Sophie Guenster spent nine years in humanitarian operations: programme coordination for the Yemen Response (remote and in-country), field-based business development in Afghanistan, where she spent eight months in Herat leading a team of six and a US$50 million portfolio, and a global humanitarian portfolio at World Vision Germany, spanning programmes across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Earlier still, health programming in Lebanon at humedica, where she led the shift from emergency relief to transitional development funding.

She knows first-hand what it means to be data-rich and insight-poor: the answers sit in the spreadsheets, the sitreps, and the monitoring outputs, but reading them competes with everything else an operation demands. That is the perspective Impact Node works from.

Impact Node is her independent practice, working at the intersection of operational judgment, applied data skills, and practical AI integration. The technical layer, grounded in MIT Professional Education's Applied AI and Data Science programme, was a deliberate addition to that operational experience, not a move away from it.