I love old-school things. That doesn't mean I want to work in an old-school way.

I drive an old Land Rover. I love a proper map and I have a ridiculous number of notebooks. Give me a beautiful notebook and a decent pen and I'm very happy.

I also happen to be a massive adopter of technology.

I use AI every single day, probably far more than most people would imagine if their picture of me is the woman bombing around Sussex lanes in an old Defender with an OS map, a notebook on the passenger seat and a huge smile on her face.

I'm fascinated by technology. I want to understand what's new, what it can do and, more importantly, where it can genuinely make things better and more efficient. I use it to research, organise, interrogate ideas, capture information, make connections and turn thoughts into action. I've embraced AI enormously because I've seen just how powerful it can be when it's used well.

I'm also very aware that I don't know everything, which is why I have some incredibly clever people around me who understand technology at a much deeper level than I do. If a business needs specialist help with AI, automation or systems, I want to know who the right person is to bring into the conversation.

I don't think I'm remotely anti-tech but I still love a paper map and I still reach for a notebook when I want to think.

Given the choice between the electrical silence of a new car and the mechanical clatter of my old Defender, I know which one I'm taking.

I've been thinking about why that is.

I don't think old school and new school are opposites, they do different jobs.

Technology is extraordinary at helping us do things faster and better. AI can help explore an idea, challenge assumptions, analyse information, organise a mess and turn hours of work into minutes.

Faster isn't terribly useful if you haven't worked out where you're going and perhaps that's why the map analogy works so well for me.

Sometimes I want Google Maps. I know exactly where I'm going, I want the quickest route and I'd quite like to know there's a traffic jam three miles ahead so I can avoid it.

Sometimes however I want to unfold a proper map on the table and literally stick a pin in and see the whole landscape. I want to see where I am in relation to everything else, notice the roads I hadn't considered and perhaps realise there is another destination entirely.

I think business needs both.

We have more technology available to us than ever before. More data, more automation, more systems, more ways to communicate and an almost bewildering number of new AI tools appearing all the time.

I'm not convinced that most businesses need more tools, quite often they need enough space to think properly about what they're trying to achieve in the first place.

What actually matters here? What are we trying to make happen? What deserves our attention? What can we stop doing? And what's the next move?

Once you've worked that out, then we can ask the other question:

What's the smartest way to make it happen?

And that's where I absolutely want the new-school thinking.

Use AI. Automate the repetitive stuff. Find the right system. Bring in somebody who knows far more about a particular technology than you do. Don't spend three hours doing something manually because that's how you've always done it if technology can do it brilliantly in minutes.

I'm not nostalgic about doing things the hard way, I just don't want us to confuse doing things faster with knowing what we're doing.

That's probably why my world quite happily contains both AI and notebooks, Google Maps and OS maps, digital systems and scribbled pages — and an old Defender that makes enough mechanical noise to ensure you know you're driving it.

I want the best tool for the job and sometimes that's the newest piece of technology available and sometimes it's shutting the laptop, opening a notebook and giving myself the space to work out what the job actually is.

Perhaps that's the bit we shouldn't automate.