# Kyle Behrend

> AI educator, consultant, and builder who helps nonprofits and mission-driven organisations figure out AI. Collaborated with OpenAI on their nonprofit training academy. Delivered 200+ workshops across four continents. Based in NSW, Australia.

## What I Do

- **Education**: On-demand courses, weekly learning labs, and a community of 250+ paid members and 200+ free members through AI Impact Hub. Free foundational courses include Prompting Best Practices, Context Engineering, Making AI Sound Like You, Creating Custom Assistants, and AI as a Strategic Thought Partner.
- **Consulting**: AI strategy, policy development, paid tool selection and rollout, pre- and post-adoption surveys, implementation plans, culture plans, maturity models, and ongoing training and support for organisations up to 250+ staff.
- **Technical Builds**: Automations, AI agents, chatbots, voice agents, MCP knowledge servers, databases, and websites — built and handed over with full knowledge transfer.
- **Speaking**: 200+ workshops, conference keynotes, and webinar series across Australia, Europe, and the United States.

## Key Credentials

- Collaborated with OpenAI on their nonprofit training academy (25,000+ views and counting)
- Founded AI Impact Hub (education platform for nonprofit AI adoption, 250+ paid members)
- 13.5 years at Edgar's Mission farm animal sanctuary (built full digital infrastructure from zero, grew team from 2 to 20+)
- Trained 2,000+ professionals across 4 continents
- Rated 5.0/5.0 at the 2026 Fundraising Institute Australia conference
- AI mentor for Kickstarting for Good incubator in Berlin
- Subject matter expert for Project Evident's Google.org-funded AI Opportunity Accelerator

## Background

I was born in South Africa and moved to Australia where I joined Edgar's Mission, a farm animal sanctuary outside Melbourne, as the first paid staff member. Over 13.5 years I built the digital infrastructure from scratch using Salesforce, Airtable, Slack, and Make.com automations. My wife Kelly built the social media presence to nearly 3 million followers. I grew the team from 2 to over 20 people. The systems I built kept running after I left.

After leaving in late 2023, I started consulting for nonprofits on AI and automations. A pattern kept repeating — I would build something, hand it over, and nothing grew from it. The people inside these organisations needed the skills themselves. That led me to rebrand and build AI Impact Hub around one idea: education first. Not consulting that creates dependency. Training that builds capability.

## Philosophy

Most organisations do not have an AI problem. They have a visibility problem. Staff are buried in manual tasks they have never questioned because they do not know an alternative exists. Leadership has not prioritised AI because they have not seen what it can do.

The real value of AI is not doing existing work faster. It is doing things that were never possible before. A three-person team building an interactive web experience in an afternoon. A staff member turning an eight-minute voice note into a complete process document. An organisation querying years of institutional knowledge through a single conversation.

Organisations need AI adoption to come from multiple directions at once. Leadership needs to set the direction — an AI policy, paid tools, a strategy. Staff need foundational skills, time to experiment, and permission to explore. Boards should be asking about AI in their strategic conversations. Funders should be encouraging adoption. Neither top-down nor bottom-up alone is enough. It has to be both.

## Projects

### Education

**OpenAI Academy**
An ongoing collaboration with OpenAI, creating practical AI training for their global nonprofit community. Video walkthroughs, custom GPTs, and free resources. 25,000+ views and counting.
Link: https://academy.openai.com/home/collections/ai-for-nonprofits-2025-07-15

**AI Impact Hub**
An AI education platform for nonprofit professionals. Free foundational courses, paid weekly learning labs, community chat, and ongoing support. 250+ paid members, 200+ free members. Library of free resources including AI policy template, introduction to AI ebook, AI maturity model, and tutorial videos.
Link: https://aiimpacthub.com/

**Infoxchange**
An ongoing collaboration with Infoxchange, Australia's leading digital transformation organisation for the nonprofit sector. Regular webinar host since 2024, covering prompting fundamentals, visual AI tools, and a six-part deep dive on ChatGPT.
Link: https://digitaltransformation.org.au/

**AI Academy Automations Workshop**
A hands-on workshop delivered to each AI Academy cohort. Participants build a real automation live in Make.com — webhooks, conditions, error handling, JSON, and AI as the intelligence layer.

