Aaron Patzalek

Operations and Service Transformation Leader

I drive AI adoption. And I ship the thing.

Most transformation leaders advise. Most builders have never run operations. I have spent 15+ years leading operations and product across retail, eCommerce, telecom, and nonprofit, and in the last year I have designed and built a shelf of alpha-stage AI products myself. That combination is the whole point.

My pattern, across every industry I have worked in: walk into an undefined space, find the real problem, orchestrate the specialists and the tools, and ship something that genuinely helps the person at the end of the chain. Based in St. Thomas, Ontario.

Three things that almost never come together

Organizations hiring for AI transformation usually get one of these. Adoption stalls because the advisor cannot build, or the builder cannot bring people along. I do both, and I evaluate the tools with a discipline most vendors would rather you skipped.

Operations depth

15+ years of multi-industry operations and product leadership: Staples Canada, TELUS, Goodwill Industries, Start.ca, Peavey Mart. Entered each industry cold and delivered measurable results.

A built shelf

Live AI-built products I designed, built, and maintain myself: accessible, bilingual, open on the web today. Not slideware. The first client was me.

An evaluator's lens

A structured vendor-independence framework for judging AI tools: what happens to your stack if any one vendor disappears. Honest assessment, no hype, no affiliate agenda.

Three products I designed and built

Each of these went from idea to live product with no dev team behind it, and each one is open on the web right now: click through and judge for yourself. An honest status note: all three are live and deployed, and none has been through a formal beta with real users yet. That work is next, and I would rather say so than dress it up.

Digital Confidence Centre

Live

A free digital-literacy learning centre built for older adults, the people most tech leaves behind. Dozens of plain-language modules, fully bilingual (English and French), designed to WCAG accessibility standards from day one.

Designed and built end to end. Accessibility, translation, and content architecture included.

Open the Digital Confidence Centre →

Clarity

Live

A free operations check-up for Canadian small and medium businesses. Seven questions produce an industry benchmark, a Canadian privacy-law check, and a personalised strengths-and-gaps analysis with an action plan. The same honest, no-hype framing I bring to client work, made public.

Designed and built end to end. Performance-tuned, no frameworks, no tracking.

Open Clarity →

Career Coach

Live

A structured career-planning tool that walks a job seeker from self-assessment to an actionable plan. Built from the operator's side of hiring: what actually gets people to a decision.

Designed and built end to end.

Open Career Coach →

The operation behind them runs itself

The three products above are the visible output. The harder build, and the one a business leader should care about, is the operation underneath: a one-person company run with the checks and routines you would normally need a team for. In plain terms:

  • The overnight shift runs unattended. Every night, across multiple machines: repositories synced and backed up, automated browser tests against every live page, and a plain-English morning briefing waiting when I open the laptop.
  • Quality is checked by machines, on a schedule. Accessibility and performance audits run automatically on every release. Every recurring failure gets logged in a reliability ledger and turned into a written rule, so the same mistake cannot happen silently twice.
  • Nothing substantial ships without a structured review. Before major work goes out, it passes a standing multi-perspective review: strategy, legal, accessibility, marketing, and operations lenses. The blind-spot check a solo operator would otherwise skip.
  • Research arrives as finished briefs. Competitive analysis, market sizing, and tool evaluations run as autonomous research jobs and land as sourced, decision-ready documents, not as open browser tabs.
  • Incoming material sorts itself. A content-intake pipeline captures articles, ideas, and links as they arrive and triages them for review, so nothing depends on me remembering to file things.

The full working case study of how this is governed, what runs each night, and what the rules are lives here: how the system works →

15+ years. Specific results.

Scaled Koodo prepaid home internet to 60,000+ subscribers

TELUS, Senior Product Manager, 2024 to 2025

Accountable for service delivery across Central and Eastern Canada, directing $15M+ in annual capital allocation. Reduced customer churn by more than 30% through localized support tools, dedicated churn-intercept specialists, and proactive digital retention plays.

Doubled the eCommerce platform to $30M in annual revenue

Staples Canada, 2005 to 2019

Fourteen years, from Category Manager to Senior Product Manager, eCommerce. Built three sub-teams from scratch: UX Design, Web Operations, and Analytics. Separately led the multi-year build of Compass, a custom fleet-intelligence platform that delivered $1M+ in operational savings.

Led a 15-person team to record online sales growth

Goodwill Industries (Canada), Senior eCommerce Manager, 2020 to 2021

Overhauled digital retail operations for a nonprofit during the hardest retail years in memory, applying Six Sigma methods to redesign fulfilment workflows from scratch.

The honest-operator rules

  • Find the real problem first. Every engagement starts with framing, not tooling. Most "AI problems" turn out to be process problems wearing a costume.
  • No hype, ever. If a tool is not worth adopting, I will say so, even when saying so ends the project. That is the point of hiring an independent evaluator.
  • Bring the people along. Adoption fails on trust, not technology. 15+ years of leading teams taught me that nobody transforms an organization from a slide deck.
  • Ship for the end user. The measure of the work is whether it genuinely helps the person at the end of the chain. Everything else is overhead.

Work with me

Running an organization that needs honest AI or process help? I take project-based consulting engagements through Two Birds Innovation. It starts with a 30-minute conversation where you describe what is breaking and I ask questions. No pitch.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aaronpatzalek Ontario, Canada