A year with my name on the door

It's crazy how fast time flies. Even crazier is how much can happen in a year.

But here we are. It's been a year since I started Kyle & Co, and I can't help getting introspective about it. What worked. What I learned. What I should be carrying into another year with this team.

Let me start further back than a year.

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Every time I turn around, I'm having to prove myself

The receipts go back further than Kyle & Co.

In 2015 I left a job paying pennies, and tripled my income in my first year of Lighthouse (did you know I founded Lighthouse??). That turned my life around. Then I got recruited back in-seat. A big institution with a big platform. Then a company scaling fast. Then running transformation work at a manufacturer at the peak of COVID.

Every one of those was an education. I learned what traditional analyst work actually is. I learned what a business looks like from the inside when it's growing faster than its processes. I learned what change management feels like when the stakes are plants and people.

And every one of them, eventually, was a place where I reached my limit.

The thing I kept running into is that this industry moves faster than the work does. We were still producing white papers and webinars while the ground shifted underneath us. Half the market was operating on assumptions and the other half on buzzword bingo. I wanted to do something about that, and the seat I was in couldn't hold it.

So in late April of 2025, I stopped waiting for a better time.

I should say plainly: I have limits here too. Brandice can produce a list.

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Putting my name on the door was me claiming what was mine

I looked at the most valuable things I'd built. The Human-Centric AI Council. The podcast. A network of people I'd been convening for years. And I decided to stop leaving them behind every time I changed seats.

It was also an invitation. The people who know how I work know what I'm actually good at, and putting my name on the door told them where to find it.

Bold is vulnerable, though. Although I'd point out that I'm an analyst. Everything I do is vulnerable. Every perspective, every piece of analysis, every opinion I put into public space is mine. I'm not just reporting on someone else's point of view. I'm taking my own, constantly. Vulnerable is just the resting state of this job.

That's a bet, and it doesn't always pay. There's a version of this job where you stay agreeable and the invitations keep coming. But if you know me, you know that's simply not how I operate.

A year in, the people who hired us are the ones who came for a different approach, for the realness. Every relationship worth having this year got built by someone wanting a straight answer more than a comfortable one. That's the asset. I'm not spending it.

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What I'm good at isn't expertise

You will never hear me say I'm the foremost expert in X, Y or Z. I think that's a weird thing to say. I'm an analyst. I study everything, which is a different claim for a different kind of analyst.

I study the industry, market, and ecosystem full time. I sit in vendor briefings, I read release notes, I get into product and I ask questions the demo isn't built to answer. Then I take what I've been told and go check it against the people who have to live with it. The TA leader who deployed it. The ops person maintaining it. The recruiter using it on a Tuesday afternoon when it doesn't work. What survives that is what I publish.

And when the story the market is telling itself doesn't survive it, I say that out loud. That's the part that isn't in the job description, and it's most of the job.

None of that makes me the smartest person in the room, but it certainly gives me more perspective on buzzwords and rumors than most. What I do with that perspective is how I'm building my business.

But there's more than perspective here. What I have beyond that is harder to put on a website. My best friend Stephanie calls it my "magic." I'd call it being a lodestone for great voices. I'm good at getting remarkable people in a room and getting something out of it, and I've stopped being embarrassed about naming that as a skill.

Year one was the test of whether that's a business or just a personality trait.

And, as it turns out… It is, in fact, a business. Half advisory, under NDA, where you'll never see it. Half original research we fund ourselves and publish with our name on it and no client approval in the loop. The second half is why anyone calls about the first.

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Momentum, not maturity. And no top right.

Publishing research nobody paid for is an expensive habit. It's also the only reason any of the rest works, so we did it twice last year.

The first was the AI Momentum Model.

We surveyed more than 350 HR leaders across North America, the UK, and the EU, and the finding that mattered was this. The organizations falling behind on AI are not short on ambition or budget. Something specific is out of balance. Strategy without capability. Capability without leadership. Investment without direction.

