Most advisors on AI workforce transformation have worked one side of the problem. Tom Delaporte has worked three: AI product, enterprise consulting, and operator-side transformation, with commercial accountability throughout. Sail, Grow, and Advise are three ways into the same body of work.
The change discipline comes from leading large-scale organizational change as a Certified Change Management Professional (CCMP). The delivery discipline comes from owning agile product execution as a certified SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager. The workforce discipline is built on the SHRM competency model, sharpened by a Master’s in Management and years spent doing the work in innovation hubs across multiple continents. Applied and refined through transformation work across Fortune 100 enterprises and public sector organizations, with measurable outcomes throughout.
Every practice is delivered personally by someone who built a customer practice from a standing start into an eight-figure ARR business at an enterprise AI company, on consulting foundations from a global firm. The judgment behind Sail, Grow, and Advise is the same, sourced from the same work.
Engagements end with a written diagnostic, decisions made, or specific moves to make, each with a named owner. Recommendations carry their sources and their reasoning. The standard is the one that applied when the work was being done from the inside, with a P&L attached.
Programs run operator-side in five of them, including Country HR head and executive committee member in Vietnam at 27. French and English bilingual, working Spanish.
Workforce and AI programs for state labor departments and the Department of Defense’s innovation arm.
On site as executive sponsor for Carnival in Miami, Meijer in Grand Rapids, Domino’s in Ann Arbor, and Sanofi in Boston, with Bay Area accounts across pharma, biotech, industrial, and high tech.
All delivery in prior roles.
Tom Delaporte founded TDcatalyst to bring that combined vantage into a single advisory practice.
The work arrives in three forms, so there are three ways in. Sail frames the adaptive challenge with executives in the field. Grow executes the transformation inside the enterprise operating model. Advise counsels founders crossing into enterprise adoption. One seam, seen from three sides; the same judgment behind each.
Leading an AI transformation means working the seams between AI product, change consulting, and HR operations.
I led Talent Transformation, Talent Intelligence Platform, and Agentic Scale programs at an enterprise AI company, where I built a customer practice from a standing start into an eight-figure ARR business across Fortune 100 and public sector clients.
Before that, as an Engagement Manager at a global consulting firm in San Francisco, I led organizational design, change, and M&A integration engagements for global companies. And before consulting, I ran HR and transformation programs on the operator side, across France, Vietnam, the Philippines, China, and India.
I’m bilingual in French and English with a working knowledge of Spanish, and have lived and worked on most continents. The ability to work well with people across cultures is how impact and outcomes materialize.
The Sail engagements begin on the Pacifica coast because the setting changes the conversation. Mori Point, Pedro Point Headlands, Pedro Point Valley, Calera Creek, and the nearby redwood stands on Skyline ridge sit at the edge of the continent, and at the edge of how people usually talk about their work. Leaders say things on a trail they would not say in a conference room. That is part of the method.
TDcatalyst is an independent advisory practice operated by Tom Delaporte in a personal capacity. Not affiliated with any previous employer.