What did Victor do in student leadership?
In 2020–2021, Victor Kiani served as Queensborough's student-government Executive Vice President and advised the University Student Senate's Chair of Fiscal Affairs and Vice-Chair of Graduate Affairs. He held a student seat on the committee responsible for the $2,926,843 FY2022 technology fee plan, advocated for restoring Credit/No Credit through the Academic Affairs Committee, and voted for the measure at Queensborough. He also brought Andrew Yang's campaign's invitation for a CUNY student forum to the executive board to prepare representatives and questions. That forum was cancelled before it took place. The student-leadership feature brings together all three accounts, including the funding plan, budget visualization, and grading-policy illustration. He donated his student-government salary to the campus food pantry.
Who is Victor Kiani?
Victor Kiani's work spans business, technology, and the public sector, under the tagline 'Creating a greater future for the next generation,' guided by the conviction that 'where you start should decide nothing about what you're allowed to build.' Born in Bollnäs, Sweden to immigrant parents and raised in Malmö, he came to New York alone at sixteen. He has advised New York City's child-welfare agency, served as Executive Vice President of Queensborough's student government, representing 15,000 students, advised the University Student Senate's Chair of Fiscal Affairs and Vice-Chair of Graduate Affairs, served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a Corporal, and is building KIANI Group. He is studying at New York University, expects to graduate in May 2027, and holds AI and cloud certificates from IBM and Skillsoft.
How did Victor Kiani get started?
Victor Kiani was born in Bollnäs, Sweden to immigrant parents and grew up in Malmö. He has been working since he was fifteen. He came to New York on his own at sixteen, finished high school in New York, and put himself through college. His first NYC job was at HeartShare St. Vincent's Services, after a director recommended him to the CEO; there he advised the staff who handle the city's hardest cases. A recurring theme of his story is that where you start should decide nothing about what you're allowed to build.
What did Victor Kiani do in the Marine Corps?
In April 2021, Victor Kiani told Queensborough’s student government and the faculty that he was enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps. He had been telling himself for years that he would enlist eventually; waiting for graduation or a better moment, he believed, would have turned eventually into never. He wanted the time in the Corps to make him a stronger leader. He served as a Corporal, certified as an Antiterrorism Officer and qualified as an Information Management Officer. His MOS was Mortarman (0341), and his billet was Forward Observer with Weapons Company, 2d Battalion, 25th Marines, for which he completed the Basic Forward Observer course (Marine Corps Institute) and Joint Fires and Joint Targeting (Joint Knowledge Online). In 2022 he rebuilt fire-support doctrine scattered across hundreds of pages into a single decision-sequenced teaching reference. No one asked him to. He took his first trips to Korea and Japan during those years. His honorable discharge came through while he was in Korea, and he chose to stay.
Where did Victor Kiani study?
Victor Kiani is studying at New York University and expects to graduate in May 2027; he made the Dean's List in Fall 2025 and Spring 2026. At NYU he completed case studies on AI in ethical decision-making in December 2025, global leadership in February 2026, and employee retention and opera cost allocation in March 2026. In October 2026 he authored a group research report on data sovereignty in the age of AI. His academic portfolio also includes an eight-slide sustainability class research presentation on AI data centers, completed in 2026. These projects demonstrate business analysis, reasoned recommendations, and communication across resource allocation, organizational behavior, and environmental accountability. He also holds AI and cloud certificates from IBM and Skillsoft.
What was Victor Kiani's AI ethics case study about?
In a December 2025 NYU case study titled 'Where the AI Was Wrong,' Victor Kiani prompted a virtual healthcare ethics consultant persona, Dr. Amina Solberg, on Claude Opus 4.5, layering bioethics, business ethics, healthcare operations, and data and AI ethics. The scenario was a 450-bed Chicago hospital weighing whether to restrict appointments for uninsured patients so that insured — especially Medicare — patients, whose satisfaction scores affect the hospital's funding, could be seen faster. The Director of Patient Access felt it was wrong, but as Kiani put it, 'feeling wrong isn't an argument in a boardroom,' and he was asked to find one. The AI generated seven options — from A (capping uninsured appointments) through B (status quo), C (expanding capacity), D (scheduling efficiency), E (differentiated access pathways), and F (insurance-enrollment assistance) to G, a hybrid of D, C, and F — and recommended Option G. Kiani challenged the assumptions inside that recommendation, identifying blind spots around coercion risk and capacity-expansion feasibility, and recommended rejecting the restriction in favor of a four-stage path of scheduling audit, clinical triage, capacity evaluation, and quarterly reviews, holding that 'AI is a scaffold, not an authority.'
