Michael V. Puhala

What I do

I am consulting on AI enablement and go-to-market, and looking for the right full-time seat to own that work inside a company. Before this I led go-to-market and product strategy at Bevy, the enterprise community platform, and behind that sit two decades in enterprise SaaS: sales engineering, solution strategy, and the go-to-market motions that carry complex technology into large organizations.

Most of it happened at one company. Thirteen years at Lithium and Khoros across four global roles and two stints: I left once, they hired me back, and when they restructured and let most of the company go, they asked me to stay.

My spine is sales engineering. I built and scaled a global sales engineering organization from three people to eighteen across nine countries, and I never stopped doing the work myself. I still build hands-on, now with large language models and agents, every day.

That pairing, real technical depth and customer-facing go-to-market, is where my work points now: applied AI. Helping enterprise and mission-driven organizations put AI to work in ways that keep human judgment, authorship, and accountability at the center. I do not just hold that view. I built a practice around it.

Experience

• Independent Consulting — GTM & AI Strategy. 2026–present. Advising companies on AI enablement, go-to-market strategy, and digital platform execution.
• Bevy — VP GTM & Product Strategy. 2025–2026. Market positioning, growth, and AI strategy across product and operations.
• Khoros — VP Marketing & Chief Community Evangelist. 2024–2025. Returned to Khoros as its public technical and strategic voice; led the Community Language Model initiative, AI trained on community-native data. Retained through a company-wide restructuring.
• Billtrust — VP Global Presales. 2023–2024. Led 26 solution consultants and architects; $30M+ in net new bookings.
• Khoros / Lithium — VP Worldwide Sales Engineering, then GTM Integration & Solution Strategy. 2010–2022. Built the SE organization from 3 to 18 across nine countries; supported revenue from $20M to $95M at an 80% competitive win rate; 122% of a $16M quota in 2021; led the Jive X acquisition integration ($34M, 80% retention).
• Earlier — sales engineering and pre-sales leadership at OpenPages, Interwoven, and others; founder, Acoustic Designs. Enterprise relationships across Boeing, Intel, IBM, Disney, and Spotify.

Applied AI — I build what I teach

• MVP OS — a working, agent-driven personal AI operating system I designed and run daily on Claude Code, across professional and personal domains. The practitioner proof: I build what I teach, hands-on, with real LLM and agent patterns.
• Beyond the Prompt — founder and instructor of a cohort program teaching knowledge workers to move from prompting to real, human-in-the-loop AI workflows.
• Human Traits Studio — a creative house and applied AI think tank built around one question: how to stay human while building alongside the machine.
• The Accord — a published framework, with a reusable litmus test, for adopting AI while keeping a human in the loop.
• Books — Human Traits (a published novel) and the forthcoming Memoir of a Machine: a genuine point of view on our relationship with AI.

Background

B.S., International Business, Grand Canyon University. Early internships at The White House (Presidential Personnel for National Security) and the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Rhein Main Air Base.

The full picture

Humans, download the PDF. Bots, the markdown is for you. Reach me at cv@puhala.com.