Our volunteers come to AI4ALL from all kinds of backgrounds, for all kinds of reasons – but underneath the different starting points, there’s usually the same goal driving us: wanting to build something meaningful, alongside people who care about it just as much. That’s what community means to us – people with different paths, working towards a shared purpose, supporting each other along the way. For Elena Miliaeva, that community also turned out to be where she found her dream job.
Elena joined AI4ALL as a volunteer in early 2025, after more than a decade in marketing built on data-driven strategy. In the years before that, she’d pushed further into data and AI – studying with Equals and The Code to Change, founding her own initiative, IT Girls, to help other women move into data science, and completing Google’s Deep Learning talent program and the Women in AI mentorship. Today, she’s our Growth Lead – and, since mid-2025, Growth Marketer at HULO.ai, a deep-tech startup working to reduce water loss in utility networks. We talked to her about how she got to where she is.
From 2022, my family went through a series of very hard years. I kept going anyway, and I was seriously considering a full pivot into a data scientist role.
By early 2025 I was exhausted – for reasons that had nothing to do with my career. If anything, studying was the part that kept me going. I was surviving, not dreaming. The break came when my mom visited over the holidays, and I finally had a moment to breathe. That gave me enough energy to start changing things.
I went to an AI4ALL Amsterdam Meetup, which reminded me how much I love this work after talking to people in genuinely innovative marketing roles. There, the meetup lead announced a new community, AI4ALL. I came to the next event, an “AI in Marketing” masterclass. We had a great group session, I asked about volunteering, and I sent my CV that evening. I didn’t want to leave marketing. I wanted to elevate it. AI4ALL was the place to do that.
I’ve volunteered my whole life. I became a Greenpeace volunteer when I was ten. Where I lived, I was an outlier – a very curious kid who just wanted her environment to be clean, healthy, and beautiful. Volunteering was life-saving, because I finally found people who shared my values. It taught me a lesson I still use: you need a community to get through hard things, and people with a shared vision to stay strong.
So I joined AI4ALL with three goals: find my community of people who want to make a real impact, give back after so many programs had helped me move from marketing into tech, and find my own place in this new AI world.
What did I have to offer? Persistence, and execution. Community organisations usually have a strong vision. I could take the vision and turn it into a plan, test it, and report what actually worked.
I started as marketing manager for the Amsterdam Circle, now called the Meetup. Then I took on the Youth program as well – as a mother I care a lot about building good opportunities and ethical guardrails for the next generation. Later, Girls Go Circular came too. By the time I was promoted I was running the marketing for all three.
Then Karen, one of our co-founders and co-CEOs, asked me a simple question: what did I actually want to do, and what was my plan? I said: growth marketing. It came out of my mouth just like that, and it surprised me as for two years I’d been telling everyone I was becoming a data scientist. Yet, there was no dramatic moment behind it, just logic: growth marketing runs on exactly what I’d spent two years studying – hypotheses, experiments, cohorts, funnels – and on the decade of marketing I already had. I’m not a data scientist, I’m a marketer, sharper for everything I studied in data science and AI, and at my best when I’m organising chaos and building the system underneath it.
Karen didn’t answer on the spot – she said she needed time to think, since they’d already been considering me for Marketing Lead. After some time, I got the role, and later became Growth Lead, which is what I do today.
Running marketing for our teenager programs, because nothing standard worked. LinkedIn, our main channel, is useless for that age group – our other channels weren’t strong enough yet, and going through parents didn’t work either, since teenagers want to make their own decisions.
So I went grassroots: local secondary schools, almost every day, asking face to face if we could put up our banner. At the workshop, I found the group that seemed most engaged and asked why they’d come. Because of the banner. That’s when it clicked: growth isn’t a channel, it’s a testing habit. You drop what isn’t reaching the people you need, even if it still works everywhere else.
On the side, I’d been running my own channel for a few months, sharing children’s activities in the Netherlands. Then, in an AI4ALL team meeting, someone shared the curriculum for the upcoming Entrepreneurship Program, and my reaction was immediate: I need to be there.
So I asked my husband, an engineer who cares about building AI responsibly, whether he could build an AI chatbot for the channel that gives personalized recommendations. He said yes, and the MVP came together fast. I was amazed by what he built – he integrated the curated content from my channel with GenAI, making it far more accessible and interactive through a chat interface: concise answers, several languages, recommendations that account for variables like weather, season, and age group. My side of it was the product logic, the user experience, and the go-to-market plan.