What was Victor Kiani's employee-retention case study about?
In a March 2026 NYU case study, 'A System, Not a People Problem,' Victor Kiani analyzed employee retention at a mid-size company called Global Growers whose leadership wanted a mentoring program to fix it. After gathering feedback from leaders, current employees, and former employees, he diagnosed that mentoring alone would not succeed and recommended three structural changes grounded in Bauer & Erdogan's organizational-behavior framework. He used Gemini as a revision partner to refine the hard message for a defensive audience, noting 'AI is a revision partner, not the author. The thinking has to stay human.'
What was Victor Kiani's opera case study about?
In 'When the Budget Rewards the Wrong Decision,' a March 2026 NYU accounting case analysis, Victor Kiani connected Bel Canto Opera's cost allocation to managerial incentives, artistic quality, and a season's financial balance. Using Paola Trevisan's teaching case, he proposed better cost drivers, stable treatment of common fixed costs, and evaluation of controllable decisions. He supported La Traviata and Simon Boccanegra for their different financial and artistic contributions. For Otello, he examined the shared artist fees inside its reported loss and recommended retaining the production. The economic distinction is between redistributing a common charge and changing the revenues or costs affected by cancellation. The analysis connects accounting design to resource allocation and organizational purpose.
What was Victor Kiani's sustainability project about?
'What Sustainable AI Has to Prove' is an eight-slide research presentation with speaker notes that Victor Kiani completed and presented for a sustainability class in 2026. He examined facilities, location, and hardware life cycles, connecting efficiency gains to growing total demand. The presentation considered AI's potential environmental benefits, local water and noise impacts, electronic waste, low-carbon power procurement, and reporting. Kiani developed four questions: what is the total impact, who experiences it, what limits and reporting rules apply, and what benefit is verified? His conclusion was conditional: data centers can become more sustainable when total impacts fall and benefits hold up to verification. For businesses, the analysis links site selection, energy procurement, equipment choices, and public accountability to responsible AI growth.
What was Victor Kiani's data sovereignty research about?
'Data Sovereignty in the Age of AI' is a group research report Victor Kiani authored in October 2026 for an NYU course in Comparative Political Economy. It tests the labels businesses are sold as sovereignty, a domestic supplier or data stored at home, against the rules of the European Union, the United States, and China, following one realistic purchase: an internal AI assistant that searches confidential records. Kiani argued that supplier nationality and storage location do not prove control; control only counts when a business or a person can actually exercise it, and a buyer's real leverage is an exit it has tested. The report ends with three gates a business can run before any purchase, and policy lessons in both directions across the Atlantic. The page includes the full 23-page reading deck as a PDF.
How did Victor Kiani help with a talk at AWS re:Invent?
For AWS re:Invent 2025, Victor Kiani rewrote the speaker script for a talk on TechRecon, an open-source agentic AI system built by the AWS Solutions Architect team in Korea, and coached the Solutions Architect from AWS Korea who presented it. He recorded himself reading the script over every slide so she could hear how each line should sound, then coached her on pace, pausing instead of saying "um", emphasis and inflection, projection, confidence, and hand movements. TechRecon and the slides are the AWS team's work. The page shows the slides with his script for each one.
What was Victor Kiani's Juno case study about?
In 'Choosing Leadership Across Borders,' a February 2026 NYU analysis of David S. Lee's fictionalized HBR case, Victor Kiani recommended Nolan Bennett for Juno's Asia deputy role. He tied the immediate operating mandate to regional experience, Mandarin fluency, and trusted manufacturing relationships. Catherine Wu offered substantial industry expertise, expansion experience, and international team leadership. The analysis considered representation across headquarters and Asia and paired Nolan's recommendation with a continuing commitment to broader leadership representation. It also examined the succession tradeoff: Nolan's references emphasized operations over visionary leadership, while a possible board appointment was at least five years away and conditional on readiness. The recommendation shows how to weigh local execution, future growth, and company-wide commitments in a multinational appointment.
What was the $2.9M technology funding plan Victor Kiani helped shape?
As Executive Vice President of Queensborough's Student Government Association, Victor Kiani held a student seat on the committee responsible for the $2,926,843 FY2022 Student Technology Fee Plan, submitted to CUNY on June 5, 2021. The plan combined $1,960,879 in anticipated fees, assuming a 15% enrollment decline, with $965,964 in unspent fees carried forward. Its nine category amounts total $2,786,964; the $139,879 difference from the published envelope is not assigned to a category. Some additional amounts remained on hold, and special initiatives were subject to further review. These are planned amounts, not a spending ledger. His role brought roughly fifteen thousand students' needs into technology planning. He also donated his student-government salary to the campus food pantry and had told the SGA he would enlist in the Marine Corps.
