Guest
Benjamin Herndon
Chief Strategy Officer, KUNGFU.AI
A strategy and organizational change leader turning AI from a cost-cutting reflex into a reason to refound the business.
About
Benjamin Herndon is Chief Strategy Officer at KUNGFU.AI, where he leads strategy and organizational change and helps clients reinvent themselves for the AI age. He is known for arguing that AI is a chance to refound a business, not simply automate it for cost savings.
Herndon's focus sits where strategy meets organizational change. At KUNGFU.AI, a company whose name he explains reflects that kung fu means anything that takes discipline to master, he works alongside what he calls an incredible engineering staff to translate fast-moving technical change into organizational change. By his account the firm works across healthcare and life sciences, finance and fintech, and government, including security agencies and the IRS, often in regulated settings where data cannot leave its source. In one build, he says, a client's proprietary data sat in 20 locations across continents, forcing a federated learning system that trained a model as if the data were in one common place.
Across that client base Herndon has watched organizations rush at AI for cost savings and pave what he calls the cow paths. He positions KUNGFU.AI away from staff augmentation, saying it brings net new capability and a roadmap to transformation most organizations cannot generate alone. His argument is consistent: the hard part is people, governance and letting go of legacy assumptions; the technology comes second.
Career30 years
- 2021 to now KUNGFU.AI Chief Strategy Officer
- 2019 to 2020 Vista Equity Partners Head of AI Strategy
- 2016 to 2019 Internal Revenue Service Chief Research and Analytics Officer
- 2009 to 2015 Georgia Institute of Technology - Scheller College of Business Professor of Management and Organisational Cognition
Show earlier roles: The University of Texas at Austin, Library of Congress, Convio, A. H. Belo, AT&T Labs
- 2003 to 2009 The University of Texas at Austin Ph.D. Candidate, Researcher, and Lecturer
- 2001 to 2003 Library of Congress Special Adviser to the Librarian of Congress
- 1999 to 2001 Convio Director of Business Development
- 1997 to 1999 A. H. Belo Executive Director, New Media Ventures
- 1996 to 1997 AT&T Labs Senior Consultant, Network Outsourcing
How Benjamin thinks3 convictions
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Refounding, not automating
Herndon rejects the instinct to automate everything for efficiency. He urges leaders to return to what made their company successful, keep those principles, and discard assumptions and structures that no longer serve them. For him the AI age is a renaissance for organizational leaders, a chance for genuine reinvention.
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Momentum regresses without focus
Herndon warns that early momentum, often driven by an engaged CEO, is fragile. If leadership loses focus or declares victory too soon, organizations slide back to old habits. Change at scale, he says, is hard precisely because it turns on people and culture more than technology.
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Human and machine as one plus one
Herndon applies one test to individuals and organizations alike. He asks what humans bring that is difficult or impossible to automate, then how they can combine with AI so the output beats the sum of the parts. His guidance to young people entering work mirrors his advice to enterprises.