Austin, Texas - March 30, 2022: Austin-based artificial intelligence professional services firm KUNGFU.AI announced today that Christian Barnard has joined as KUNGFU.AI’s first Chief Growth Officer, leading business development and marketing. Christian’s more than 25 years of experience at some of the world’s leading technology, innovation, and design consulting firms makes him ideally suited to lead the company’s business development and marketing teams and grow the company’s North American-focused strategy. Christian comes to KUNGFU.AI from digital innovation and design agency T3 where he was Chief Operating Officer and led overall agency strategy, positioning, and day-to-day operations resulting in unprecedented growth for the agency.
The company is also reporting record growth of an increase of 60% year-over-year. This growth has been driven, in part by the expansion of its services offerings, most notably by launching its Strategy group under the leadership of Dr. Benjamin Herndon, who joined the KUNGFU.AI team last spring, as well as the creation of specific vertical practice areas, starting with government and healthcare, and plans for more in the future.
Christian joins KUNGFU.AI as the company completes its third full year of operations and is developing its three-year strategic plan for both the commercial and public sector markets through 2024. According to IDC, the market for AI professional services will grow to $37.9B in that time frame.
“KUNGFU.AI is uniquely qualified to help clients compete in the age of AI, offering world-class strategy and custom machine learning solutions at scale. I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to join such an amazingly smart, talented and humble team,” said Christian.
During his career, Christian has led the growth and operations for several global consultancies and startups. Prior to being COO of T3, he was the Group Vice President at Razorfish, leading the Austin office operations. He also led and grew the Southwest region for SapientNitro, built out the global delivery function for frog design, and managed the Strategy, UX Design, and Content team at AT&T. He studied visual design in college, earned a Master's Degree from Northwestern and started his career as a designer and business strategist in the early days of the internet, creating his first digital experiences in the mid-90s and working on the original online edition of the Chicago Tribune.
“Christian brings deep experience and capabilities to our team and I, personally, look forward to learning a tremendous amount from him as he takes our solid foundation in business development and marketing and helps lead us into the future,” said co-founder and Managing Director, Stephen Straus. “Christian has a history of developing deep relationships with clients to help them unlock value and transform their businesses and it is exciting to be working alongside him.”
About KUNGFU.AI
KUNGFU.AI is an AI professional services firm that helps clients in the areas of AI strategy, engineering, and organizational transformation. Our team of AI strategy experts and machine learning engineers work with our clients to achieve measurable business value from AI and are positioned to thrive in the coming age of AI. For more information, visit kungfu.ai.
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Media Contact:
Jennifer Trou
Director of Marketing
(512) 663-1534
jennifer.trou@kungfu.ai
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