Which is why we didn't build a maturity model. Maturity models move in clean linear stages and end at Stage 5, as though there's a finish line somebody has crossed. Nobody has. What leaders are actually experiencing is uneven progress, stalled pilots, over-investment in one place and under-commitment in another. So we built momentum instead: three dimensions, seven drivers, and nine archetypes that describe how organizations get stuck rather than how mature they are.

Then it stopped being a report. It became a half-day working session we run with executive teams, and the thing participants keep naming is not the framework. One of them put it this way: it was refreshing to be in a room where people could be candid about the messiness, not just the wins. Another said what they valued was no hype, just an honest discussion about what's working, what's stalling, and why.

That's the whole product. The research gives people permission to say out loud what they already know.

The second test was the Category Compass.

Every evaluation model in this market ends in a quadrant, and that top right corner is the most monetizable artifact our industry makes. We built ours with nothing to sell placement in. The hypothesis going in was that there is no category winner, only fit against a specific buying situation, and that hypothesis held all the way through.

It cost us an obvious revenue line. It's also why the research was worth reading.

The people on the receiving end of that process said so themselves. Ritu Mohanka, CEO of VONQ, said we prioritized proof over hype and asked questions that went past surface-level AI claims.

Then Franz Gilbert, Managing Director, HCM at Deloitte posted about it publicly, said it "is going to change the analyst game," which I hadn't asked for and didn't see coming. He wrote that I'm definitely going to change the analyst game. And what he singled out wasn't the vendor profiles. It was how the document is structured.

Of course, one report doesn't settle anything. But that's the whole idea I built this firm on, handed back to me by someone with no reason to hand it over.

The Council did the rest. It was a third of our revenue in year one, the underwriting behind it let us go deeper than client work alone would have funded, and it drove new engagements outright. I wrote last week about what the founding cohort built and where we're headed next, so I won't restate it here.

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Why Kyle & Co: what my team brings

Beyond the research I wanted to do, there was also the question of the team I wanted to assemble. I didn't want employees. I wanted a small group of people who were already excellent at something I'm not, who didn't need managing, and who would tell me when I was wrong.

That's harder to hire for than it sounds. It also means the company only works if I actually let them run.

A year in, here's what that looks like.

The Momentum Model, my first flagship study, was not going to be ready for HR Tech, and the whole point of that timing was landing it while the industry was in one building. Brandice got on the plane with it unfinished and shipped it from the air. 60+ pages designed from scratch. I won't forget it.

Then, earlier this year I asked Jake for something small: A tool that would spin up an RFI for buyers so we could stop building them by hand. What came back went considerably past what I asked for, an AI analyst that can assess needs and make real recommendations. It's called Meridian, and you'll be hearing about it from us soon.

And when the Eightfold case dominated headlines in January, Matt wrote the one post worth reading. He argued the lawsuit was progress, that accountability was catching up to the AI hype cycle, and that it was never really about one company. He didn't soften it for anybody's comfort, but he ran it by me first out of respect for my personal brand.

There is a reason this company is Kyle & Co, and not just Kyle.

My expectations aren't always fair, and I know it

I don't think of myself as our CEO. I said that out loud when we started and I still don't know what to do with the feeling.

My expectations are high, they're inconsistent, and they don't always feel fair, mostly because they aren't. Some days I'm directive and demanding. Other days I want to be equals among equals. People want more consistency from a leader than that, and I'm not there yet. Working with me is frustrating as hell. So am I. I think I'm getting better. I'm not going to sit here and tell you I've fixed it.

When I said as much to Brandice, the answer I got back was not reassurance:

I'm not going to pretend that settles it. But it does tell me what to protect while I work on the rest.

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People took me at my word, and now they want more

I came into year one nervous, vulnerable, uncertain, and determined.

I'm coming into year two more determined, for entirely different reasons.

The gap between what this industry is building and what it has actually adopted did not close this year. Not even slightly. Closing it is the whole point of this firm, which means we have work to do.

Abso-freaking-lutely I'm going to keep going. How could I possibly not?