our new normal, effective teamwork and collaboration have become essential drivers of organizational success. As we navigate through 2025, the latest research highlights how collaborative approaches aren't just nice-to-have workplace practices but critical strategic elements that directly impact the bottom line. Let's explore the hottest trends and research around teamwork and collaboration, and why they matter more than ever to business results.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

Generative AI in 2025: More Personal, More Human, More Powerful Than Ever. But Is It Moving Too Fast?
Linkedln
April 16, 2025
I've been researching the latest AI trends, and what I'm seeing for 2025 is nothing short of remarkable. Let me share what's brewing at this fascinating intersection of innovation and caution.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

Rethinking AI Readiness: Why Being “Unready” Might Be Your Biggest Advantage
Linkedln
April 13, 2025
For years, AI readiness was treated like a checklist. Scalable infrastructure? Check. Clean data? Check. Skilled teams, governance, and strategy? Check. Only then could you “safely” deploy AI at scale.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

Leading with Impact: Women Entrepreneurs in 2025
Linkedln
April 08, 2025
Women entrepreneurs lead with impact in 2025, driving innovation, creating jobs, and reshaping the business landscape with purpose and power.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

BREAKTHROUGH ALERT: AI Education Revolution Has Arrived!
Linkedln
April 02, 2025
Let's be brutally honest: education technology has promised transformation for decades, yet most tools have delivered incremental improvements at best. Claude for Education is different. This isn't just another digital tool to add to your already overwhelming tech stack.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

Agentic AI & the Big Four
Linkedln
March 29, 2025
Unlike traditional AI, which responds to prompts or analyzes data, agentic AI can execute multi-step processes on its own. Think of them as digital coworkers who don’t clock out, don’t tire, and can learn across projects.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

19 Author Newsletters
My Favorite "Lazy" AI Hack for Turning a Messy Brainstorm Into a Perfect Project Plan
Linkedin
March 10, 2026
Here is what I have experienced when working with clients and strategic partners: everyone loves the high of a brainstorm, but everyone hates the hangover of the execution. We have all been there.

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Tags: Agentic AI, AI, AI Orchestration

Your Quick-Start Guide to a 2026 AI Roadmap: Do This First to Ensure Measurable ROI
Linkedin
March 04, 2026
The traditional eighteen month AI roadmap is a relic. If your strategy for 2026 involves extensive "discovery phases" and theoretical framework building that lasts until Q4, you are already behind.

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Tags: AI, Generative AI, Leadership

Gemini 3.1 Just Learned to Code Animated SVGs, Why Your Creative Agency Might Be Quietly Panicking
Linkedin
February 27, 2026
If you are still waiting three weeks for a motion designer to send back a loading icon or an animated hero graphic, you are overpaying for friction. The release of Gemini 3.1 Pro on February 19, 2026, changed the math. Google managed to solve the spatial reasoning gap that previously made AI-generated code a hit-or-miss nightmare.

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Tags: AI, Generative AI, Leadership

The Treasury Just Released Its AI Playbook for Financial Services: 5 Steps to Align Before Your Board Asks
Linkedin
February 25, 2026
Here's what matters: This isn't theoretical guidance. This is Treasury saying "here's the common language and practical framework you need to deploy AI without getting wrecked by cybersecurity risks or regulatory scrutiny."

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Tags: AI, Generative AI

My Perspective -Your Employees Are Using AI, and It's Not Working the Way You Think
Linkedin
February 24, 2026
After many conversations with leaders in different industries, there is a theme I see  behind the scenes of "successful" AI programs.

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Tags: Agentic AI, AI, AI Orchestration

Agentic AI Is Here: But Who's Accountable When Your AI Agent Makes a Mistake?
Linkedin
February 19, 2026
Here's what keeps me up at night, and it should probably keep you up too.

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Tags: Agentic AI, AI, AI Orchestration

Your AI Doesn't Remember You. (And What That Tells You About What's Coming.)
Linkedin
February 17, 2026
They open ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. They feel like it knows them. They've got the paid plan. It remembers their name, their job, maybe their preferred tone. And they think, "Okay, memory, checked."

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Tags: Agentic AI, AI, AI Orchestration

The Presentation Tool Nobody's Talking About (But Everyone Should Be Using)
Linkedin
February 03, 2026
If you're a business owner, consultant, or team lead, presentations are part of your weekly reality. Board updates, client briefings, audit readiness reports. The information already exists in your head or scattered across documents. Yet somehow, creating the deck feels like starting from zero every time.

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Tags: Agentic AI, AI

Stop Chasing the "Ideal" AI Tool (Here's What Works)
Linkedin
January 19, 2026
The anxiety about choosing the "right" AI tool? That's manufactured pressure. And honestly, those of us creating AI content (myself included) haven't always helped. We use urgent headlines and FOMO hooks that make you feel like missing one model update means you're toast.

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Tags: Agentic AI, AI, AI Orchestration

Google quietly made the AI prompt optional early this week. Most people missed it.
Linkedin
January 15, 2026
Here's what I am seeing behind the scenes of "successful" AI programs.

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Tags: Agentic AI, AI, AI Orchestration

The Microsoft Tools Are Ready. Are We?
Linkedin
January 13, 2026
Both organizations have Microsoft 365 Copilot. Both have AI-powered features in Teams, call summaries, real-time translation, and intelligent security alerts. Both are paying for enterprise licenses that include capabilities most of their teams don't even know exist.

