The People Behind the Infrastructure

Most executives have ideas.
Very few have the infrastructure
to turn those ideas into authority.

Phantom IQ is a lean, AI-native firm built to close that gap — pairing the most advanced AI workflows with human editorial judgment that no $20/month subscription can replicate. We are two founders, 20+ agentic workflows, and a mandate: executive voice at scale, without the noise.

Why We Exist

Brilliant operators — people leading transformations, running major business lines, making decisions that shape entire industries — whose public presence either doesn't exist or sounds nothing like them. The longer that gap persists, the more it costs. Narrative debt compounds silently.

How We Work

Human-in-the-lead at every stage. AI accelerates research, synthesis, and drafting. Our editorial team ensures what ships meets publication standards and sounds unmistakably like the executive it came from.

What We Build

Executive narrative infrastructure: the voice architecture, the editorial rigor, the publication strategy, and the distribution engine that makes it all repeatable. Not more content — the system that captures how executives actually think and turns it into authority that compounds over time.

The Founding Story

Built by people who had already
done the work

Phantom IQ wasn't built from a whiteboard. It was built from years of watching the same pattern play out on both sides of the problem — and knowing exactly what it would take to fix it.

Tom Popomaronis had published over 1,000 articles across Forbes, CNBC, Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, and Inc. before co-founding Phantom IQ. He had seen, firsthand, how consistent executive authority creates asymmetric advantages: easier fundraising, stronger talent pipelines, more board access. He had also seen how hard it is for time-constrained leaders to maintain that presence without infrastructure behind them.

Kindyl Duncan had spent years building narrative strategy for Fortune 100 leaders and growth-stage operators — watching brilliant people struggle to translate their real expertise into public authority. The problem wasn't ideas. It was systems: no structured capture process, no editorial consistency, no compounding distribution strategy.

Together, they built the infrastructure layer that didn't exist. A two-person founding team now operating 20+ agentic AI workflows, managing up to 21 concurrent executive programs, and producing content that surfaces in Forbes, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and increasingly — in AI-generated answers on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

Leadership

The Co-Founders

Tom Popomaronis

Tom Popomaronis

Co-Founder & CEO

Frederick, Maryland

LinkedIn Top Voice HBR Advisory Council OpenAI Forum 40 Under 40 Techstars Advisor

Top Skills

Generative AI Thought Leadership Storytelling Product Innovation
Full profile & publication history →

Building narrative authority at scale for the AI search era.

Most enterprise brands aren't losing the AI search era because of bad strategy. They're losing it because their executive authority isn't built like infrastructure.

Tom co-founded Phantom IQ to fix that. As a Forbes contributor since 2016 with over 1,000 published articles across tier-1 publications, he brings something rare to executive content: he's lived both sides. He knows what it takes to earn consistent placement in the outlets that matter — and he knows what organizational leaders need to do differently to make that happen at scale.

He is also the host of TomTalks Exec Q&A, a LinkedIn newsletter reaching 44,000+ senior executives focused on the costs, benefits, and risks of AI adoption.

  • An AI-native infrastructure layer that extracts 45 minutes of executive thinking per month and distributes it across Perplexity, ChatGPT, Google AI, major publications, and LinkedIn — within hours
  • Multi-executive programs coordinating 5–20+ executives under a unified narrative — no voice overlap, no message drift, no calendar consumed
  • A context engineering methodology refined across hundreds of iterations — producing executive-quality output at a level no $20/month AI subscription can touch

Contributor at

Forbes CNBC Harvard Business Review Entrepreneur Inc. CIO InfoWorld TechCrunch Fast Company
Kindyl Duncan

Kindyl Duncan

Co-Founder & COO

Nashville, Tennessee

Fast Company Executive Board Fortune 100 Experience

Top Skills

Narrative Strategy Brand Strategy Marketing Comms Ghostwriting
Full profile →

Building the human-in-the-lead systems that power modern corporate thought leadership.

Kindyl co-founded Phantom IQ after years of watching the same pattern play out: brilliant operators — people leading transformations, running major business lines, making decisions that shape entire industries — whose public presence either didn't exist or sounded nothing like them.

As COO, she holds the editorial line that separates Phantom IQ from every AI-first content shop: voice fidelity and publication-grade quality, every cycle, at scale. The editorial team she leads ensures that what ships sounds unmistakably like the executive it came from.

She is also a Fast Company Executive Board contributor, where she writes about the intersection of AI and editorial judgment — and why the human layer in executive content matters more now than ever.

  • Voice architecture and editorial systems that scale across 5–21 concurrent executive programs without losing individual authenticity
  • Narrative infrastructure for CEOs, presidents, revenue leaders, CMOs, and communications executives at Fortune 100s and growth-stage companies
  • The Context Engineer model — human editors who hold the standard, strip LLM artifacts, and ensure every piece meets publication bar before it ships

Clients placed in

Forbes Fortune Rolling Stone Harvard Business Review Fast Company Time Women's Health CIO Industry Dive

Ready to build narrative infrastructure that compounds?

Stop producing content. Start building the system that turns executive thinking into authority — across AI answers, major publications, and every platform that shapes your category.