After moving to a new city, Marina has drawn on her newfound AI skills to find work and launch her own freelance venture.

At a career crossroads after relocating, Marina joined our Get Into AI Hackathon to boost her chances of finding a job that matched her skills and interests.

Applying insights from the programme directly helped Marina secure a role in sales business development, where she now regularly uses AI tools. Alongside her job, Marina also gained the confidence to develop her own freelance venture, leveraging technology to progress and launch her idea, despite limited startup resources.

‘Starting out as a solo founder initially felt daunting,’ she explains. ‘However, the programme showed me that AI can act as my ‘first team member,’ boosting my productivity and laying a solid foundation until the project grows enough to expand the team.’

Enabling women in tech

With King’s Trust Group research showing that young women around the world feel less confident about their digital skills than young men, the Hackathon, delivered in Crete by our partner Bizrupt, was our first ever all-female tech programme.

‘Programming and AI are traditionally male-dominated fields, so having a space created specifically for women provided a deep sense of safety, comfort, and mutual support,’ Marina explains. ‘Being in an environment where we shared common challenges and built solution-oriented tools together was immensely inspiring.’

Building on our commitment to practical rather than theoretical learning, the programme was built around collaborative projects in small groups. For example, Marina’s group created their own AI personal assistant to help with time management. Marina had never previously integrated AI into her work, but the programme’s hands-on approach soon saw her become confident and proficient in applying AI tools to business challenges.

‘It demystified AI and showed me how to use accessible tools to manage time, structure project tasks and solve operational problems independently,’ she recalls. ‘What I found most useful was my first hands-on experience with AI tools and the startup problem-solving mindset.’

A whole new world

‘Working with AI has truly opened a brand-new window of opportunity and a whole new world for me,’ Marina says, outlining how the programme helped her with everything from honing her resume and negotiating her salary to empowering her team and progressing her social enterprise.

‘Applying the AI knowledge and skills from the programme not only helped me secure my current role in sales business development but also empowered me to negotiate a higher salary,’ she explains.

‘In my daily job, I now actively use AI tools across both sales and marketing for automating message drafts, analysing statistics, conducting research for outreach strategies, and creating digital assets.’

Marina’s growing comfort and confidence applying AI tools has also played a key role in her decision to progress her freelance idea alongside her job. ‘Before the programme, I felt hesitant and uncertain about how to turn my ideas into action. I had a spark burning inside me for a long time, but I wasn’t sure how to launch a project entirely on my own or leverage technology to move forward. After the programme, that spark truly turned into a flame.’ Marina hopes that her initiative, Ocharoto, will eventually become a physical cultural hub in Crete, driving personal growth through the arts.