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Tags: Agentic AI, AI, AI Orchestration

Stop Prompting, Start Architecting: My Strategy for 2026
Linkedin
December 31, 2025
As we close the book on 2025 and wake up to 2026, I’ve been reflecting on the incredible velocity of change we’ve seen. You know me, I’m usually up early with a coffee in hand (and Java and Biscuit, my Corgis, running circles around me), thinking about how we can stay ahead of the curve as the technology landscape shifts beneath our feet.

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Tags: Agentic AI, AI, AI Orchestration

Stop Buying Strategy. Start Building Systems.
Linkedin
December 22, 2025
If your AI roadmap doesn't change how your team works on Monday morning, it's just an expensive PDF. Let me be direct: the 2024 playbook of "strategy first, execution later" is completely dead. The gap between having an AI idea and deploying a working agent has collapsed to near zero.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

Beyond the Benchmarks: Four Profound Takeaways From OpenAI's GPT-5.2 Release
Linkedin
December 11, 2025
True story! The updates arrive daily, and the "AI fatigue" is real. Most of these announcements are just noise that won't shift how you run your day or your P&L.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

The Week AI Stopped Being "General Purpose"
Linkedin
December 02, 2025
Last week was a pivotal moment in artificial intelligence. Not because one company released a breakthrough model, but because three major AI labs released competing flagship models within days of each other, and each one took a fundamentally different approach.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

One of the BEST things I learned from Microsoft Ignite 2025
Linkedin
November 20, 2025
It’s a common assumption in the tech world that the most powerful AI tools come with a premium price tag. However, a recent announcement from Microsoft's Ignite event is set to upend that expectation. By March 2026, many of Copilot's most advanced features will become a standard, built-in part of the Microsoft 365 subscription for everyone, fundamentally changing the landscape of AI-powered productivity.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

AI Isn't the Job Killer. It's the Great Re-Skiller. (6 Truths You Need Now)
Linkedin
November 10, 2025
It’s impossible to ignore the constant noise around Artificial Intelligence. From boardrooms to kitchen tables, AI’s potential to reshape our world is a topic of daily discussion, often framed in dramatic terms of utopian breakthroughs or dystopian job losses. The hype cycle is in full swing, painting a picture of a technology that is simultaneously all-powerful and just around the corner.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

The $30 Trillion Question: When Machines Start Banking
Linkedin
November 04, 2025
The financial world is witnessing a collision of three unstoppable forces: artificial intelligence that can make decisions, blockchain technology that can execute them, and traditional banking, finally ready to embrace both. SWIFT, the century-old backbone of global payments, announced in September 2025 that it's building a blockchain-based shared ledger with over 30 major financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

The End of Guesswork: HubSpot’s AI Turns Data into Deals
Linkedin
October 12, 2025
Sales teams are tired of being promised transformation. Every quarter brings another "revolutionary" tool that ends up creating more work than it eliminates. But something different is happening in 2025, and it matters because it's not about adding more technology. It's about fundamentally changing where sales professionals spend their time.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

3 Books
The AI Imperative When Shadowstalker Hunts: A Leader's Guide to AI Security, Ethics, and Red Teaming
InkByte Publishing LLC
October 21, 2025
Book introduces three pillars of AI defense for leaders:

• Operational Red Teaming
Pressure-test AI agents through structured adversarial simulations to uncover vulnerabilities before attackers do.

• Embedded Ethics
Encode explicit reasoning boundaries so AI systems behave predictably when under stress.

• Adaptive Guardrails
Design agentic architectures that evolve as threat patterns and system capabilities evolve.

See publication

Tags: AI, Business Strategy, Cybersecurity

The AI Imperative When Shadowstalker Hunts: A Leader's Guide to AI Security, Ethics, and Red Teaming
InkByte Publishing LLC
October 19, 2025
Agentic AI , AI Security
Three Pillars of Defense:
•Ethics encoded into how your AI reasons under pressure
•Guardrails that adapt to threats instead of breaking
•Red Teaming that finds vulnerabilities before enemies do

What keeps security executives up at night?
Your AI makes thousands of autonomous decisions every day. Adversaries study those decisions, searching for patterns to exploit. The gap between “we have AI security” and “our AI is secure” could decide whether you become an industry leader, or a cautionary tale.

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Tags: Agentic AI, AI, AI Orchestration

Women's Success in Corporate Leadership: A Guide to Master Influence, Advocacy, Inspiration, and Innovation in Business for a Future Proofed Career Now
Amazon
May 14, 2024
A practical guide for women building lasting careers in leadership, now shaped by artificial intelligence, hybrid work, and rapid transformation.

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Tags: AI, Careers

1 Founder
Byte Strategy AI
Byte Strategy AI
July 01, 2024
At Byte Strategy, we close the gap between AI ambition and real-world results. We are an end-to-end AI implementation partner that designs your strategy and then builds your digital workforce.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

1 Media Interview
Pioneering AI for Project Leaders
Project Insight
August 26, 2025
As founder & Chief Strategy Officer of Byte Strategy, René helps small businesses & fintechs bridge the gap between project management and AI. With MIT training and deep experience in automation and AI strategy, she shares how project managers can embrace technology with confidence & lead in an AI-driven world.

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Tags: AI, Innovation, Leadership

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