by Sara Vicente Barreto
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.
What started as a question about a school curriculum led me to a broader reflection on motivation across generations. From Gen Alpha’s expectations of personalization to workplace tensions between Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z, how do we balance adapting to individuals with encouraging growth beyond their comfort zones?
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.
Why are people uncomfortable admitting how much AI they use? From students hiding AI usage to employees overstating adoption, this article explores the psychology, fear and organisational culture shaping corporate AI adoption, and the hidden cost of AI shame.
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.
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 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.
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?
Goals rarely fail because they are wrong. More often, they slowly lose their place in our day-to-day decisions.
As the year moves on and life takes over, it becomes harder to stay connected to what we set out to do. This is not about starting again, it’s about checking in, understanding what’s been done (or not), and finding a way back to what matters.
Sometimes life brings you to a wall—unexpected, immovable, and overwhelming. This is a reflection on pressure, perspective, and learning to build space to move through it.
In this episode, Sara Vicente Barreto shares how a simple shift in using AI turned overwhelming revision into a focused, effective learning experience. Using Google Notebook LLM, information became clearer, more relevant, and easier to understand—highlighting how AI can truly support the way we learn.
We often struggle to justify art because it doesn’t feel “useful.” But what if its value lies elsewhere? A reflection on emotional connection, joy, and expression—and why art deserves space in our lives.
In this episode, Sara explores how AI can transform the way you follow up after networking events. By using AI as a personal secretary and thinking partner, she turns scattered conversations into structured actions and real opportunities.
In this episode of Try AI for Growth, Sara shares how she used AI to automate a monthly accounting process—only for it to fail completely at first. A story about iteration, debugging, and making AI work in practice.
Last week I was invited to speak on a panel about work-life balance. My first response intrigued them: I don’t believe in work-life balance. Instead, I’ve come to think about life more like a river—dynamic, imperfect, and constantly flowing. This reflection explores perfectionism, guilt, and why letting go of balance might actually bring more ease to our lives.
In this episode of Try AI for Growth, Sara Vicente Barreto shares a simple experiment: recording a voice note while driving, turning it into a transcript with Descript, and using ChatGPT to clean it into a structured draft. A practical workflow for capturing ideas on the go and turning messy thoughts into writing.
