Kyle Branchesi Email

Director, Learning Product and AI Strategy

I find where AI helps, and make it work for the people who use it.

12 → 4 weeks
to build a course with AI agents
800+ organizations
on the learning platform I relaunched
216 new CEOs
completed onboarding; 95% finished a 60-day plan
90 → 20hours of expert review per course, with people holding every gate.
From the AI use guide I designed. A person sets the line, and AI does the work only inside it.

I treat learning and AI as one job, because learning is where an organization redesigns its work for AI. That means deciding which work AI should change, setting the limits it runs inside, and proving the change with evidence. I ran it that way at United Way Worldwide.

01

AI in course production

AI course-production agents. United Way Worldwide, 2026

I don’t use AI to speed up a single task. I use it to redesign the whole workflow.

The agents I built write the first drafts of outlines, modules and job aids. But faster drafting is worthless if review becomes the bottleneck, so I redesigned the review at the same time. People decide what ships. A subject expert can reject or return any draft, and the learning team checks every course against a rubric before it goes out. Across 11 courses in 2026, expert review per course went from 90 hours to 20.

How the agents work

AI drafts in amber. People decide in blue.
  1. BriefFrameworks, personas, standards
  2. Agents draftOutline, modules, job aids
  3. Expert reviewCan reject or send back
  4. Quality checkLearning team, rubric and acceptance criteria
  5. Published11 courses in 2026
AI drafts at the amber step. People decide at the blue steps.

02

Filling the shelves, fast

Learning platform and course catalog. United Way Worldwide, 2024

Every organization in the network chooses its own training, so the courses have to be worth choosing.

The hard part of organization-wide learning is rarely the platform. It’s filling the shelves with what people need, quickly. I let AI agents turn an organization’s own frameworks and standards into first drafts, so experts spend their time deciding instead of writing. At United Way Worldwide, that’s how I filled a relaunched learning platform with 30 courses in English and Spanish. Once agents were drafting, a course took 4 weeks instead of 12.

One mark per course, grouped by program. As of October 2026, 800+ of the network’s 1,100+ organizations use the platform.

03

AI curriculum

Curriculum design. United Way Worldwide

I design AI training for better decisions about when to use AI, not for more AI use.

At United Way, staff had AI tools before there was an AI policy. I designed a ten‑course curriculum for them, and the first course is built around a use guide that asks two questions of every task: what am I giving the tool, and what happens if the answer is wrong? I make the safe path the fast path. The guide is designed to clear low-risk work quickly and send only consequential decisions to formal approval, and I count over-caution as a failure too: the target is that no more than 10% of safe tasks get wrongly blocked.

The curriculum and use guide

The full use guide, with an example task in each tier. The red one uses only public information and still stops for approval, because of the decision it feeds.
Green

Summarize a published public report

Use it, and check the result.

Yellow

Draft an update from an internal plan

Approved tool, and a named person owns the draft.

Red

Rank partners for investment from their public websites

Stop for formal approval. It feeds a decision about organizations.

The full use guide behind the chart at the top of this page. The red example uses only public information and still stops for approval, because of the decision it feeds.

04

Leadership programs

NuVuX, 2019 to 2024, and United Way Worldwide

Workshops taught me that good ideas stall without support to carry them out. So I measure finished plans, not satisfaction.

I build leadership programs around a real problem from each leader’s own organization. They leave with something built, not just ideas. At NuVuX, leaders at Rolls‑Royce, Balfour Beatty, Plexus and Peak Scientific took theirs to a working prototype. At United Way, I led onboarding for new CEOs, and each one wrote their own first-60-day plan. Of the 216 who completed it, 95% finished that plan.

See the programs

Problem to Prototype, a design-thinking program for executives. Leaders start with many ideas, and most get crossed out under critique. Each leader chooses one, in blue, and builds it into a prototype for their own organization, testing and revising it in rounds.
  1. Many ideasLeaders brainstorm around a real problem
  2. Critique from other points of viewMost ideas do not survive
  3. One prototypeChosen by the leader, built for their own organization
Problem to Prototype, a design-thinking program for executives.

05

Alf Studio

An AI product I designed and built, 2026

I build AI that drafts quickly and leaves the final say with the person using it.

Alf is planning software for project-based teaching. A teacher fills in a short form and gets a full unit. She can edit anything in place. It notices the edits she keeps making, and uses them in future drafts only if she switches that on. I design and build it by directing AI coding agents from written specs, with code review and an automated test suite. As of October 2026, all 1,131 tests pass.

The product storyOpen Alf

This is one recorded run: a three-week Grade 6 science unit, drafted in 23 seconds and sped up here. See the real run

Ask

Ask an AI about my work

    Answers come only from a published record of my work, with the section they cite.

    More work

    AI red and blue teaming

    I red-team and blue-team frontier AI models in health, looking for subtle harm that builds over several turns of a conversation.

    An Italian tutor, a personal build

    Pratica is a private tutor for Italian, levels A1 to C1, that I built by directing AI coding agents. Every AI task in it feeds one spaced-repetition system.

    Experience

    2024

    United Way Worldwide

    Director, Learning Product and AI Strategy

    2019 to 2024

    NuVuX

    Senior Director, Global Programs

    Earlier

    MIT Global Startup Workshop; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow

    Education

    MIT and SCI-Arc

    MS in Design and Technology, MIT. Bachelor of Architecture, SCI-Arc.

    Contact