About
Philip LeNir — Montreal, bilingual, thirty-three years of building software and running businesses. Pivoted to AI in late 2025.
The short version
I'm Philip LeNir. People call me Phil. I run Systèmes Calibre out of Montreal. I spent 15 years as a software engineer at SpeechWorks and Nuance Communications, building speech recognition and speaker verification systems — I hold a patent in speaker verification. I spent another 18 years — overlapping the Nuance years and continuing after — running CoachingOurselves with Henry Mintzberg, a peer-learning publishing business for managers. I'm bilingual in English and Quebec French.
Why I pivoted to AI in late 2025
I've watched a lot of technology cycles. I spent the dot-com bubble debugging speech recognition. I spent the last decade running CoachingOurselves through the cloud migration, through the video conferencing explosion, through the move from classroom to virtual. I have seen a lot of technology-will-change-everything claims come and go.
AI — specifically what became possible once Claude got good enough at late 2025 — was the first one in a long time where I sat down, tried it on my own work, and found I could do things in hours that used to take me weeks. I don't mean impressive demos. I mean real tasks. Cleaning up spreadsheets. Reading contracts. Writing first drafts of proposals. Extracting patterns from my own email history. Translating content into Quebec French and catching the European-French artifacts that machine translation leaves behind.
I decided to rebuild the consulting side of my practice around that. Not by selling AI strategy — there are already too many people selling that and most of them are selling slides. By taking real jobs that real businesses want done, and getting them done, or automating them, one short project at a time.
The two businesses I already run with AI
Systèmes Calibre — the consulting practice — now runs on a layered system of specialized AI assistants, one per project. They read my email, write drafts, maintain my contact database, track pricing, watch my calendar, and hand work off to each other when a task needs a specialist. I built all of it for myself first, because I wanted to see what it would actually take. I wrote it down as I went.
CoachingOurselves — the peer-learning publisher Henry Mintzberg and I have been running for 18 years — is in the middle of its own AI rebuild. The pattern library from my 18-year email archive is one piece of that. The on-demand module shortener is another. Both are real production tools, both came out of the same "get a real job done" approach.
If you hire me, the thing you're buying is the experience of running two businesses on this technology before I sold an hour of it to you.
Where I sit
Montreal, Quebec. I work remotely most of the time. I meet in person when it matters. I travel for the right clients but I don't live on planes.
I work in English and Quebec French. I write in both, I read in both, and I keep my tools bilingual.
What I'm not
I am not an AI consultant in the conference-speaker sense. I don't sell AI strategy decks. I don't do "AI readiness assessments." I work one-to-one with the person who actually has the problem.
I am a senior operator who built two businesses over three decades, discovered something that actually made a difference to both of them, and is now quietly offering the same treatment to other small and mid-sized businesses who want it.
How to get in touch
One message is enough.
Or go straight to how I work to see the shape of a typical engagement before you reach out.