How Michael Operates

• Active Scoping. Michael gets to know you and develops a tailored problem statement matching your level and skills. Crucially, it doesn’t just accept your premise—Michael checks if a larger, more systemic problem exists and ensures you are the right person to take it on. Whether it is an org-design question or a time-to-market problem, Michael is always checking whether the value of the business will increase.
• Full Institutional Study. Michael runs the exhaustive heavy lifting. It generates and tests hypotheses, builds the financial benefits case (“the size of the prize”), runs benchmarks, reviews case studies and conducts a modernized version of stakeholder focus interviews to capture organizational reality. Every assumption is transparently flagged.
• Instant Deliverables. You don’t get messy data dumps. Michael synthesizes the entire study into a polished, traceable strategy document and a client-ready file. You can now advocate for budgets, client approvals, and more—with real analyses.
• Feasibility Auditing. Michael calculates the relative probability of your current team successfully executing the plan. If your team lacks the necessary skills or bandwidth to pull it off, Michael will explicitly flag it. All four steps above — from scoping to feasibility auditing — typically complete in <2hrs, allowing for rapid testing of options.
• Scenario Living. Michael calculates the most important uncertainties driving the value of the business and builds a digital clone of the company. Using a quantum-compute function, it then instantiates the clone into at least a hundred future scenarios. Where standard scenario planning tests three or four, Scenario Living lets you walk through a hundred-plus — and stress-test your plan against every one.
• Risk vs Return. Michael takes the proposal and treats the whole company as one portfolio. It plots the current businesses by return and risk, tests that position against every possible mix of them, and shows whether the company is already earning the most return for the least risk it carries. Then it tests whether the proposal meaningfully moves that position. The result is one picture a board can read at a glance, and it is most powerful in M&A studies, where it shows whether a deal genuinely improves the company’s risk and return or only makes it larger.
• Zero-UI Implementation. Michael actively leads and manages execution and the banking of benefits — with no software interface for you to implement or master. Because Michael handles the chain from initial problem statement to final implementation, the decision chain remains traceable.
• The Digital Twin. Over time, this end-to-end management builds a live digital clone of your entire business, seamlessly spread across six specialized modules.
• The Platform. Built internally by management consultants — for consultants and their clients — Michael typically does in under 2 hours what a team of three consultants supported by a partner and principal would take 12 weeks. While Michael should not hallucinate since AI is the engine and not the thinker, updates to our underlying models may periodically introduce inaccuracies. We don’t use prompt engineering. Any consultant can run their business through Michael, and any company can bring consulting capabilities to its employees.

What would you and your organization achieve today if everyone worked with Michael?

Michael is built for one purpose: making partner-grade strategy work accessible to anyone who needs it. For that purpose, we have not yet seen a comparable AI system in the market. We continue to roll out updates and new modules.

Kris Safarova

Kris Safarova is an alum of PwC, Deloitte, and BMO who led the team that codified elite partner-level business judgment into a proprietary AI strategy engine, Michael. Michael handles the complex analysis required to identify the correct problem and grow the value of a business.

She is a WSJ bestselling author, has written over 20 books on business strategy and leadership (some now adopted as university course texts), is the founder of FIRMSconsulting.com and StrategyTraining.com, and hosts the popular Strategy Skills podcast where she interviews business leaders. She has been quoted in The Harvard Business Review, and has written for business journals.

She bridges the gap between old-school corporate rigor and next-gen AI deployment. Kris welcomes a small number of speaking engagements a year — on Spirituality & Realizing Human Potential in the age of AI — and mentors business executives worldwide.

Kris holds an MBA from Ivey Business School where she graduated on the Dean’s list with distinction. She also holds a B.Comm. from the University of South Africa, where she graduated cum laude with highest distinction, and a music diploma in classical piano from DG Shatalov Music College. She was a recorded pop singer and a classical concert pianist who toured Europe as a representative of Russia.

Kris is based in Los Angeles, but will reside in Europe during 2026 to pursue business opportunities. Read Kris’s full biography

FIRMSconsulting

We deploy AI, quantum computing and other emerging technologies to solve complex problems for businesses and governments. We document our process via audio/video and PPT files, on StrategyTraining.com, and also mentor clients to use our teachings to achieve breakout success.

Michael Applied

Michael.Defense. Michael.Defense focuses on the economic decisions behind national defense such as building digital clones of assets, companies, cities, supply chains, and other critical systems — and, using a quantum engine, instantiates them in real time into thousands of conflict scenarios, so leadership knows how each one would perform before the conflict happens.

Michael.Invest. Michael.Invest puts the firm’s own capital behind the analysis. We use the proprietary thinking tested in our Monday Morning 8am investment notes — and the model behind Michael — to invest where the thesis identifies an opportunity.

Michael.Capital. Michael.Capital frees capital and reduces balance-sheet risk by acquiring a company’s non-core assets, rebuilding them for the AI era using industry best practices, and leasing them back via a service-level agreement.