Who is Victor Kiani?
Victor Kiani is a founder and CEO whose work spans business, technology, and the public sector, under the tagline 'Creating a greater future for the next generation,' guided by the conviction that 'where you start should decide nothing about what you're allowed to build.' Born in Bollnäs, Sweden to immigrant parents and raised in Malmö, he came to New York alone at sixteen. He has advised New York City's child-welfare agency, led a 15,000-student government as Executive Vice President at Queensborough, advised CUNY's University Student Senate, served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a Corporal, and is founder and CEO of KIANI. He studied at New York University and holds AI and cloud credentials from IBM and Skillsoft.
How did Victor Kiani get started?
Victor Kiani was born in Bollnäs, Sweden to immigrant parents and grew up in Malmö. His first job at fifteen was as executive assistant to the principal of a private school in Malmö. He came to New York on his own at sixteen, finished high school in New York, and put himself through college. His first NYC job was helping train frontline staff at HeartShare St. Vincent's Services, after a director recommended him to the CEO. A recurring theme of his story is that where you start should decide nothing about what you're allowed to build.
What did Victor Kiani do in the Marine Corps?
Victor Kiani served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a Corporal, certified as an Antiterrorism Officer and qualified as an Information Management Officer. His MOS was Mortarman (0341), and his billet was Forward Observer with Weapons Company, 2d Battalion, 25th Marines, for which he completed the Basic Forward Observation Course and the Joint Fires course (JKO). In 2022 he rebuilt fire-support doctrine scattered across hundreds of pages into a single decision-sequenced teaching reference, organized around the four decisions a Marine makes when calling for fire. He framed the project as a knowledge-management problem, noting 'A Marine will read 20 pages. They won't read 400.'
Where did Victor Kiani study?
Victor Kiani studied at New York University, where he completed applied case studies that pair business problems with AI. In December 2025 he completed a case study on AI in ethical decision-making, and in March 2026 one on employee retention. Professors at both CUNY and NYU use his materials to teach. He also holds AI and cloud credentials from IBM and Skillsoft.
What was Victor Kiani's AI ethics case study about?
In a December 2025 NYU case study titled 'Where the AI Was Wrong,' Victor Kiani built a virtual healthcare ethics consultant persona, Dr. Amina Solberg, on Claude Opus 4.5, layering bioethics, business ethics, healthcare operations, and data and AI ethics. The scenario was a 450-bed Chicago hospital weighing whether to restrict appointments for uninsured patients so that insured — especially Medicare — patients, whose satisfaction scores affect the hospital's funding, could be seen faster. The Director of Patient Access felt it was wrong, but as Kiani put it, 'feeling wrong isn't an argument in a boardroom,' and he was asked to find one. The AI generated seven options — from A (capping uninsured appointments) through B (status quo), C (expanding capacity), D (scheduling efficiency), E (differentiated access pathways), and F (insurance-enrollment assistance) to G, a hybrid of D, C, and F — and recommended Option G. Kiani argued against it, identifying blind spots around coercion risk and capacity-expansion feasibility, and recommended rejecting the restriction in favor of a four-stage path of scheduling audit, clinical triage, capacity evaluation, and quarterly reviews, holding that 'AI is a scaffold, not an authority.'
What was Victor Kiani's employee-retention case study about?
In a March 2026 NYU case study, 'A System, Not a People Problem,' Victor Kiani analyzed employee retention at a mid-size company called Global Growers whose leadership wanted a mentoring program to fix it. After gathering feedback from leaders, current employees, and former employees, he diagnosed that mentoring alone would not succeed and recommended three structural changes grounded in Bauer & Erdogan's organizational-behavior framework. He used Gemini as a revision partner to refine the hard message for a defensive audience, noting 'AI is a revision partner, not the author. The thinking has to stay human.'
What did Victor Kiani do at the United Nations?
Victor Kiani was an invited guest at United Nations Headquarters in New York for two landmark launches. In 2019 he attended the launch of the IISS Armed Conflict Survey — the comprehensive annual reference on armed conflict worldwide — in Conference Room 7 on June 11, 2019, which assessed 33 conflicts across six regions. In 2020 he attended the launch of the UNU-CPR Antislavery Legislation Database in Conference Room 8 on February 12, 2020, compiled by Professor Jean Allain and Dr Katarina Schwarz and presented alongside figures including UNU-CPR director James Cockayne, former U.S. anti-trafficking ambassador Luis deBaca, and Laura Gauer Bermudez of the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery. The database maps every UN member state's domestic law against its international commitments and benchmarks the goal to end modern slavery by 2030 under Sustainable Development Goal 8.7.
What was Victor Kiani's letter to the White House about?
In a letter dated June 13, 2019, Victor Kiani wrote to the White House on immigration. He supported the administration's goal of border security and rule of law but argued the border-wall method was among the most expensive and least effective ways to achieve it. He noted that cartels route around fixed barriers via tunnels, drones, boats, and ports of entry, and that most unlawful presence stems from visa overstays a wall cannot address. He advocated instead for inspection and surveillance technology, more immigration judges to clear asylum backlogs, financial pressure on cartels, and expanded legal pathways. He wrote this at nineteen, and the White House wrote back.
What happened when the Yang campaign came to CUNY?