**Amplify for Animals**
A 12-week structured training programme. One of four trainers, teaching over 1,100 registered professionals how to adopt AI practically and responsibly.

**Project Evident**
Subject matter expert for the AI Opportunity Accelerator, a Google.org-funded capacity building programme supporting cohorts of community-based nonprofits across five US cities.

**SPAA**
A nine-month strategic planning cohort. Teaching AI office hours every third week, delivering classes on CRMs and donor management, and building custom AI tools for the platform.

**The Leverage Point**
A Substack newsletter exploring how small shifts create transformative change for mission-driven organisations. Named after Donella Meadows' systems thinking concept.
Link: https://kylebehrend.substack.com/

### Consulting

**AI Consulting**
Working with nonprofits and mission-driven organisations — up to 250+ staff — on complete AI strategy. AI audits, policy development, paid tool selection, pre- and post-adoption surveys, implementation plans, culture plans, maturity models, and ongoing training and support.

### Technical Builds

**Automations**
Custom automations built on Make.com. Media monitoring systems, donation workflows with immediate phone call triggers, inbox categorisation. Thousands of hours of manual work saved across organisations.

**Chatbots**
Interactive chatbots on Typebot combining structured flows with AI-powered RAG responses on organisational knowledge bases. FAQ and contact form replacement.

**MCP Knowledge Servers**
A foundation-sponsored project making research searchable across entire sectors. Pinecone vector database with n8n-powered MCP server. One organisation replaced their website search because MCP results outperformed it.

**AI Agents**
AI agents leveraging skills, memory, tool use, and schedules — standalone in Claude or embedded within automation workflows. Currently managing parts of AI Impact Hub operations.

**Voice Agents**
AI-powered voice agents using VAPI for telephony, ElevenLabs for voice synthesis, and n8n for orchestration. Primary build is a daily personal interviewer agent using different personas.

**Social Media Comment Reply Generator**
A foundation-sponsored tool drafting replies to social media comments for nonprofits. Built with n8n, multiple AI models, Retool, and Supabase. 10,000+ comments processed, 84.8% response rate. Human-in-the-loop review.

**Animal Database**
A comprehensive animal management database for farmed animal sanctuaries on Airtable with Make.com automations and Softr front-end. Collaborated with the Open Sanctuary Project. Free template downloaded by sanctuaries worldwide.

**This Website**
A living CV built with Claude Code in under seven days while working full time. Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS v4, Motion. Terminal-style project explorer with Easter eggs throughout.

### Speaking

**FIA Conference** (2026)
Delivered the AI session at Australia's peak fundraising conference in Melbourne. Rated 5.0/5.0 across all categories.

**Kickstarting for Good** (2025)
AI mentor for an 18-week incubator programme in Berlin. Three workshops plus one-on-one sessions with individual organisations.

**AVA Conference** (2024–2026)
Presented across Vietnam, Washington DC, Los Angeles, with Toronto upcoming. Foundational through advanced AI workshops.

**Sentient Futures** (2025)
Two workshops at UC Berkeley — advanced AI writing techniques and automations.

**Infoxchange Conference** (2026)
Upcoming conference presentation on digital transformation and AI for the nonprofit sector.

## Personal

Lives on 2.5 acres in NSW, roughly halfway between Sydney and Brisbane. Rescue dogs, seven sheep, cats, and a rooster. Married to Kelly, teenage daughter. South African-born, British mother, moved to Australia via London. Deeply committed to animal advocacy — the thread through all the work.

## Work With Me

- [Book a Call](https://cal.com/kyle-behrend/15min): 15-minute intro conversation
- [See My Work](https://kylebehrend.com/work): Case studies and portfolio
- [About Me](https://kylebehrend.com/about): Full background and philosophy
- [Contact](https://kylebehrend.com/contact): Send a message

## Find Me Online

- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylebehrend/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/kylebehrend)
- [The Leverage Point (Substack)](https://kylebehrend.substack.com/)
- [AI Impact Hub](https://aiimpacthub.com/)
- [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@kylebehrend)