Anutara Tantraporn

I was born in 1970 — the same year the Unix epoch began. Time zero. The point every digital system on earth counts from. I didn’t plan that, obviously, but looking back, it feels about right. My life has moved with that clock — through technology transitions, economic crises, political upheavals. The scenery kept changing. I just got good at reading what was underneath it.

I changed schools a lot growing up. Went from a Catholic school that ran like a military boot camp to an art school where freedom was the whole point. Most people would see those as opposites. I thought they were just two incomplete answers to the same question.

Along the way, I got my hands on a Nintendo 8-bit with a green screen, an Apple II, Windows 1.0. I was using Photoshop 1.0, Aldus FreeHand, QuarkXPress — back when desktop publishing was still explaining itself to people. At 19, I ended up in a classroom in Australia sitting next to classmates in their 40s. Technology transitions have a way of putting everyone back at the starting line. We were doing 3D modelling and animation on a 16-bit computer with 256K of RAM. That didn’t teach you software. That taught you patience.

In 1997, I decided to study interactive multimedia. Almost nobody understood what that meant at the time, which honestly made it more interesting. The real question behind it was simple enough: how do people actually interact with the systems we build for them?

I remember one night in the lab, a friend sitting next to me during a late session just looked around and said something like — “Anutara, look how lucky we are. Sitting here in the studio, working with something we love. How many people in the world get this?” I don’t remember his exact words. But I’ve never forgotten what he meant.

Then in 1999, I got to work at NECTEC — right before Y2K. So there I was, inside Thailand’s national tech center, while the rest of the world was wondering if computers were going to forget what year it was. Good timing. It gave me a front-row seat to what happens when short-term thinking meets long-term consequences.

After that came an unexpected turn — banking, of all things, as a marketing specialist. Which taught me that understanding technology wasn’t enough if you didn’t understand how people make decisions. So I went back and studied management science. Ended up in C-level ICT roles across a few organisations. Every one of them a different lesson in how institutions think — or don’t.

Then came my master’s research, and one question that changed everything for me. While we’re trying so hard to make computers smarter — which is what we now call AI — why don’t we try using technology to teach people to think smarter?

That question never left. It’s still the one I’m trying to answer.

So in 2009, I started a school. It began as a Thai-curriculum school with an English focus. Three years later, it became an English Program school. In 2024, it became a full international school running the Oxford International Curriculum. Sixteen years — not chasing trends, just building toward something worth building.

Everything I’ve done — the technology, the business, the writing, the school — comes back to that same question. We made the machines smarter. But are we making the people smarter too?

“It is not the knowledge you know; it is the way you think.”