I called it Hupsakee – a family navigator for adventures with children. Hupsakee is what Dutch parents say when they encourage a child into a move, like a jump; the closest English is “off we go.” That’s exactly what I wanted the product to be: one step at a time, towards more adventures with your children.
With that MVP, I applied. For the next few months I saw the organisation from the inside out – studying how to be a founder, guided by the speakers, my mentor, and the other members, while also being one of the people running the place. It let me pressure-test the business from two directions at once. It was thrilling, and I’d do it again.
My transition to HULO.ai was a direct result of the high-caliber network at AI4ALL.
One day Oliviana, our co-founder and co-CEO, posted an opening. Their mission stopped me: saving water. Utilities lose a huge share of the water they treat and pump before it ever reaches a customer – that’s called non-revenue water, and HULO finds those losses. I’d always wanted to work at a company with that kind of impact, so I dug in, read everything I could find, and watched every interview with the founders. It clicked. I went back to Oliviana and asked if she’d refer me. She introduced me to Robbert Lodewijks, the co-founder, and I applied for the Growth Marketer role.
Two things, I think.
The first: a deep-tech startup needs someone who forms a hypothesis, looks at what the numbers say, and changes direction fast – and who then builds the system underneath it, so marketing connects to sales instead of running beside it. I have more than a decade of marketing experience across brand and product strategy, in B2C and B2B. It probably also helped that I could talk to the engineers. I’d spent years on data analytics, machine learning, and deep learning courses, so a deep-tech product wasn’t a black box I’d have to write copy around – I could ask how it actually works, and understand the answer. For a company selling AI to water utilities, that’s not a nice-to-have.
The second is that the mission wasn’t a talking point for me. I’m not looking for a job. I’m looking for a problem worth solving.
AI4ALL is an NGO with around 80 volunteers. Everyone gives the time they choose to give, around their own jobs and lives, so nothing there runs on obligation. That environment taught me that if you want real results, you must rely on intrinsic motivation, take absolute ownership of your work, and become the cross-functional glue for your team.
It also shaped how I set my own bar. When you take full ownership of something, you’re the one who decides when it’s truly good – and I’d rather keep working until I’m satisfied with the result than stop when the task is technically finished. The output is what matters to me. I use all of that at HULO.ai today.
Full-time job, volunteer leadership, two kids. So I would like to think my time management is decent.
I do a block of volunteer work in the morning, after I get the children ready for school and before my workday officially starts – usually over breakfast. Sometimes I take a volunteer call at lunch. My deepest focus is at night: after the children are asleep I go back to AI4ALL work and my own side projects.
On Fridays I go into the office, which is five to six hours on the train there and back. That sounds like dead time, but it is some of my best: no interruptions, no household, just me and a laptop. A lot of my studying and my clearest thinking happens on that train.
It sounds intense, but what makes it work is that I genuinely love building things, so strategy work gives me energy instead of taking it. And something does have to give: I almost never watch series. That’s not discipline, it’s simply what I’d rather do with an evening.
I’d say it keeps me honest about what I care about.
Volunteering is the best sandbox I know. There’s no long approval chain, and everyone in the room chose to be there – they’re there for the mission, not the title. So you can try the strange idea, and if it fails you learn something the same week. It’s not frictionless – you’re coordinating volunteers with day jobs, across time zones, and that takes patience. But the friction is honest friction.
And the people. I found my community at ten years old, and I keep finding it the same way.
Stop waiting for the perfect moment. It doesn’t exist – I joined in the hardest year of my life.
People hesitate for two reasons: they think they don’t have the hours, or they think they don’t know enough about AI yet. On the hours – for a marketing role it’s roughly three to five hours a week, and you can shape when they happen. What I do now is more than that, but that’s my own choice, not the ask. On the AI – volunteering here is how you learn it. That was literally my reason for joining.
Bring whatever you already have – marketing, operations, or just an appetite for organising chaos – and you’ll find a team that helps you grow. I came in looking for a community and a way back to work I love. I found both. And a job.
Join the AI4ALL Community
Curious what volunteering with AI4ALL could look like for you? Visit our website to see open roles and upcoming opportunities to join the community.
Want to be part of what’s next? Check out AI4ALL’s upcoming Meetups, the Entrepreneur Program, Masterclasses, and the Mentor Program. Join our movement shaping AI’s future together.