Hey, Welcome To About Me

Well I'm Samantha (Sam),

Welcome and thanks for dropping in.

So who am I. Well if you've read the homepage you already know how contAIn came about, so I'll spare you that again.

One thing I will say though is don't let the AI hype scare you. I use AI a lot, I've failed miserably, and documented it all. But I'm not techie and I never have been. The trick with AI is to be disciplined, if you can manage that you're good.

So you know about the £37,000 bill, well nothing like a jolt of reality to motivate me, and to say I was royally ticked off is an understatement. I turned to AI to alleviate the work, or so I thought. Hours in chats, lots of workarounds, I was either drowning in documents, or they were being murdered. Then the penny dropped. The problem was never the tools.

So I applied 30 years of project management to it. Don't ask it, don't show it, make it follow my rules. The process was complicated, multiple levels of SOPs and matrices, more moving parts than I care to admit. But as Tommy Cooper used to say, just like that, it started working. The tools, platforms, apps and agents may change. The discipline doesn't.

Quite simple really.

If you want to see what I mean, give the Ignite baseline a go. It's free and it takes 30 minutes.

Sam.

Because I've been at the thin end of the wedge. I write about it quite a lot on Substack. But Substack could pull the plug at any point. WordPress.com can shut you down. In fact any of them can. I'm finally back on LinkedIn after they banned me in 2021. That's a whole other story, the point is the only platform I trust to still be there tomorrow is the one I'm running myself.

If I'm teaching people that being a passenger doesn't work, I can't be a passenger on my own publishing platform. So this site, the content, the newsletter, the community. All of it runs on infrastructure I control. That's contAIn applied to its own operation. It does not mean that YOU have to run your own stack, it means that you CAN if you want to.

What would have taken a tech team before, I can now do myself. Make of that what you will.

At 18 I was in charge of the onboard railway catering out of King's Cross, feeding the LNER network from one of the busiest mainline terminals in the country. Before that, the sandwich operation supplying Victoria station, yes the good old BR curly cheese sarnies. The people running those operations today have MBAs, I had a BTEC and a lot of nerve.

I've taught English to customs, immigration and the forestry department in Laos, before the bridge, when Laos was still largely its own world. I learnt Thai and Malay in kindergartens and cafes. I've sailed halfway round the world, been stuck in the doldrums, and been airside during a major aircraft emergency, which between them teach you more about patience and problem-solving than any boardroom ever could. I've modelled, managed a photographer, lived in more countries than most people have visited, and there's at least one more thing on that list which if you work with me I might tell ya!

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I squeezed in three decades of complex, multi-industry project management.

I didn't plan a career. I navigated one.

When I started using AI a lot, I observed the industry filling up with people who'd been teaching it for six months, I thought someone who'd been operating at the sharp end for thirty years might have something to say that may actually be useful to people. That's why contAIn™ works, specifically because it is not a course in the traditional sense. More like a driving licence for AI, you take the lessons, you pass the test, and then you're done. Except you never really stop getting better, because the more you use AI the sharper you get. I use it daily to control my own projects, and I make mistakes every day too, I make the mistakes so you don't have to, I'm good like that!

So if you are drowning in documents, or AI isn't working for you, you don't have a YOU problem, you have a systems problem, and I know just the thing to fix that!

In 2020, in the middle of Covid, I co-created a multimedia eBook called Rethink the Rainbow with Emily "Madge" Payne. Every penny went to grassroots children's mental health charities. Benjamin Zephaniah wrote the foreword. I was already calling it in 2020. Five years before it became the conversation everyone is now having.

LinkedIn didn't take to my view, they warned me, removed my posts and then one day just gone. It didn't just take my network. It took my history too, a children's home in Ethiopia, a school block in Nepal, 30+ years of history, contacts and work that had nothing to do with business or AI and everything to do with showing up and doing something useful, so if you find a new profile with hardly any connections, that's why.

I'm back on the platform now so please reach out.

In case anyone wants to know.

Dubai Airports Oracle LMS. The first in the UAE to receive GCAA approval. Premier Composite Technologies, Microsoft Dynamics across the manufacturing plant that supplied the carbon fibre roof for Apple's Steve Jobs Theatre and the ceiling panels for the Grand Mosque in Makkah. Mubadala Infrastructure Aconex SaaS. Ran the apps delivery team for Barclays UK and Africa desktop migration, and a document control system that achieved ISO 9001 accreditation, among many many other things.

The Feed Loop, a preprint on AI governance failure mechanisms, published Zenodo and SSRN, May 2026. DOI: https://zenodo.org/records/20474271

ITIL v3 · TEFL · BTEC · ISO 9001 implementation

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