I help organizations scale without breaking.
An AI-native operations leader for founders, scale-ups, and institutions — building the systems that keep growth from outrunning you. Available as a fractional COO or project-based partner.
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What We Do
Strategy & Operating Systems
I help leaders articulate strategy and build the operating system that makes it real — goals, cadence, and the metrics to know if it's working.
- Strategy development and activation — a written strategy that becomes a core organizational artifact
- OKR and goal-setting frameworks, plus the quarterly rhythm and retros that keep them alive
- Operating cadences: planning cycles, leadership meetings, decision rights
Executive and board reporting, dashboards, and KPIs - AI woven throughout — from strategy research to automated reporting
Operational Transformation
When headcount, tools, and processes outrun your systems, I run a top-to-bottom audit and rebuild the backbone.
- End-to-end operational audits that surface what's slowing you down
- Process redesign, SOPs, and change management that sticks
- Data foundations: properly housed, structured, and connected
- Tech-stack consolidation — from a dozen overlapping tools down to what fits your size
AI Adoption & Enablement
I help teams move from "we should use AI" to AI running real work, responsibly.
- AI opportunity audits — where AI drives growth, cuts cost, or replaces manual work
- Off-the-shelf AI automations and agents for internal workflows, support, and ops
- AI governance: usage policy, guardrails, and responsible-use practices
- Hands-on team training and enablement to build lasting internal capability
Fractional & Embedded Leadership
Whether you're a founder who needs a fractional COO or an organization that needs a seasoned operator to execute a mandate, I embed and get it done.
- Fractional COO / Head of Operations for founding teams and scale-ups
- Embedded operator to drive a specific initiative, program, or transformation
- Subcontract execution partner for consultancies, accelerators, and institutes
- Program and PMO leadership — including standing up new programs from scratch
- Interim leadership through fundraises, M&A, and other inflection points
Real Work, Real Results
The most strategic problems rarely fit neatly into one department. Those are the ones I get handed, and I solve them by building the systems that let organizations scale without breaking.
AI, Not Hiring | Series B SaaS
🚨 Problem: company needed to scale output without scaling headcount
✅ Solution: led a company-wide AI adoption effort, embedding AI into the highest-leverage workflows
🚀 Results
- AI-resolved customer inquiries doubled to 50,000/yr, while satisfaction scores remained high
- AI video production cut timelines by 75%, and costs by 95%
Expanded Globally | Tech Accelerator
🚨 Problem: a global AI accelerator needed its first European location built
✅ Solution: built the program model, operations, investor network, and team; raised the funding
🚀 Results
- $9.4MM raised for a 5-year runway
- Scaled from 1 cohort of 25 startups to 4 cohorts of 100
- Inaugural cohort of AI startups collectively raised $6.8MM in seed financing
Cut costs by 25% | Series B SaaS
🚨 Problem: cost/customer had been climbing for several years, quietly eroding margins
✅ Solution: ran a top-to-bottom operational audit; implemented new databases, automations, and AI tools
🚀 Results
- Cost/customer dropped by 25%
- Customers supported/staff grew by 15%
- $600K in direct savings
Scaled Global Org | Tech Accelerator
🚨 Problem: offices operated in silos with no shared systems, impeding global scaling
✅ Solution: implemented a unified technology stack — CRM plus a custom-built CSP
🚀 Results
- 100% adoption of the new stack
- Scaled from 60 staff/5 offices/1 country to 170 staff/10 offices/4 countries
Kyle Murphy: The Story Behind the Work
Kyle Murphy brings deep experience across for-profit, non-profit, government, and academic organizations. He has led teams of 200+, managed operations spanning six countries, and overseen budgets exceeding $40MM. Throughout his career, he has scaled global operations, launched digital products, and driven organization-wide transformations.
He led the digital transformation of the Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Toronto, the world’s largest AI and machine learning startup program, and spearheaded its European launch at the University of Oxford. More recently, Kyle scaled two funded tech startups: a seed-stage e-learning company enabling the creator economy and Fortune 500 companies to move their training online, and a Series B edtech company revolutionizing the assessment and nurturing of human potential.
Kyle began his career in government and public policy, serving in the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada and later at the C.D. Howe Institute, Canada’s leading economics think tank.
He holds an Honors Business Administration, with Distinction, from Ivey Business School, Western University, and a certificate in AI and machine learning from MIT.
Today, Kyle works as an AI-native operations leader and fractional COO, helping founders, scale-ups, and institutions build the systems that let them scale without breaking.
How We're Different
Not just a talking head
Strategy is easy to talk about from a slide deck. Harder in a spreadsheet, CRM, workflow, or product roadmap. We do both. We’ll help you decide what to do — and then roll up our sleeves to make it real.
AI is built in
We don’t “add AI later.” From day one, we look for ways AI can unlock growth, automate work, and lower costs. It’s not hype — it’s leverage, woven into everything we design.
Treat businesses like products
Nothing is ever finished. Markets change, tools evolve, and yesterday’s process becomes tomorrow’s bottleneck. We bring a product mindset to strategy, operations, and growth — ship early, iterate often, improve continuously.
Let's Chat Today
The first call is a free assessment of the major opportunities in your organization, and a preliminary plan of attack.