Roberta Scrofani Stopped Waiting for the Right Moment

Fifteen years in an industry she couldn't defend

Roberta Scrofani led cross-functional teams across several countries. She had been in the industry 15 years, almost nine of them at the same ad tech company in Barcelona. In that time she held different roles and lived through several disruptions in her field. She trained as a coach and developed the people around her. She also woke up unfulfilled.

"It's an industry that capitalizes on human attention as its main product," she says. "I was not contributing the way I wished, because it was not helping human flourishing."

"I had to start listening to the voice that was telling me, for almost a decade, that this was not the path for me."

By her mid-30s she had the degrees, the career, the house, the marriage, the son. "I'm supposed to already have everything, but I still feel this deep emptiness somehow."

In 2020 she became a mother and got certified as a coach in positive psychology, emotional intelligence, and mindfulness. "My intention wasn't really to become a coach, I already was a Co-Active coach. It was more to use these tools for me, because I felt I needed to change, but I didn't know where to start." Then she moved to a new company. The industry was the same.

The question that made her say yes

One of her new employer's investors had also backed Tomorrow University. Through him she found out about a scholarship. Roberta had been looking at MBA programs for two years. None was flexible enough for a full-time leadership role and a 3-year-old at home. She applied for the scholarship and got it.

She still hesitated. Time was her biggest worry. With no family nearby, studying after work meant her husband had to take on more. He agreed.

The push came from Eilecia Bovard, one of our ambassadors. Roberta was describing her hesitation. Eilecia asked her one question: "If it's not today, then when?"

"I don't want to keep thinking about it and then turn it into a regret," she answered. She started our Impact MBA in March 2024, in Cohort 3.

Learning to act before she felt ready

Her first challenge was Mission Identification, a structured exercise in naming what her work should be for. She knew the tools from her coach training. Using them on herself was harder. In her corporate years she had identified with her job title, and this challenge took the title away. She mentors other learners through it now. "Don't think that what you're going to write there is going to be written in stone," she tells them. "It's a life document."

She was used to learning from books and theory. Here she worked in teams on real problems. We call that Challenge-Based Learning. At first she missed the theory. It took her a while to see why we do it this way. "This is the way you connect, for the first time, what you learn to how it is applied in the real world."

Her cohort surprised her too. After years in one corporate bubble, she found herself among people with very different missions. Even the ones she admired most had, in her words, "the same doubts as me."

For one Impact Certificate, a deep-dive course in a single field, she chose Mental Health & Wellbeing. She worked with Professor Katherine C., who later mentored her thesis. She almost picked a harder technical subject instead, to fill her gaps. A classmate, Pim, told her: "Not everything needs to be hard and tough. Sometimes you can just follow your heart."

Her other Impact Certificate included a challenge called Leading with Technology and Human-Centered AI. Roberta had no strong technical background. She built a prototype, tested it with real users, wrote a business plan, and pitched investors. She found a co-founder, started a company around it, and joined accelerator programs. "Even if it was me, the woman from the south of Italy, I could make it. The difference between myself and the others was just that they were taking action and believing in themselves," she says.

Laid off in the middle of her thesis

In July 2025, while she was writing her thesis, she lost her job in a wave of layoffs. She spent almost two days on the floor doing breathing exercises. One question kept coming back: what now?

She was shocked, but also relieved. She had been thinking about leaving for a while, she says. She had never felt bold enough to walk away from the salary on her own.

Roberta decided not to panic. "You don't have your job title anymore, and your salary at the end of the month. But you got some savings, and you still got yourself. You are the project, and not the project of the company."

Her mentors stayed close. Katherine was guiding the thesis, and Thomas Funke, one of our co-founders, was mentoring her too. Consuela, a tutor she had barely worked with, kept checking in while Roberta was building that company. She finished our Impact MBA in November 2025 and graduated in Berlin in June 2026.

Her own firm and a task force on women in the AI economy

She spent the year after the layoff trying things out. Today Roberta runs ELEVATE, her own advisory firm for the human side of AI. She advises institutions and organizations on AI transformation, applied AI ethics, and ethics by design. Much of that work is in mental health, though not all of it.

She also leads a task force for WIDCON (Connecting Women in Digital), an EU-funded project that writes policy recommendations. They feed into the EU AI Act, she says. Her task force does qualitative and quantitative research on what keeps women in the EU from shaping the AI economy. The invitation came by email. "No friendship, no one I knew before, absolutely nothing." She is due to present the findings at the Digital Talent EU Days in Dublin in October 2026.

She's still active in our Slack channels, and she coaches other women through the transition she just made. She is starting a tech fellowship with us in 2026, with a guest lecture on change management booked for 2027.

Her advice to anyone still deciding:

"Don't waste your time on something that is not you. Listen to your inner call. Everything starts from within."

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