What Consulting Teaches Founders Building in the Age of AI

Muriel grew up moving between cities in Brazil and was always the kid asking “why.” Her mother gave her shared principles and values instead of lots of rules, which Muriel says gave her confidence and creativity. She went on to study control and automation engineering and earned an MBA at Duke. Although she had offers from other firms, she chose to join Bain in São Paulo in 2017 because it felt like home. During her first two years, she worked on projects across industries including healthcare, automotive, and private equity.

She left Bain in 2019 to join the founding team of Avocado, a grocery delivery startup, and later co-founded Turbo BR, which grew to 16 cities in 14 months and more than 700 people at its peak. She had never led a team before, so she sought out mentors and learned by doing. Her main lesson from scaling that fast was to hire people you trust, set clear principles, and let them run. At her next startup, she led sales and customer experience, and built a sales and service bot with the help of an AI model. Her point is that business people are best placed to guide these tools, because a good bot depends on knowing how to do the work manually.

That thinking led her to found Unna Tech in January. It adds a management layer inside a company’s processes that routes each input to AI, fixed rules, or a person, and uses human corrections to make the system more autonomous over time. She says the hardest part is that the rules companies work by often live in people’s heads, not on paper. Her first big use case is the legal industry, where the system extracts data from long legal petitions and sends only uncertain fields to human reviewers. She also teaches AI and business process automation to students, and tells them that anyone using AI to execute work is now a manager, whether they are an intern or an analyst. Her advice for future founders is to start in consulting, as it teaches you to break problems down and tell symptoms from root causes and gives you exposure to many industries quickly.