About the partner: Who is ExperTech?

ExperTech Personnel Services Inc. has been recruiting in Canada since 1995 and joined the Talentor network as our partner for the Canadian market. A boutique executive and professional search firm with offices in Toronto and Montreal, ExperTech works across Information Technology, finance and management, recruiting both in Canada and into the United States. Alongside executive and professional search, the team offers talent mapping and assessment, recruitment process outsourcing, and technology-enabled assessment for IT professionals.

The Canadian technology market has become notably more selective over the past year, and that context shaped this assignment from the start.

About the client

The client is a Canadian aviation organisation operating in a complex and highly regulated environment, with a clear commitment to modernising its technology capabilities. As part of its digital transformation strategy, the organisation set out to establish a new AI-assisted application development practice within its IT department - not a pilot or a proof of concept, but a permanent capability with its own methods, standards and internal following.

What did the client need from ExperTech?

ExperTech (Talentor in Canada) was engaged to identify an AI Innovation Leader who could build this new capability from the ground up.

This was deliberately not a traditional AI developer position. The organisation needed someone who could combine a software development background with strong business acumen, understand operational needs, rapidly build AI-enabled solutions - and then act as a coach and an ambassador for an entirely new way of developing applications.

In other words, the appointment had to succeed twice: once technically, and once culturally.

The challenge: a very small intersection

The combination of skills made this a particularly focused search. The ideal candidate needed:

• A strong foundation in software development and in emerging AI technologies
• Proven experience translating business requirements into practical technology solutions
• An entrepreneurial mindset, and the ability to build a new practice rather than join an established team
• The leadership and communication skills to drive adoption of new AI-assisted development methodologies across the organisation

Each of these is common enough on its own. Together, they narrow the available talent pool dramatically, and none of them is reliably visible on a CV.

How did ExperTech approach the search?

Rather than searching for conventional AI specialists, ExperTech (Talentor in Canada) ran a targeted search across professionals whose careers bridged software development, business applications, AI and technology leadership.

Two filters did most of the work. The first was demonstrated entrepreneurial capability - evidence that a candidate had built something, not only maintained it. The second was hands-on experience with emerging AI development tools, used in real work rather than referenced in passing. Throughout, the emphasis was on identifying someone who could understand a business problem, turn it rapidly into a working solution, and influence how technology teams adopt new approaches.

The result

ExperTech (Talentor in Canada) placed the role within six weeks.

The appointed leader brought more than ten years of experience spanning software development, entrepreneurship and product leadership. A two-time co-founder, he had built a technology business from the ground up to ten employees and USD 1.5 million in revenue while staying closely involved in both technology and business strategy.

Just as importantly, he brought practical experience with AI-assisted development tools - including Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot - used in production rather than in experiments. His earlier initiatives included an internal AI tool that improved developer productivity by 30%, alongside large-scale AI automation projects.

For a newly created role, that combination was the point. The client did not need technical expertise alone; it needed the entrepreneurial mindset, business understanding and leadership credibility to build an entirely new AI capability inside an established organisation.

What this search tells us about hiring AI leadership

1. Define the role by capability, not by job title. Had the brief been written as "AI developer", the search would have produced a shortlist of strong specialists and missed the person who was ultimately appointed. The requirement was never a technology stack; it was the ability to create a practice.
2. A new practice needs a builder, not a joiner. Entrepreneurial experience is often treated as a curiosity on a corporate CV. Here it was the single most predictive signal - someone who had already carried the risk of building something from nothing.
3. Adoption is a leadership problem. The client explicitly asked for a coach and an ambassador. AI-assisted development changes how teams work, and change of that kind is won through credibility and communication, not through tooling decisions.
4. Precision shortens timelines. Six weeks is fast for a newly created leadership role. It was achievable because the brief was defined sharply enough to search against - the opposite of casting the net wide and hoping.

Read the wider picture

This search is a single, very concrete example of a pattern our partners are seeing across all sixteen markets covered in our latest industry focus: the leaders who deliver digital transformation increasingly come from outside the conventional technology track, and the organisations that recognise this are hiring from a far larger pool than their competitors.

Read the full analysis in Who Will Lead Your Digital Transformation? What the Global Talent Market Is Telling Us - with verified data and first-hand commentary from Talentor partners across Europe, Asia, North America and Australia.