Michael Schmier

Michael has spent roughly three decades leading operations and product across consumer, enterprise, and education. He helped pioneer the virtual reality market at Samsung, led the content business at BabyCenter, and held leadership roles at startups in data analytics and sports technology. The through-line is execution: taking a strategy and making a whole organization run on it.

He joined Study.com as Chief Product Officer and now serves as President and COO of Candova, where he drives company-wide execution and oversees the AI initiatives. That means he leads AI transformation and organizational change from the front lines, not the whiteboard: deciding what to roll out, sequencing it across teams, and getting people to actually change how they work. He has also served 18 years on the board of GreatSchools.org.

He writes here about the operational side of AI: how adoption actually happens across an organization, what a Head of AI really does, how to run an enterprise rollout that sticks, and why most transformations stall at the desk rather than in the strategy deck.