I’m Phil.
Philip LeNir, in Montreal.
- CoachingOurselvesCo-founded with Henry Mintzberg in 2007
- Hundreds of senior professionalsCoached and facilitated, one to one and in groups
- Speech recognitionFifteen years, from Bell‑Northern to Nuance
- A U.S. patentCo-inventor, speech recognition and speaker verification
Fifteen years in speech recognition
I studied electrical engineering at McGill and started building speech recognition middleware and applications at Bell‑Northern Research in the early 1990s. I spent fifteen years in the field, the last seven at SpeechWorks and then Nuance Communications, and I’m a co-inventor on a U.S. patent for speech recognition and speaker verification. Along the way I moved from writing code to running teams in Montreal, Boston, New York, Ukraine and India.
Coaching
I wanted to attend Henry Mintzberg’s program for practising managers and couldn’t afford it. So I read his book Managers Not MBAs and started running learning meetings with my own management team. Henry supplied material from his program, and in 2007 we co-founded CoachingOurselves.
Small groups of managers meet for an hour or ninety minutes around a guide written by a management thinker, and they learn from each other. When managers talk to each other about their real experiences, they figure things out for themselves, and those lessons stick. I run the business side.
The AI turn
In late 2025 AI got good enough to try on my own work, and I found I could do in hours what used to take me weeks: cleaning up spreadsheets, reading contracts, first drafts of proposals, translating into French.
My business runs on it now. One AI assistant per project: they read my email, draft replies, keep my contacts, track pricing, watch my calendar and hand work to each other. I built it for myself.
Why I do this
My dad had always refused the opportunity to move into management because he loved tinkering and engineering, and making things work. By the time he was fifty-five, he was forced into early retirement. The young engineers were faster and cost less. I went into management instead, and lost patience with the details of building software.
AI changed everything. It handles the details now, and I build again.
I also help other people get started with it, and that’s the part I love: stepping into someone else’s shoes, seeing the world from their perspective, and helping them use this tech to do what they’re trying to do.
A small e-commerce company had more than 6,000 messy, inconsistent product kits stuck in an old inventory system. I spent about three hours with their operations manager. I didn’t write complex code. I sat with someone who knew the business, asked the right questions, and let AI do the tedious part.
Friends now refer people to me when they want to see how far AI can go, and I’m glad to be their guide.
For those of us with a few grey hairs, this might be the best tool we’ve ever been handed.
Outside work
I’m on the volunteer board of a lake association in Quebec, and I help get its newsletter out.
Where I work
Montreal. Mostly remote, in person when it matters.
I work in English and French. I write in both, I read in both, and I keep my tools bilingual.
Or write to phil@lenirai.com.