Wayfinding, a modern business fable, brings to life the urgent challenges executives face as artificial intelligence rewrites the rules of competition. Through CEO Sarah Foster's ninety-day race to create an AI strategy or lose her job, Stephen Straus and Ben Szuhaj deliver a gripping narrative about the fears, missteps, and breakthroughs that define leadership in times of seismic change. The authors draw on proprietary frameworks from KUNGFU.AI, their AI consulting firm, honed across 100+ engagements spanning more than thirty industries and the full AI toolkit.
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Stephen Straus is CEO of KUNGFU.AI, which he co-founded in 2017. Prior, he started, ran, and successfully sold two companies and was a General Partner at Austin Ventures during the dot-com era, at the time the largest venture capital firm between the two coasts. Stephen holds a degree from Colgate University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. As co-author of Wayfinding: A Business Fable About Leading in the Age of AI, he translates his AI professional services experience into guidance for leaders navigating the AI era.
Beyond his work at KUNGFU.AI, Stephen is founding Chair of Impact Dyslexia, a non-profit focused on bold solutions to the dyslexia crisis, Chair of The African American Leadership Institute, and serves on the Engineering Advisory Board of the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT Austin. He is a former board member of Sustainable Food Center and Austin Film Society, spearheaded the launch of The Startup Diversity and Inclusion Pledge, and is a partner and mentor at Capital Factory. He and his wife are proud parents of four great kids and enjoy being empty nesters in Austin.
Ben Szuhaj is a Senior AI Strategist at KUNGFU.AI, where he partners with executives to change the basis of competition in their industries, identifying high-impact AI use cases, redesigning organizations, and translating complex technological capabilities into clear business value. A student of history and the societal consequences of technology, Ben brings a foresight lens to his work, helping leaders think critically about where AI is heading and what it demands of them. He's particularly drawn to how people and machines learn to work together, and how individuals and communities can gain new skills to thrive during periods of intense change. As co-author of Wayfinding, he brings that perspective to the page, turning the fears, missteps, and breakthroughs he sees in his work into actionable narrative.
Previously, Ben led strategic initiatives at Doblin, Deloitte Consulting's innovation practice, focusing on AI strategy and sustainability. Earlier, he worked as a business researcher at Gartner. He holds a BA in English with a minor in human-centered design from Dartmouth College, where he won the Mecklin Prize for creative nonfiction. He lives in Cambridge, MA, and is a competitive long-distance runner.
"Everyone at KUNGFU.AI is driven to make customers successful and solve hard problems. They're all tremendously knowledgeable, tremendously skilled. PhDs across the board, which is really impressive. That's actually rare for a machine learning or an AI company to have that depth of expertise, which is one of the reasons how I knew they were the real deal."
"We were struggling with a huge chorus of voices who all wanted different things, and we felt like KUNGFU.AI was best able to harness that energy into something productive. They’ve delivered 100%, providing a governance structure that both enables innovation and mitigates risk, and a strategy for building an AI studio that will be phenomenally impactful on campus."
"We wanted a partner with both technical capabilities and cultural compatibility to work well with our team. KUNGFU.AI kept coming up in our search, and the immediate chemistry between our teams confirmed they were the right choice—not just for developing technology but for addressing challenges together. They aren't just a consulting group—they’ve become an integral part of our core team. Their insightful questions push us to rethink problems in ways that benefit the entire industry. It’s been refreshing to have a partner that truly understands not just what we’re solving, but why."
“The things that stood out immediately while working with the KUNGFU.AI team are the caliber of the resources that they bring in to bear and the other aspect is just how well they’ve worked with our team. KUNGFU.AI has gone out of their way to make it easy for us to work with them. These are people who are both smart and knowledgeable with different techniques, which is something we’re looking for out of our partnership.”
“KUNGFU.AI didn’t feel like a vendor—they were true partners. From day one, they brought incredible talent and were people I could jam with, think strategically, and genuinely solve problems alongside. I appreciated their heavy focus on value and ROI—it was never about building tech for tech’s sake. If you’re trying to figure out how to approach AI in your business, I’d absolutely recommend working with them.”
Wayfinding, a modern business fable, brings to life the urgent challenges executives face as artificial intelligence rewrites the rules of competition.