AI & automation transformation
Most companies automate the wrong thing. Automating a broken process makes the break permanent.
I tell you what to automate, what to fix first, and what to stop paying to treat.
AI & automation transformation
I tell you what to automate, what to fix first, and what to stop paying to treat.
Who this is for
Your board wants an automation strategy. The proposals you are getting all describe tooling, none of them describe the problem.
You sit on a board or hold a portfolio. One company keeps missing its numbers, and every report you receive explains why that was reasonable.
You have already spent on platforms, consultants, and senior hires. Nothing moves any faster than it did.
The gap
Your people know something is wrong. What they bring you are the symptoms, because symptoms are safe.
Some of them cannot see the core issue at all. They sit in one function and report what is visible from that seat.
Others can see it perfectly and will not say it, because naming it means crossing someone with an agenda. So the room stays polite and the problem stays funded.
What holds underneath is usually one of three things. A culture nobody will address. An architectural flaw nobody wants to reopen. Or processes the company outgrew years ago, held together with duct tape to avoid an ego clash.
None of them appear in a status report. All of them get automated anyway, and once that happens the company is running on them.
Client feedback
She immediately identified a $2M monthly revenue leak that multiple teams had argued about for months. She cleared the bottleneck by asking one very pointed question we were all afraid to ask the C-suite in front of their board of directors, which forced them to let us resolve it under her leadership.
Sandra Williams
VP Sales Operations. Her engagement paid for itself ten times over.
Why the usual fixes fail
Consultants deliver a deck and leave. The findings are shaped by who commissioned them and who they hope to sell to next.
Internal reviews are written by people whose positions depend on the answer. Nobody audits their own function honestly.
Another senior hire inherits the same politics on day one and spends a year learning what they are not allowed to say.
Platform vendors scope to what their product does. Every diagnosis arrives shaped like the thing they sell.
More tooling encodes the broken process into software, and what was a workaround becomes architecture.
The Empyrean Standard
I do not hand you a PowerPoint. I surface the blockages and the broken pieces, all of them, cleanly and without spin.
Then the brilliant people already living in your day to day devise the answer. They know the terrain, they will run it after I am gone, and the fix holds because it is theirs.
I have worked across many cultures and every level of an organization. I have no seat to defend, no relationship to preserve, and nothing to sell you afterward. That is the entire reason I can say what your people cannot.
I am not here to sell you. I am not here to fight your battles or win your wars. I am here to listen, to advise, to guide, and to create the shifts that let the best in your business thrive.
One agenda: the highest and best outcome for everyone at the table. Customers delighted, employees unblocked, investors confident.
I am here to bring your business to world class.
How it works
I speak with every function and every level, from the executive floor to the people carrying the work, and with the outside parties nobody thinks to ask. At Xbox that meant sixteen functions daily, from the Executive Office, Legal, and Finance through engineering, testing, and external publishers.
You get the root issue stated plainly, what it costs you every quarter it stays, and what is a symptom you can stop paying to treat. No hedging, no politics, no managing of anyone's ego including yours.
You get the sequence: what to repair before it is encoded, what to automate now, and what to retire. Decisions pushed back out to the people doing the work, with automation that holds the change in place. Your teams run it.
Current practice
I work with large language models and deliver automation into live operations, both internally and for clients. This is not a framework about AI. These are the systems themselves, in production, with people using them every day.
A Chief of Staff application, CRM systems, and internal and external platforms and sites, taken from architecture through launch and adoption.
Lead automation, vendor automation, and partnership automation. These are the unglamorous processes where companies quietly lose weeks every quarter.
Investor research automation. Manual diligence gathering replaced with systems that surface what matters before the meeting.
Client feedback
Ms. Truong has been instrumental in helping us navigate complex business automation and process breakdown challenges. Her strategic insights and immediate recommendations have led to significant improvements in our operations.
Amy Davis
CFO, AIrChat Technologies. Her wisdom, ease to communicate with, depth of expertise and collaborative approach make her a trusted advisor to our organization.
The record
Natural language IVR delivered through the Nuance and Dictaphone merger. Concept to certification and launch in four months, with churn contained through the transition.
Bing research requests were drowning a team. Triage and assignment became automatic. Turnaround moved from weeks to three or four days.
AT&T care representatives given the portal and the authority to resolve up to $2,000 without escalation. The bottleneck was approval, not capability.
AT&T Sacramento. A call center workforce recruited, trained, and onboarded in six months, alongside the care support portal and the technology requisition system that equipped them.
Microsoft Office. Ten-page status decks and Gantt charts replaced with red, yellow, and green dashboards with drill-downs, so teams resolved priorities independently and leadership read status at a glance.
Mobile care software commercialized through OEM partnerships with Nokia, Samsung, and Motorola, across 350M subscribers in eighteen countries.
Webex. Support backlog cut from a month to two days through automated outage messaging and a restructured escalation path. Satisfaction up 58%. International corporate retention up 23%.
Revenue reported the year after the engagement, up over 200%. First iPhone application and a thirteen-country revamp in six months across twenty-four teams.
Certification, licensed content, micropayment, and indie producer strategy, with the execution framework and full roadmap across multiple teams.
Recommended against a nine-figure commitment after identifying unrecoverable cost structure and reputational exposure. The investor withdrew.
