Who Darren Goonawardana is today
Darren Goonawardana is a technology entrepreneur and keynote speaker known as The Cyborg CEO. He is the co-founder and CEO of Collectiv, a Chicago-based Microsoft data and AI consulting firm. His focus is AI leadership: helping executives use data, automation, and artificial intelligence to make better decisions and build companies that scale beyond them.
What Darren Goonawardana does
Through Collectiv, Darren Goonawardana helps organisations get real value from the Microsoft data platform. The firm builds modern data architectures, analytics, and connected planning across Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, Azure, and Databricks, and turns AI pilots into production systems that deliver a return.
As The Cyborg CEO, he speaks and advises on AI leadership: the idea that the best leaders lead with AI rather than against it, using it to amplify human judgment, automate the work that should be automated, and free themselves for the decisions only they can make.
Who Darren Goonawardana serves
Through Collectiv, Darren Goonawardana works with data and AI leaders at organisations that want their data to drive growth rather than sit in reports. As The Cyborg CEO, he works with executives and leadership teams who want a practical, human-centred way to lead with AI.
What Darren Goonawardana works on
The fields and concepts at the centre of his work, each defined and connected to what he builds. Explore the full topics glossary.
Companies founded
Each venture links to its full page here, and out to the live source.
Writing and speaking
Darren Goonawardana publishes on AI leadership, data strategy, and systems thinking as The Cyborg CEO, and is a regular speaker at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference and on the Microsoft World Tour. He hosts the Cyborg CEO video podcast. Read his writing and see where he has been featured.
Background
Darren Goonawardana studied Electronic and Broadcast Engineering at the University of Brighton from 1992 to 1996. He then spent more than three decades in business intelligence and enterprise software, building companies on four continents: he co-founded MIS in the United Kingdom and again in the Asia-Pacific region from Sydney, and founded the Systems Union business intelligence division for the Americas, which was acquired by Infor.
Along the way he co-founded the consulting firm FizzyLime and the fitness venture HotFit.tv, held senior roles at Infor, and served as a director at the planning and analytics company Acterys. In 2019 he co-founded Collectiv, the Microsoft data and AI consultancy he leads today as CEO.
Beyond the work
Darren Goonawardana’s career has been a global one, with chapters in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, where he is now based in Chicago. That experience of building across cultures and markets shapes the practical, human-centred view of technology and leadership he brings to the stage as The Cyborg CEO.
Elsewhere on the web
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