Hi, I’m Milene

Founder of CogNative, author and advisor

I’ve spent my career asking what systems do to the people inside them.

I’m the founder of CogNative, where I research how AI is changing professional judgment and build ways to make the thinking behind AI-assisted work visible. My work brings together decision science, anthropology, law, digital product leadership and more than 30 in-depth interviews with experienced professionals using AI in their work.

Founder of CogNative and advisor on judgment, decision-making and cognitive authorship in AI-driven organizations.
Researcher at the intersection of cognitive science, automation bias and professional expertise.
MBA in Decision Science, postgraduate qualification in Anthropology and bachelor’s degree in Law, specializing in Digital Law.
Machine Learning Specialization from Stanford and DeepLearning.AI.
12 years in law and business strategy · 6 years in digital product leadership
Led Condé Nast’s first AI innovation program
Writing on AI and human cognition since 2019

Now let me explain what the CV doesn’t.

I grew up reading the future

I grew up
reading the future

Every book that mattered asked me to imagine a future and interrogate it.

Is this a future I want? Who benefits from this?

What kind of person would I be, living inside it?

Every book that mattered asked me to imagine a future and interrogate it.

Is this a future I want? Who benefits from this?

What kind of person would I be, living inside it?

YES, I'M A SCI-FI READER

Science fiction, at its best, has never really been about spaceships or alien civilisations.

Ursula K. Le Guin described science fiction better than almost anyone, not merely as extrapolation but as something closer to a mental experiment. A metaphor. A way of borrowing the dominant languages of a civilisation — science, technology, history, anthropology — and using them to ask the questions that ordinary conversation tends to avoid.

Isaac Asimov asked a different version of the same question. Not what does it mean to be human but what happens when you build a system designed to serve human values, and the system turns out to be more rigorous than the values it was built on? His robots followed their rules perfectly. That was always the problem.

Together, those two lenses gave me a way of looking at any system — social, technological, institutional — and asking not just how it works, but what it does to the people inside it.

Every major technology in history displaced physical or mechanical effort. This one is different. When AI takes a cognitive task — analysis, synthesis, reasoning, judgment — it doesn’t just do the work. Over time, it quietly changes your relationship with the work.

Leaders built authority through a specific loop: think hard → make a call → learn from it → build judgment. That loop is how expertise accumulates and how confidence becomes legitimate.

Ursula K. Le Guin described science fiction as a mental experiment, a way of borrowing the languages of science, technology, history and anthropology to ask the questions ordinary conversation avoids. Isaac Asimov asked a different version of the same question: what happens when a system built to serve human values becomes more rigorous than the values it was built on? His robots followed their rules perfectly. That was always the problem.

That lens took me through some unusual places.

Law first.

Which, if you think about it, isn’t so far from science fiction. Both are attempts to answer the same question: how do we build systems that protect human dignity and keep behaviour accountable to human values?

One uses institutions. The other uses imagination.

I was drawn to both for the same reason.

Law first.

One uses institutions. The other uses imagination.

I was drawn to both for the same reason.

Then anthropology

The study of how cultures make meaning, how groups build shared reality, how identity forms and deforms under pressure.

Then anthropology

The study of how cultures make meaning, how groups build shared reality, how identity forms and deforms under pressure.

Then cognitive science and decision science

The specific, strange, beautiful mechanics of how individual minds actually work when they have to choose.

Then cognitive science and decision science

The specific, strange, beautiful mechanics of how individual minds actually work when they have to choose.

Each field was, in its own way, science fiction's question asked in technical language.

What are we, really? What do we do under pressure? What do we become when the conditions change?

Each field was, in its own way, science fiction's question asked in technical language.

What are we, really? What do we do under pressure? What do we become when the conditions change?

AND THEN THE CONDITIONS CHANGED

Generative AI arrived, not as a distant future, but as the present.
And it did exactly what the best science fiction had warned it would.

Not with robots. Not with superintelligence.

Quietly, inside the workflows of people who were good at their jobs, taking, for the first time, not just the effort, but the thinking those people used to do themselves.

A Curiosity

Let me tell you something about myself. When I was younger, immersed in science fiction, there was one character I wanted to become, not as a career plan, but as a way of being in the world.

Susan Calvin. Asimov’s robopsychologist. The scientist who studied artificial minds to understand what they revealed about human ones. This is the posture I bring to the work: not watching from a distance, but looking precisely at what happens between human and machine, what becomes possible and what is quietly taken away.

THE PATTERN I FOUND

I studied, researched and interviewed more than 30 experienced professionals across industries in Europe, India and Brazil. I listened for the hesitation beneath the productivity gains and found a consistent pattern. They were not losing their jobs. They were losing something harder to name: whether their judgment was still genuinely theirs, and whether their decisions reflected their thinking, experience and accountability rather than a polished output they had approved.

I called it a Cognitive Authorship problem. That research led me to found CogNative: a platform that helps experienced professionals and organizations make the thinking behind AI-assisted work visible, identify which abilities may need attention and decide what to strengthen next.

Explore CogNative

This is the conversation most
leaders haven't had yet.

This is the conversation most leaders
haven't had yet.

A first conversation costs nothing except honesty. We start with what you're already feeling — and see where it leads.

Book a free conversation

Explore CogNative

I’ve spent my career asking what systems do to the people inside them.

Now let me explain what the CV doesn’t.

I grew up reading the future

I grew up reading the future

Every book that mattered asked me to imagine a future and interrogate it.

Is this a future I want? Who benefits from this?

What kind of person would I be, living inside it?

Every book that mattered asked me to imagine a future and interrogate it.

Is this a future I want? Who benefits from this?

What kind of person would I be, living inside it?

Science fiction, at its best, has never really been about spaceships or alien civilisations.

Together, those two lenses gave me a way of looking at any system — social, technological, institutional — and asking not just how it works, but what it does to the people inside it.

Generative AI arrived, not as a distant future, but as the present.And it did exactly what the best science fiction had warned it would.

This is the conversation most leaders haven't had yet.

This is the conversation most leaders haven't had yet.

This is the conversation most leadershaven't had yet.

I grew up
reading the future

Generative AI arrived, not as a distant future, but as the present.
And it did exactly what the best science fiction had warned it would.

This is the conversation most
leaders haven't had yet.

This is the conversation most
leaders haven't had yet.

This is the conversation most leaders
haven't had yet.