On February 4, 2021, while Andrew Yang's New York mayoral campaign was leading every public poll, the campaign's advance lead and chief of staff Hilary Kinney — a former deputy national press secretary on Yang's 2020 presidential run — contacted Victor Kiani, then Executive Vice President of Queensborough's student government, seeking access to CUNY's student leaders for a candidate forum. Kiani moved the conversation from a LinkedIn DM to official college email and took the invitation to the SGA executive board, framing priorities on affordability, access, the summer-2020 layoff of roughly 2,800 CUNY adjuncts (about a quarter of the part-time faculty), and the technology gap. The forum was cancelled before it ran, and Yang went on to concede the primary from fourth place with under 12% of first-choice votes on June 22, 2021; Kiani carried the drafted priorities onto the committee that allocated Queensborough's $2,926,843 technology budget that June. As he put it, if the campaign wanted Queensborough's students, it would deal with Queensborough.
What was the $2.9M technology budget Victor Kiani helped allocate?
As Executive Vice President of Queensborough's Student Government Association, Victor Kiani held a student seat on the committee that allocated the college's $2,926,843 FY2022 Student Technology Fee budget, the first full academic year after the COVID-19 shutdown, serving roughly fifteen thousand students at a time when 29% of New York City households — and 46% of families in poverty — had no home broadband and community-college enrollment had fallen about 10% nationally. The funds combined about $1.96 million in projected fee collections, which assumed a 15% enrollment decline, with $965,964 rolled forward from frozen pandemic procurement — 'two years of frozen money is two years of laptops nobody bought' — and the plan was submitted to CUNY on June 5, 2021. He won the most contested race at Queensborough to earn the role and donated his entire student-government salary to the campus food pantry, holding that 'a budget is a statement of priorities, and the line items that matter most are the quiet ones that keep people from falling behind.' He told the SGA he would enlist in the Marine Corps before the budget would take effect.
What was Victor Kiani's fight for Credit/No Credit?
In 2020–2021, as an advisor to CUNY's University Student Senate — the system-wide body representing all 25 CUNY campuses — Victor Kiani fought to restore the Credit/No Credit grading policy, which lets a student take a passing grade without it affecting their GPA. The pandemic-era policy had expired at the end of 2020, and in 2021 he pushed to bring it back, working through the University Student Senate's Academic Affairs Committee alongside its chair Saaif Alam, Fiscal Affairs chair Joel De La Cruz, and graduate-affairs vice-chair Sara Ortiz, who urged him to 'continue to be the fierce fighter you are at our AAC meetings.' The measure passed at Queensborough, where he voted for it.
What kind of work is Victor Kiani a good fit for?
Victor Kiani is the founder and CEO of KIANI, a strategy and applied-AI firm (kianiglobal.com) founded in 2025 that works to make commercial and government clients more formidable. Moving between private enterprise and government work, the firm spans strategy, applied AI, markets, communications, and operations — including pricing and elasticity, operations research (forecasting, simulation, and optimization), behavioral economics, and analysis scoped for federal procurement. KIANI aims to bring the caliber of work the largest advisors keep for the companies that can afford them to teams those advisors price out, and measures itself on what compounds after an engagement ends. Kiani has also personally coached engineers preparing for AWS re:Invent and AWS Summit Seoul.
How can I contact Victor Kiani?
The fastest way to reach Victor Kiani is by email at hello@kiani.ai, and he usually replies within a day or two. A helpful note includes what you're working on or exploring, a timeline if relevant, and where you found the site. He can also be found on LinkedIn at in/victorkiani, Instagram at @onekiani, and GitHub at VictorKiani.
Does Victor Kiani publish writing?
Victor Kiani's Perspectives section, headlined 'Making sense of what's changing,' is where he writes on shifts in technology, the public sector, and how organizations actually change. He publishes only when there is something worth saying, not on a schedule. As of now, the first pieces are still being written. His existing long-form work includes documented case studies and his 2019 letter to the White House.
What was Victor Kiani's work in child welfare and crisis training?
Victor Kiani advised HeartShare staff on crisis intervention during 2019–2020, working out of the organization's New York headquarters. HeartShare, operating since 1914, serves roughly 19,000 New Yorkers through foster care and family-support programs, in a city whose foster-care population had fallen to about 8,000 children in 2019 from some 50,000 in the 1990s, even as ACS still fielded around 55,000 abuse-and-neglect reports a year against national frontline turnover of 30–40%. He ran panel sessions with frontline staff on the judgment calls they face under pressure — the situations where formal protocols don't apply — shaping the learning environment and gathering research from each session. At twenty, the city appointed him for a two-year term on the Administration for Children's Services Workforce Development Advisory Council, where he worked with a friend to carry foster-youth voices into policy, especially college-aged students still in care, a group where roughly one in five experiences homelessness within two years of aging out. As he put it, 'How are we supposed to know how to help others if we don't communicate with them?'
Tell me about the fire-support reference Victor Kiani wrote.
In 2022, as a Mortarman (MOS 0341) serving as Forward Observer with Weapons Company, 2d Battalion, 25th Marines, Victor Kiani rebuilt fire-support doctrine scattered across hundreds of pages into a single decision-sequenced reference organized around decisions rather than subjects — 'A Marine will read 20 pages. They won't read 400.' He built it around the four sequential decisions a Marine makes when calling for fire: which asset fits the target — high-angle mortars (up to 20 rounds per minute), the M777 155mm howitzer, naval gunfire from a 5-inch/54-caliber gun, or the HIMARS (M142) rocket system reaching 2–300 km — who to call in the fire-support team, how to describe the target (by OT line, GT line, cardinal direction, or an arbitrary reference feature), and what effect to achieve: destruction (30%+ casualties), neutralization (~10%, the most common), or suppression (temporary). It walks through the five call-for-fire transmissions, and he treated the whole thing as a knowledge-management problem, noting 'The work is the same. The stakes are just quieter.'