About Us

Tailwind helps colleges and universities make AI part of how they actually operate, calmly and on their own terms. We advise, we build, and we give a lot away for free along the way. The company was founded by two people who approach AI from opposite ends of the same problem, one from deep inside higher education and the other from the frontier of applied AI, who meet in the middle to deliver systems campuses can trust.

An AI-native firm, built only for higher education

Tailwind is an AI-native service company. We were built from the ground up around modern AI rather than a traditional consultancy that bolted it on after the fact. That shapes everything we do: the tools we ship, the way we run our own operations, and the advice we give. We use the technology daily, so our guidance comes from practice, not theory.

We also focus exclusively on higher education. Colleges and universities are all we do. We don't split our attention across industries, so the patterns we recognize, the policies we track, and the workflows we map are specific to your world, not generic corporate best practices borrowed from somewhere else. When we talk about committees, governance, enrollment, advising, or accreditation, we're speaking your language.

Put those two things together and you get our whole reason for existing: practical, responsible AI that fits the realities of a campus, delivered by a team that lives and breathes both the technology and the sector.

Devin Golets

Devin has spent more than a decade inside higher education, including five years at Western University as an admissions and recruitment officer and career counselor. Over that time he sat in cabinet rooms, walked freshmen through post-secondary and career planning, and worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the faculty, advisors, and administrators who keep a campus running.

That vantage point, seeing an institution from the front-line student conversation all the way up to senior leadership, is what shapes how he approaches Tailwind's work. He understands the real constraints campuses operate under: committees and governance, tight budgets, accreditation and privacy obligations, and the very human anxieties that come with any change to how people work. He has lived the pressures that make AI feel exciting and intimidating at the same time.

At Tailwind, Devin leads engagements by listening first. He asks a lot of questions, gets leaders aligned on what they're actually trying to solve, and helps campuses move from AI uncertainty to confident, defensible decisions. His conviction is that AI adoption in higher education is fundamentally a question of people and trust, not technology, and that the goal is always to reduce administrative burden so staff can spend their time where it matters most.

Connect with Devin on LinkedIn →

Davie Lee

Davie is a serial entrepreneur with deep domain expertise in big data and applied AI. He has spent more than a decade building AI-powered products that operate at scale, and his previous company was acquired by a private-equity firm. That experience taught him how to take ambitious technology from prototype all the way to dependable, production-grade systems.

His background spans the full technical stack of modern AI: architecting large data pipelines, applying machine learning to messy real-world problems, and hardening systems so they stay secure, accurate, and maintainable once real users depend on them. He also actively invests in early-stage startups, which keeps him close to the frontier of AI tooling and a clear-eyed judge of what's genuinely useful versus what's hype.

At Tailwind, Davie translates a fast-moving AI landscape into calm, grounded systems that campuses can actually run. He makes sure every recommendation Tailwind makes is technically sound, realistic about data and privacy, and built to last beyond the initial pilot. His job is to keep the team honest about what's possible today, and to build the tools and resources, like the AI Policy Database and AI Fluency Test, that Tailwind gives away along the way.

Connect with Davie on LinkedIn →

…and Ollie

Ollie is the friendly guide woven through our tools and resources, here to make AI feel approachable instead of intimidating. Wise, calm, and always happy to explain things twice.