AT&T Interactive. Sold revenue from the display advertising launch across 5,000 consultants in twenty-two markets. Consumer portal and Voice of the Company work added 21%.
NomaData. Raised on adoption across 138 practices of an open-source practice management suite with patient-controlled data portability, ahead of federal mandate.
AT&T mMode. Sales growth from customer acquisition optimization on the mobile portal.
Multi-site surgical group. Repositioned from $299 to $2,999 per procedure. Revenue up $4.2M in two years. COO, then interim CEO.
Resort and infrastructure development, early career.
Jade Truong
Called into companies where execution stalled and nobody could say why.
Microsoft. AT&T. eBay. Nuance. Xbox. Verizon. iPass. A twenty-three company investment portfolio. A surgical group run as COO and interim CEO. A nonprofit co-founded that opened five boarding schools for children rescued from trafficking.
No position to protect, no relationship to preserve, and no reason to manage your ego. You will hear what is true the first time.
Trust is power. Power is execution. Execution is the outcome.
Where this leaves you
Keep funding the symptoms. The duct tape holds until it does not, and the cost compounds quietly every quarter.
You would be asking your own people to name something that threatens one of their colleagues. Some of them will not see it. The ones who do will not say it.
Someone with no seat to defend, who crosses every aisle, names the cause, and hands you the path. Then leaves your teams to run it.
Client feedback
Employee turnover was killing us. Her analysis identified three core issues we had not even thought about. She worked with us top down on the first two and taught our team how to automate the third. Turnover dropped from 28% to 13.8% within eighteen months.
Margaret Chen
Chief Executive Officer
Client feedback
Together we created and ran the strategic business planning process for all 35+ products within MSN along with three acquisitions, which required gaining buy-in across 100+ teams. The outcome was 38 unique yet streamlined business product plans and a global roadmap with a three-year vision, successfully delivered to Bill Gates and approved, a difficult thing to achieve. There is a certain caliber of person who sees no limits, who can motivate and inspire, gain trust, and stay above the fray while putting herself in the shoes of the person across the table.
Connie Pohl
Planning Organization, MSN, Microsoft
What surprised me most was the level of initiative you took to reach out and investigate best practices across other divisions throughout Microsoft, and to distill a great deal of our company’s wisdom into a practical best practices strategy in a compressed period. Two teams in Windows and a program management group want to adopt the framework you developed as a solution for their own planning. You have made a real impact here.
Bill Shaunnessy
General Manager, Microsoft
The Book of Insights is the most thorough and solid start to the planning process for a multi-year release roadmap that we have had to date. Synthesizing the inputs across our entire organization during a time of shift may not have been the easiest project, but you kept our departments focused on the end goal. As an aside, my communications team informed me you had taught them new strategies for our own communications. Where did you find the time?
Blake Irving
MSN / Windows Live Platform, Microsoft
She managed four major program initiatives simultaneously in a year with unbelievable success rates across the board. Consider her if you are looking to streamline business systems, synthesize a vision, or have a program that needs a champion to drive it forward. All of her work was exceptional, and she achieved results far beyond our expectations in every initiative.
Abhisht Arora
Product Organization, Windows Live, Microsoft
She emerged as a solutions-oriented individual with cross-departmental insight, developing a hiring and onboarding process at scale, then filling gaps across IT and facilities so the center was ready for launch. The skill to bridge the gap between collaborative leadership and function made her an excellent facilitator between our department heads. She works with a high level of integrity, openly gives credit where due, and seeks practical solutions that stand the test of time.
Scott Sanford
Director of Customer Care, AT&T Wireless
Together with her board we formed NomaData, where we delivered the first SaaS practice management and marketing platform. Her vision back then is very similar to what I have seen Salesforce and other companies go on to create. She is a visionary with enough savvy to figure out who the real experts are and empower them. If you can dream it, she seems to be able to take it farther than you imagined.
Kenny Flegal
Technical Architect, NomaData
She has complete understanding of big picture scenarios and the details, adapts to any business environment seamlessly, and completes high quality plans and strategic solutions quickly. She is one of the few individuals I have taken under my wing and recommended to others in the start-up arena. She brings out the best kind of ingenuity in people, and can communicate at any level with alacrity and insight.
Nathan Lewis
Angel Investor, London
She asked each of them point blank what caused them the greatest pain, and whether solving it would be enough to give automation another try. Inside three days she automated eight team processes with our longest-serving experts. Because they drove the solutions, they were thrilled. Her ability to surface brilliance where there had been heavy pushback was arguably the most incredible turnaround I have seen.
Christian Peterson
On an operations automation initiative
She caught the one bottleneck we didn’t see. She understood bottlenecks before we had the definition for them. The missing piece was not process. It was whether new people felt safe enough to speak up, meet anyone, and offer an idea. The changes in our business were immediate.
Jen Nguyen
On an automated onboarding system
She takes time to understand your challenges and ensures she is solving the real issues. She had a way of making even the most technically resistant of us comfortable with a major technology transition, and her training was founded in developing confidence in our employees.
B. Johnson
On a company-wide technology transition
By application
We spend focused time on what you are actually facing. I ask the questions your people cannot ask you, and you leave with the root cause named and what it costs you every quarter it stays. I take on a small number of principals each year. Responses within two business days.