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 advanced AI workflows with human editorial judgment. Two founders and a clear 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.
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 pairing AI-native workflows with human editorial judgment to support executive programs at scale — producing content that can surface in outlets like Forbes Council, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Company Executive Board, and increasingly in AI-generated answers on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
The Co-Founders
Tom Popomaronis
Co-Founder & CEO
Frederick, Maryland
Top Skills
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 approach that captures executive thinking with a light time commitment and helps distribute it across Perplexity, ChatGPT, Google AI, major publications, and LinkedIn
- → Multi-executive programs coordinating leaders under a unified narrative — minimizing voice overlap, message drift, and calendar burden
- → An approach that pairs advanced AI with human editorial judgment to produce executive-quality output
Contributor at
Kindyl Duncan
Co-Founder & COO
Nashville, Tennessee
Top Skills
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 sets Phantom IQ apart from purely AI-first content shops: voice fidelity and publication-grade quality at scale. The editorial team she leads works to ensure 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 concurrent executive programs while preserving individual authenticity
- → Narrative infrastructure for CEOs, presidents, revenue leaders, CMOs, and communications executives at large enterprises and growth-stage companies
- → A human-in-the-lead editorial layer — editors who hold the standard and work to ensure each piece meets a publication-grade bar before it ships
Clients placed in
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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.