Darija Barrech

Curiosity As A Career Strategy

"It's my curiosity that brought me into where I am today," she says of her path.

Barrech is candid that she never had a very specific plan about where she needed to land in terms of industry.

What she did have was intent.

HR, as she points out, is a field that travels well — a discipline that lets a professional move between sectors — and she chose to use that mobility on purpose rather than by accident.

Several years in medical devices came first, across different sizes and different kinds of organizations, each one adding another set of lessons about how businesses actually work.

Then came a deliberate move into process automation, the field she calls home today.

Where others might see a series of changes, Barrech sees one continuous education.

Learning From Every Kind Of Leader

Ask Barrech who shaped her, and she does not name a single mentor — she names a spectrum.

"The diversity of leaders that I have had shaped me," she says, and she counts it among the things she has valued most.

Very different kinds of people led her and worked alongside her: different nationalities, different backgrounds, different assumptions about how work should be done.

She saw the value in that exposure early, and she is still drawing on it today.

Her earliest lesson, characteristically, came from paying close attention rather than from being handed a template.

Watching a manager whose approach did not match her own instincts, she came away with a principle she still repeats: you need to know what you don't want to do, and how you don't want to be, in order to know what you do want to be.

That question — okay, what else is out there? — sent her looking, and she has been looking ever since.

Pioneering AI Inside The HR Function

Barrech is quick to say she is not a technical person by training.

She is equally quick to say that never stopped her from asking what a new technology is and how it could be used.

In her current company and her current field, she is the pioneer of implementing AI — a role she has grown into over the past three years, developing HR processes globally alongside her team.

Before AI dominated the conversation, she notes, the work was digitalization itself: implementing the tools that drive efficiency.

Now the task has evolved into optimization — refining processes, designing out the human error that still creeps in wherever manual work remains, and generating the data on which everything else depends.

"AI can only live if you have enough data," she says, framing data not as a byproduct but as the raw material of good business decisions.

That work is made more demanding by context: hers is a largely decentralized organization, one with systems available but not mandated.

So Barrech has taken a disciplined approach, defining within her own area of responsibility exactly where adoption makes sense because there is something real to be gained from it.

The payoff she is aiming for is not automation for its own sake.

It is freeing up time so that experts can do what they are expert in — and so the organization can be shaped for the future rather than simply maintained in the present.

Strengthen Your Core To Support Others

Asked what advice she would offer other leaders heading into 2027, Barrech pauses over the phrasing, then lands on something she clearly believes deeply.

"Strengthen your core to support others."

Her reasoning is grounded in realism.

Leaders are role models, she says, but they do not have all the answers — not on technology, not on geopolitics, not on the social and political currents that feel stressful in different ways depending on where in the world you sit.

She sometimes compares leadership to a blind walk, and she includes herself in that description; leaders are affected by uncertainty too.

But the conclusion she draws is not resignation.

If leaders do not have strength within themselves, she argues, there is no one for their people to follow — and so building that internal strength becomes a responsibility, not a luxury.

A Deliberately Positive View Of The Future

For all her clear-eyed acknowledgment of how frightening the world can feel, Barrech's outlook is unmistakably optimistic.

"I look very positive into the world," she says. "There's so much opportunity."

She is careful to honor the fact that every person carries different experiences and will read the same moment differently.

Yet she insists the opportunity to shape the future is genuinely enormous — and available.

The condition, in her view, is self-knowledge: knowing who you are, what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how.

Leaders who can answer those questions, she believes, give others something worth following.

It is a fitting philosophy from someone who has spent a career choosing her direction on purpose — and it is a large part of why Darija Barrech belongs on the Talent 100 list.

Her instinct for generosity extends beyond her own organization, too: given the chance to shine a light elsewhere, she used it to champion a friend she admires as a courageous, genuinely innovative entrepreneur — someone who moved from marketing and communications into real estate and is succeeding by doing it in a way nobody else does.

That, perhaps, is the truest measure of the leader she has become: still curious, still learning from others, and still looking for the people worth following.