Dr Kate Barker provides private advisory and executive coaching for AI-ready leadership at chief executive and board level. Across a 30-year career she has developed more than 100,000 executives, government leaders and board members, and today works with a small number of chief executives, chairs and senior leaders on AI transformation, board readiness and leadership performance in an AI-first world. The practice runs as three twelve-month engagements: the Signature Programme, a one-to-one advisory year anchored in a psychometric baseline and ten sessions timed to real inflection points; the Mentoring Programme, for leaders who want seasoned external judgement rather than development; and the Board Member Programme, for executives moving from executive authority into governance.
The evidence for the work is her own: executives in the top quartile for cognitive agency outperform the bottom quartile on decision quality by 31%. The gap has a mechanism behind it in cognitive surrender, when a leader takes on a machine-formed recommendation as their own and the shift in authority passes unnoticed. Sustained across a year of consequential decisions, that habit becomes AI brain rot, and it lands hardest at the top, where fluency is most rewarded and least challenged. The work is structured around the Executive Cognitive Advantage Index, her five-dimension diagnostic of the capabilities on which senior performance now turns: judgement and discernment, cognitive agency, relationship capital, executive alignment and challenge, and human plus AI decision performance. Engagements are selective and by application, taken on where the mandate is significant and the leader is serious; that selectivity is deliberate, because at this level the advisor’s attention is the product.
Private advisory engagements at chief executive and board level across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, London, New York and Singapore
A short FAQ. For longer conversations, please write directly.
At this level the work is closer to private counsel than coaching: sharpening judgement on consequential decisions, preparing chief executives and chairs for AI-driven transformation, and strengthening the capabilities the Executive Cognitive Advantage Index measures.
It addresses the specific pressures AI puts on senior leaders: persuasive machine recommendations, faster but not better decisions, performed alignment in executive teams, and the erosion of judgement through over-reliance.
By application through the contact page, with a short note on the decision or transition prompting the enquiry. Engagements are limited in number at any one time.
Twelve weeks minimum lead time. Eighty bookings a year. Every enquiry is read personally.