Category: Make Space for Growth

This is the blog for Make Space for Growth. Here you will find topics around business growth and leadership, personal growth and family as well as growth in your community.

Investment Guide for Kids with AI
Make Space for Growth / Try AI for Growth

Building an Investment Guide for My 9-Year-Old

When my nine-year-old son received a cash gift to buy his first shares, I thought the challenge would be choosing the right company. Instead, it became an unexpected AI experiment in designing a learning experience. Rather than telling him what to invest in, I wanted to help him understand how businesses work and how investors think.
In this episode of Try AI for Growth, I share how a simple ChatGPT conversation evolved into a printable investing guide, a company rating framework and a series of child-friendly company profiles—all through continuous iteration. Along the way, I explore why AI is at its best when it helps us refine ideas, build reusable systems and think more deeply about the problems we’re trying to solve. Whether you’re creating learning materials, developing a business framework or simply looking for a better way to brainstorm, this episode is a reminder that AI can amplify your thinking, not replace it.

Strength in Weakness, An empty podium
Make Space for Growth

There is Strength in Weakness

Watching our children struggle, experiencing disappointment ourselves or seeing our teams fall is never easy. Yet weakness often brings unexpected gifts: emotion, reflection and change. If we allow ourselves to embrace these moments rather than avoid them, we may discover there is strength in weakness.

Claude for Word - Photo by Tiger Lily
Make Space for Growth / Try AI for Growth

The Best Reports Start as Messy Notes

What if your best client reports already exist—you just haven’t assembled them yet?

In this episode of Try AI for Growth, Sara Vicente Barreto shares how she used Claude for Word to transform rough working notes into polished, professional client progress reports. Instead of spending hours rewriting, formatting and structuring information, she uploaded her project mandate alongside her weekly notes and asked Claude to create the first draft.

The result wasn’t simply better writing. It was a repeatable workflow that allowed her to focus on what mattered most: the quality of her thinking and advice. By keeping good notes throughout the week and letting AI handle much of the structure and presentation, she created consistent, client-ready reports in a fraction of the usual time.

If you’re a business leader, consultant or entrepreneur looking for practical ways to use AI in your daily work, this episode demonstrates how AI can remove friction from routine documentation without replacing your expertise or judgement.

Human Connection
Make Space for Growth

The Connections that Shape Us

What happens when you reconnect with friends you haven’t seen in years? For me, a long weekend with six business school friends became more than a reunion. It was a reminder that human connection can survive distance, silence and time. And that sometimes, through reconnecting with others, we find our way back to ourselves.

AI Agents for Revenue
Make Space for Growth / Try AI for Growth

Building an AI Agent for Real Team Work

Can AI agents help businesses identify opportunities faster and more strategically?

In this episode of Try AI for Growth, Sara Vicente Barreto shares how she built an AI Grant Scout agent for her charity, Um Pequeno Gesto — and why the lessons extend far beyond fundraising.

What started as a grant research experiment evolved into a structured AI workflow designed to scan opportunities, prioritise fit, support decision-making and guide action. Along the way, Sara explores how AI agents can support commercial teams looking for partnerships, funding opportunities, leads or strategic relationships.

The episode also goes behind the scenes of what it actually takes to build a useful AI workflow: creating rules, designing scoring systems, structuring instructions, developing team processes and refining outputs over time.

Rather than treating AI as a one-off prompt tool, this episode explores how leaders can start thinking about AI agents as operational support systems for real business workflows.

Claude for Powerpoint, Photo by Markus Winkler - Pexels Photo
Make Space for Growth / Try AI for Growth

What Happens When You Let Claude Loose on Your Pitch Deck

In this episode of Try AI for Growth, Sara Vicente Barreto shares how a moment of complete creative paralysis at a workshop led to her first experience building apps with Lovable. From redesigning field data collection workflows at the charity to creating spelling and football apps with her son in under ten minutes, this episode explores how AI-powered app building is changing the relationship between ideas and execution — even for non-coders.

My First Lovable Experiment
Make Space for Growth / Try AI for Growth

From Blank to App: My First Lovable Experiment

In this episode of Try AI for Growth, Sara Vicente Barreto shares how a moment of complete creative paralysis at a workshop led to her first experience building apps with Lovable. From redesigning field data collection workflows at the charity to creating spelling and football apps with her son in under ten minutes, this episode explores how AI-powered app building is changing the relationship between ideas and execution — even for non-coders.

AI Adoption Framework
Business Talk / Make Space for Growth

From Experimentation to Scale: An AI Adoption Framework That Makes AI Work in Pratice

AI is everywhere—but real impact is still rare. While companies rush into experimentation, few manage to scale what works.
In this piece, I share a practical AI adoption framework that moves beyond tools and training, focusing instead on how organisations actually make AI work—from early exploration to measurable impact, governance, and ultimately, re-imagining how work gets done.

Dual monitors showing sales dashboard on left and AI chat conversation on right
Make Space for Growth / Try AI for Growth

Claude for Excel: The AI That Made Me Question My First Job

In this episode, Sara Vicente Barreto explores how Claude for Excel—an AI tool embedded directly into spreadsheets—goes beyond productivity gains. From fixing complex models to building full dashboards, it compresses hours of analyst work into minutes. But more importantly, it raises a bigger question: if AI can now do the work that once helped us learn, how do entry-level roles evolve?