About

Researcher, communicator, former founder

Twenty years across European institutions, aerospace, entrepreneurship and tech, now focused on the risks of AI to strategy.

I am a researcher, a communicator and a former founder. My path runs through classrooms, European institutions, aerospace, a start-up and the semiconductor industry, and it all leads to one question: how do we keep human judgement at the centre of strategic decisions as AI enters the room?

Biography

Audrey Pariente is a PhD researcher at Sheffield Hallam University and an expert in digital transformation. Her research examines how generative AI is reshaping strategic decision-making, and how organisations can safeguard responsible decisions and human judgement as they adopt it.

Her work explores the gap between the AI governance that firms disclose and the governance they practise, how strategy can remain open when AI mediates it, and how leaders can preserve their judgement. It also extends to primary education policy and to strategic decision-making in the Global South, where limited AI capability shapes how the technology can be used.

Her article “More Insight, Less Foresight: Generative AI and the Narrowing of Strategic Decision-Making”, forthcoming in Electronic Markets, sets out 25 risks that generative AI poses to strategic decision-making. It shows that these risks build up as leaders search for information, frame problems and weigh judgements, shaping which options they consider and which appear viable long before a decision is made.

The result is the paradox of the title: generative AI gives leaders access to more information, but its outputs favour the dominant patterns in its data and tend to erase rare information, such as weak signals, contrarian views and unusual events. Yet strategic decisions deal with novel, complex and open-ended situations, where what matters most is often not yet common knowledge. It is in this rare information that emerging possibilities first appear, before they become consensus. Relying on these systems can therefore limit leaders’ strategic foresight, their ability to anticipate these possibilities. It can also narrow their strategic agency, meaning their capacity to frame strategic questions, to challenge what these systems produce and to take ownership of their decisions.

Her research is informed by almost 20 years of experience in strategic communication across European institutions and the technology sector. She has led digital transformation projects at the European Commission, the European Parliament and CEPOL, and contributed to technology projects at Airbus, including its Quantum Computing Competition. Her entrepreneurial experience includes founding a tech start-up, Trashre. She now heads European communications at Applied Materials, where she co-leads the AI transformation in Europe.

Where my path took me

  • 2004 – 2007TeachingLanguage teaching in Vienna, Zürich and Nice, alongside an MA in German Studies and Political Science. Teaching
  • 2008 – 2018European institutionsEuropean Commission, European Parliament and CEPOL: ten years of communication and digital transformation in multilingual organisations. European Institutions
  • 2018 – 2022Aerospace and entrepreneurshipAirbus CTO office, Deutsche Aircraft, and founding the biomaterials start-up Trashre. Entrepreneurship
  • 2022 – todaySemiconductorsApplied Materials Europe, where I lead PR, communications and brand and co-lead the AI transformation. Tech Industry
  • 2024 – todayDoctoral researchSheffield Business School, Sheffield Hallam University. Research

My career, tab by tab

Twenty years of experience: ten in the European institutions and ten in aerospace, entrepreneurship and the tech industry. Each part has its own page.

10 yrs · aerospace, start-up, semiconductorsTech IndustryAirbus, Deutsche Aircraft and Applied Materials, with seven international awards.10 yrs · 2008–2018European InstitutionsEuropean Commission, European Parliament and CEPOL, and my book on the history of translation.2019–2022 · TrashreEntrepreneurshipFounding a biomaterials start-up, and what its failure taught me.2004–2007 · early careerTeachingLanguage teaching in Vienna, Zürich and Nice, my education and thoughts on learning.

How my work is connected

Every stage of this path has been about decisions made under uncertainty, and about the information that reaches the people making them. As a teacher I learned how framing shapes understanding. In the European institutions I saw how 27 countries and 24 languages negotiate one shared decision. As a founder I lived the strategic choices that cannot be delegated: when to raise, when to pivot, when to stop. In the technology industry I now help an organisation adopt generative AI at scale.

My research asks what my career kept showing me: the quality of a decision depends on what is still visible when it is made.

That is why the PhD is not a change of direction but a way to study, rigorously, the questions I met in practice. And because I am still in practice, the research stays close to the people who will use it.

Beyond the CV

Outside work I climb and I make music. A short glimpse is on Beyond the CV.