Yves Hughes — AI, taught by someone who builds it.

Track record

Two decades inside the room
where products get built.

Where I've led product

15+ years as a product manager and product leader inside companies like:

Where I've deployed innovation and AI:

What I do

Lead with applied AI people can actually use.

My featured program combines training, guided build time, and a hackathon finish — so your team doesn't just learn about AI, they leave with working automations running against real business problems.

Featured service

Hands-On Applied AI Program

A five-week, in-person enablement program that gets your team using AI on real work. We start with a full-day workshop, then keep people moving through guided office hours and build support, and finish with a hackathon where the best automations and agents get showcased to your leadership.

The outcome: Teams finish week five with live, usable automations against their own workflows — and a shared way of deciding when to trust AI and when not to. It's the same build-it-for-real approach I used to put a $9.5B foster-care nonprofit's back office (social, bookkeeping, grants, reporting) onto AI agents.

1 day workshop + 4 weeks office hours + week 5 hackathon

Day 1

Workshop

I teach Claude chat, co-working, connectors, skills, token optimization, and the operating habits that help teams use AI well. If your team prefers another harness, we work in that environment instead.

Homework

Pick a real workflow

Each participant identifies one area of the business they want to automate, accelerate, or build an agent for.

Weeks 1-4

Office hours

People drop in with their builds, blockers, and questions. I help them debug prompts, choose tooling, work through data and process constraints, and keep shipping.

Week 5

Hackathon showcase

Teams finish, demo, and celebrate what they built. Internal leaders or outside judges can score projects on application, impact, and readiness.

A shared AI operating baseline across the teamParticipant-built agents, automations, and workflow prototypes — not slidewareA leadership-ready showcase you can use to build internal momentum and justify the next investment

Also available

Yves Hughes facilitating a hands-on AI workshop

Custom AI Workshops

Focused sessions for teams that need a shorter push: AI fundamentals, agent workflows, prompt strategy, safety, and hands-on practice against your actual business problems.

Half-day or multi-day · On-site or virtual

Executive AI Coaching

1:1 and small-group coaching for leaders who need to lead on AI, not just nod along. I help you set up the tools, build your own agents, and make confident calls. It's how I coach 40+ leaders in the Rewired Mastermind.

Ongoing · 1:1 or small group

Keynotes & Speaking

Talks that make AI feel exciting and doable — for conferences, all-hands, and leadership offsites. From the main stage (including TEDx) to your sales kickoff. Always tailored, never the canned AI-doom speech.

25 / 45 / 60-min · Virtual or in-person

Need a builder in the room as you roll AI out?

I can embed as a fractional AI advisor for teams that want a steady hand while they choose tools, set guardrails, and ship the first useful workflows.

Local-first · Hardware-sovereign

AI that never leaves your network.

For teams with compliance, IP, or client-confidentiality constraints — private equity, legal, healthcare, government — the cloud isn't always an option. I build and run AI on hardware you control, so sensitive data never leaves your environment.

I run this stack myself: local models on Grace Blackwell hardware, agent orchestration, and the same workflows I teach — all on-prem. When “don't put this in a public model” is a hard requirement, that's the engagement I'm built for.

Models running on infrastructure you own
No client or deal data leaving your network
The same hands-on program, adapted to an air-gapped or restricted environment

Investment & how to start

Straightforward to start.

Most engagements begin with a short scoping call. Program and workshop pricing is shaped around team size, format, and whether you need an on-prem build — structured 50% on signature and 50% on delivery.

Yves Hughes

Meet Yves

From Fortune 50 boardrooms to the foster care system.

Yves Hughes builds AI for a living — and teaches like he wants you to win.

He spent 15+ years leading product inside some of the largest companies on earth, and he's won hackathons hosted by Google, Meta, and Snowflake by building working products in a weekend. But what tells you who he is, is what he built when no one was paying him to: as a foster dad, he watched a $9.5 billion system run on fax machines, so he founded a nonprofit and built AI agents to fix it.

That's the throughline. Yves doesn't do AI theater. He builds, he teaches, and he's endlessly patient about meeting people exactly where they are — which is why companies keep flying him in to bring their teams along.

Ask him anything →

What people say

Trusted in the room.

Short pulls from LinkedIn recommendations and recent comments.

“

Super knowledgeable, calm in a crisis, and always willing to help the team.

PBPamela BoichLinkedIn recommendation

“

A quick learner who produced expected outcomes under tight deadlines.

DADebra NovotneyLinkedIn recommendation

“

Super fun and engaging. This is the energy people want in an AI session.

VCVictoria WangLinkedIn comment

Get your team using AI on work that actually matters.

Two decades inside the room
where products get built.