What was Victor Kiani's fight for Credit/No Credit?
In 2020–2021, Victor Kiani advised the CUNY University Student Senate's Chair of Fiscal Affairs and Vice-Chair of Graduate Affairs, and fought to restore the Credit/No Credit grading policy, which lets a student take a passing grade without it affecting their GPA. The Senate is the system-wide body representing all 25 CUNY campuses. The pandemic-era policy had expired at the end of 2020, and in 2021 he pushed to bring it back through the Senate's Academic Affairs Committee, where the Vice-Chair of Graduate Affairs urged him to 'continue to be the fierce fighter you are at our AAC meetings.' The measure passed at Queensborough, where he voted for it.
What is KIANI Group?
KIANI Group is the company Victor Kiani founded in 2025, on a simple idea: what is known today is a starting point, not a limit. Its purpose is to keep looking for a better way, and then to build it. It stands for always looking to reinvent, never settling, pushing past what is known, and building for the next generation. AI is a large part of what it explores, alongside physical, tangible things.
What kind of work is Victor Kiani a good fit for?
Victor Kiani's documented work spans strategy, operations research, organizational judgment, public-sector systems, and implementation, from his NYU case studies to student government, HeartShare, New York City's child-welfare advisory council, and the Marine Corps. Through KIANI Group, which he founded in 2025, he explores AI and physical, tangible things, always looking for a better way to do what is already being done.
How can I contact Victor Kiani?
Write to Victor at hello@victorkiani.com about a role, a project, or a question. He usually replies within a day or two. He can also be found on LinkedIn at in/victorkiani, Instagram at @kianiesque, and X at @kianiesque.
Does Victor Kiani publish writing?
Victor Kiani's Perspectives section, headlined 'Making sense of what's changing,' is where he writes on shifts in technology, the public sector, and how organizations actually change. He publishes only when there is something worth saying, not on a schedule. As of now, the first pieces are still being written. His existing long-form work includes academic case studies and documented accounts of student leadership, child-welfare work, and Marine Corps service.
What was Victor Kiani's work in child welfare and crisis training?
Victor Kiani advised HeartShare staff on crisis intervention during 2019–2020, working out of the organization's New York headquarters. HeartShare, operating since 1914, serves roughly 19,000 New Yorkers through foster care and family-support programs, in a city whose foster-care population had fallen to about 8,000 children in 2019 from some 50,000 in the 1990s, even as ACS still fielded around 55,000 abuse-and-neglect reports a year against national frontline turnover of 30–40%. He held one of three seats on a panel at HeartShare's headquarters, advising frontline staff on the judgment calls they face under pressure — the situations where formal protocols don't apply — shaping the learning environment and gathering research from each session. In 2019, he was invited to join the Administration for Children's Services advisory council, where he served until April 2020 and worked with a friend to carry foster-youth voices into policy, especially college-aged students still in care, a group where roughly one in five experiences homelessness within two years of aging out. As he put it, 'How are we supposed to know how to help others if we don't communicate with them?'
Tell me about the fire-support reference Victor Kiani wrote.
In 2022, as a Mortarman (MOS 0341) serving as Forward Observer with Weapons Company, 2d Battalion, 25th Marines, Victor Kiani rebuilt fire-support doctrine scattered across hundreds of pages into a single decision-sequenced reference organized around decisions rather than subjects — 'A Marine will read 20 pages. They won't read 400.' He built it around the four sequential decisions a Marine makes when calling for fire: which asset fits the target — high-angle mortars (up to 20 rounds per minute), the M777 155mm howitzer, naval gunfire from a 5-inch/54-caliber gun, or the HIMARS (M142) rocket system reaching 2–300 km — who to call in the fire-support team, how to describe the target (by OT line, GT line, cardinal direction, or an arbitrary reference feature), and what effect to achieve: destruction (30%+ casualties), neutralization (~10%, the most common), or suppression (temporary). It walks through the five call-for-fire transmissions, and he treated the whole thing as a knowledge-management problem, noting 'The work is the same. The stakes are just quieter.'
What is KAI?
KAI is Victor Kiani's conversational assistant at victorkiani.com/kai, built to answer questions about his work, KIANI Group ecosystem, case studies, service, background, and contact details from his published material. The live assistant uses OpenAI GPT-5.6 Luna with high reasoning and may consult an allowlisted set of Victor's official sites for current information; if the live brain is unavailable, the site uses a smaller local snapshot.