AI & digital transformation, led with aroha.
I help mission-driven small businesses, solo founders, and nonprofits set up and refine the systems they run on — so friction disappears and your team can focus on its zone of genius. AI comes in only where it earns its place.
What I do
Whether you need someone to build it, stay alongside you, or help your team learn it, the work meets you where you are.
For teams who want to build their own AI workflows and systems but don't know where to start. I look at how you work, teach you what's worth building, and hand over the plan and tools to run it yourselves. Then I step back, because the point is your team standing on its own.
Best for capable teams who want to build the muscle in-house.
Your people have the hands. I keep the whole thing moving: the cadence, the tracker, the momentum. And I act as your quality gate, the senior eye that reviews the work and catches what's off before it ships. You build the muscle. I make sure it's built right.
Best for teams with capable people who need discipline and a senior eye on the work.
For when you need the outcome, not the learning curve. I build the whole thing, the AI workflow, the system, the documentation, and hand back something that runs. Or I stay on to hold and maintain it as a fractional part of your team.
Best for leaders who need it done well and want to trust one steady person with it.
Made by hand.
Built with care.
He aha te mea nui o te ao? Māku e kī atu, he tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata.
What is the most important thing in the world? I will say: it is people, it is people, it is people.
How I work
I lead with care, and for me that starts with whakawhanaungatanga (relationship) — not the deliverable. I stay close, honest, and genuinely invested in the people I'm working with. No jargon, no distance, no performance. Just someone grounded and easy to reach, who's actually on your side.
Here's how I think about AI: let it handle the behind-the-scenes. The repetitive load, the friction, the operational drag — that's the machine's job.
You're the generative element.
The ideas, the craft, the relationships — those are yours. Everything I build exists to clear the way for them.
What I love most is building — and watching a mission-driven business find its footing and thrive. That's why I keep a small roster: a few clients at a time means I can stay genuinely present, not spread thin across a dozen logos.
Selected work
Real outcomes, told simply — what the situation was, and what changed.
The team had no shared system — work lived in scattered docs and color-coded flags only a few people understood. I interviewed every team, built their ClickUp workspace from nothing with a clear folder structure and per-team views, replaced the flags with a status-based workflow, and set a steady Mon/Wed/Fri rhythm.
Result: cross-functional visibility and a real operating cadence — for the first time, everyone could see the work.
With the operation finally running smoothly, we went after the biggest time sink: publishing. I built a 30-plus-step pipeline on Zapier and the Anthropic Claude API that takes a client's Word doc, turns it into structured content, hosts the images, logs an audit trail, and delivers a finished CMS draft — with a validation layer so nothing breaks silently.
Result: 30+ minutes saved on every post, running across all client accounts unsupervised.
Open customer claims were piling up with no single view of what was outstanding or what needed action. I built a triage system that pulls in the open claims, sorts what genuinely needs attention, and rolls it up into one clear weekly task — so nothing slips and the team starts each week knowing exactly what's on the table.
Result: a scattered backlog turned into a single, reliable weekly action list.
The business was paying for 30+ tools, many overlapping or unused, but cutting them felt risky. I audited the whole stack, made the case tool by tool, and earned the founder's buy-in before changing anything — so the cuts landed with zero pushback.
Result: more than half the tools removed and hundreds of dollars saved every month, with nothing the team actually needed lost.
A pepeha is how I introduce myself — the mountain, the river, and the people I belong to.
E ngā mātāwaka huri noa, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.
Ko Hikurangi te maunga
Ko Waiapu te awa
Ko Ngāti Porou te iwi
Ko Olivier Danoy tōku matua, nō Wiwi ia.
Ko Athena Reedy tōku whaea
I whānau ahau i te Whenua Moemoeā.
Ko Françoise tōku ingoa.
Tihei Mauri Ora!
About
I help mission-driven small businesses, founders, and nonprofits build the operational backbone they actually run on — the systems, the workflows, the quiet infrastructure — with AI woven in only where it earns its place. I've spent the last several years inside e-commerce brands, remote agencies, and startups, and a decade before that building and running my own six-figure business from the ground up.
My middle name, Aroha, is a Māori word for love and compassion — and it's not just a name to me. It's the standard I hold my work to: thoughtful, honest, and genuinely on your side.
When I'm not embedded with a client, you'll find me knitting, weaving, spinning, creating. I spent ten years designing patterns and growing a community of makers around my own studio, and working with my hands is still where I do my clearest thinking. I'm based in San Antonio, Texas.
Let's talk
I take on a small number of clients at a time. If you're weighing an operations or AI project, I'd love to hear what you're working on — no pressure, no pitch. And if you just need a sounding board to think something through, that works too.
Request an intro callor email kiaora@francoisedanoy.com
Françoise Danoy