The burnout came first
Laura Ivonne spent more than two decades in senior corporate leadership, across engineering, revenue strategy and operations. She is a two-time published author on AI-era leadership, a board member of the Australian Artificial Intelligence Industry Group, a certified yoga teacher, and a Global Wellness Institute Ambassador.
None of that is where the business came from.
My own burnout experience led me to support high-performing managers embracing AI, lead with confidence, and all without compromising their wellbeing or performance.
Investment decisions, and people who aren't ready
Her diagnosis of AI adoption is not about models or tooling. It is about the speed mismatch between a board's decision and a workforce's readiness.
She has watched it from inside a senior role, which is why she describes it as a sequencing problem rather than a training problem.
The biggest challenge I see is that AI is advancing so fast, and people is not ready to adopt it. Organisations are making investment decisions, and people is not ready.
Not a tools platform, and not burnout recovery
Thrive Lotus sits between two crowded categories, and Ivonne defines it by refusing both of them before she says what it is.
The company works with managers in mid and senior roles — the people who have to make an AI decision real for a team that did not make it.
Thrive Lotus is not a platform for learning AI tools. It is not a wellness or just self-care, emergency recovery, burnout recovery platform. It is here to help you bridge the gap between AI adoption and AI human readiness.
Mind, body, spirit, and AI
The work runs through leadership skills, assessments and coaching programs, with wellbeing treated as part of the method rather than a wrapper around it.
The methodology has a name and four parts, and Ivonne has trained an AI coach on it — so the support does not stop between sessions.
I'm very proud that I have also developed my own AI clone, which I have trained on the Thrive Lifestyle formula, which is Thrive Lotus methodology: mind, body, spirit, and AI. So we enable our customers with twenty-four/seven support, so they don't have to wait for any session or when they need it the most.
A business built in the margins
Ivonne is a full-time mother. She holds a senior leadership role. Thrive Lotus is the third thing.
She is direct about what makes that arithmetic work, and she uses AI across email marketing, automations, prospecting, proposals and social media presence to do it.
“I don't think I'll have a business if it wasn't thanks to AI. I'm a full-time mom. I have a senior leadership role, and in the side, I'm doing my startup.”
What she buys with the time is not more output.
It's still allowing me to be happy with my family, with the kids, and have those breaks… Many people ask me, 'How do you do it all?' And I always say, 'Thanks to AI.'
Starting a business can be very lonely
She came to the AI Pathfinder program already knowing her subject. What she did not have was other people at the same point in the same work.
The lesson she names first is not encouraging, and she means it as a compliment.
“Definitely one of the biggest lessons I learned was that there are a lot of people with brilliant ideas, and the challenge is tough. It is not easy to start a business, and the program really help us to stay motivated, to make us realise how hard this journey is gonna be. We have to be patient.”
The support did not stop when the workshops did.
They were amazing with their Q&A sessions, and the support has been incredible even after the conclusion of the workshops and the day-to-day support. So it's ongoing.
What AI can't replace
For someone whose business runs on AI, Ivonne is unusually specific about its limits — and she frames them as the skills worth investing in rather than as a warning.
AI won't be able to replace our core values and our core ethics, our beliefs, our empathy, our listening, our connection. That's the skills that we need to develop more in order to have a better and a balanced life.
From managers to organisations
Today Thrive Lotus works directly with individual managers. The next step moves upstream, to the organisations making the investment decisions in the first place.
The ambition is to work with organisations in their AI adoption plans, assessments, mapping, audits, and definitely help them not only to increase productivity, but also to embrace wellbeing as a pillar of the strategy.
