Andrew Kilshaw · TalentOptima
Every strategy is a bet on the organisation that has to deliver it. I shorten the odds.
I’m Andrew Kilshaw. I redesign how complex global organisations work. AI bolted onto an old operating model is the proverbial faster horse: the value comes when the work is rebuilt around people and AI, with the talent and capability to run it and the culture and adoption that make it last.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” attributed to Henry Ford, almost certainly apocryphally. The point stands.
Delivered through practice
What organisations bring me in for
Complex transformation, end to end
Shell: I partnered with Shell’s Downstream leadership through the oil-price collapse, mobilising a 300-plus team to take roughly $1 billion of structural cost out of the business.
Operating-model redesign and simplification
Sanofi: I led CEO-sponsored simplification across a 90,000-person enterprise: spans, layers and decision speed all improved.
Organisational health and the capacity to lead
Sanofi: I created Space to Lead at Sanofi: organisational health worked from the executive committee down, with fewer, better-designed manager roles and room to lead.
Strategy into growth
Nike: I led the HR integration and capability build for Nike’s first digital organisation: foundations for 35% annual ecommerce growth.
Nike: I combined strategy and HR leadership for the $2.5 billion Jordan brand, leading a five-year growth plan presented to Michael Jordan.
Talent, learning and succession
Nike: I created NikeU, Nike’s first corporate university, serving more than 55,000 people worldwide.
BlackRock: I led board-sponsored succession design and merger integration through BlackRock’s acquisition of BGI.
AI adoption and upskilling, enterprise-wide
Sanofi: I was people and culture lead for Sanofi’s AI adoption journey: decision intelligence in the flow of work for tens of thousands.
Sanofi: I co-led the Digital and AI executive programme for Sanofi’s top 150 with HEC Paris, cascaded across the enterprise.
Three ways to partner
Diagnose and decide. Mobilise. Sustain.
There’s no set path through this work, and you don’t start at the beginning of mine. These are three open entry points: come in wherever your problem lives, at whatever weight fits, and we shape the journey from there. Proven, directional, adapted to you: never rinse and repeat.
Diagnose and decide
Begin here when the question is still forming. An advisory decision sprint or a concierge diagnostic turns an ambiguous organisational question into evidence, a decision and a plan you can commit to.
Diagnose and decide in detailMobilise
Begin here when the direction is set and the organisation now has to move. Transformation architecture and mobilisation, built with your own leaders and teams, and if you want the aim rechecked first, a focused diagnostic rides alongside.
Mobilise in detailSustain
Begin here when what you want is judgement alongside you: advisory on a continuing decision agenda, independent assurance, or reassessment against the baseline we set together.
Sustain in detail
The intersection
Organisational capability and hands-on AI proficiency often sit in different rooms.
I bring proven expertise where they combine.
Capability and transformation
Learn more about Capability and transformation
The capability a strategy needs, and the path to build it, differ in every organisation. I have built it in four industries.
- At Sanofi I was executive lead for CEO-sponsored work to simplify how a 90,000-person enterprise operates, improve organisational health and put always-on capability planning in place.
- At Shell I partnered with the Downstream leadership team on a transformation through an oil-price collapse: agility, simplification, decarbonisation and roughly $1 billion of structural cost out of the business.
- At Nike I built the people capability behind a new digital organisation, and co-led the growth strategy for the Jordan brand.
- At BlackRock I led talent, succession and the people side of integration through a merger.
Designing work for humans and AI
Learn more about Designing work for humans and AI
Start from the operating model, not the technology. Decide what people do, what AI does, and who stays accountable: AI recommends, leaders decide.
- At Sanofi I co-built AI and data fluency in the top team and out across the enterprise, through a CEO-endorsed programme with HEC Paris.
- I was people and culture lead for Sanofi’s AI adoption journey, putting decision intelligence in the flow of work for tens of thousands of decision makers through plai.
- At TalentOptima I apply the same method to my own practice: AI drafts and audits, and nothing publishes without an approved source.
Practical AI fluency
Learn more about Practical AI fluency
I build with these tools, not just about them.
- I built an AI-powered adaptive learning platform end to end: strategy, product definition, architecture and the AI capabilities themselves.
- I advise start-up founders on the same ground, from product strategy through to what the technology can and cannot yet do.
- My practice runs on a governed multi-agent system I built: one agent drafts, a second audits it independently, and nothing publishes without an approved source.
- At Sanofi I was one of fifteen senior leaders the CEO selected to drive enterprise-wide AI adoption.
Go deeper
The proof has stories behind it.
Selected work
Taming complexity at global scale
How a global enterprise attacked accumulated complication, and what it took to make simplification a movement rather than a programme.
AI × Capability, in full
Where twenty years of organisational change meets hands-on AI building, and what happens where they combine.
How I think
Learned by building
Nine steps from an unmet need to a shipped AI product, what each taught me, and the four Ps of working with the models.