About

Built by an operator, not a consultant.

Echelon One is an Australian AI transformation consultancy that redesigns how founder-led businesses operate, then installs AI where it adds meaningful value. It exists because the person who built it kept seeing the same thing: companies handed AI advice by people who'd never run a business, and technology bolted onto operations nobody had bothered to understand. We do it the other way round.

The background

Two decades operating, not advising from a distance.

Founder Luke Lombe has spent twenty years inside real businesses: as a consultant and operator across Asia, the Middle East, New York and Australia; in media and entertainment, blockchain and finance; and as a founding partner of a venture studio he helped scale to around 150 people across eight companies. The pattern repeated: brought in to fix or build something, then kept on to run it, because the outcomes were good enough that leaving wasn't an option.

More recently, that experience collided with AI. Applying the old management-consulting playbook, understand the business first, then improve it, with AI as the tool rather than the point, turned out to be far more powerful than the “just add a chatbot” approach everyone else was selling. So we built the method, and the systems behind it, in our own companies first. The full account is in the essay that started all of this: I replaced an eight-person team with AI

inside real businesses, as consultant and then operator

people across eight companies, scaled as a founding partner of a venture studio

markets worked across: Asia, the Middle East, New York and Australia

an eight-person team became one AI-augmented operator, in our own company

Why we're different

Human disciplines first

Strategy, process and people come before any tool. AI goes on top, only where it adds meaningful value, never sprayed everywhere because it looks impressive.

Operator-built, not advisor-at-distance

The method was forged running real businesses under real pressure, and installed in our own companies before we brought it to anyone else's.

We install it, then hand it over

You get a working operating layer your company owns and runs, plus the plan to keep it running. Not a deck, and not a dependency.

The team

A small core, with specialist partners.

Luke leads the client relationship, the diagnosis, and the framework, the parts that need judgment and experience.

A dedicated implementation lead builds the systems, the automations and the integrations, working closely alongside the founder, not throwing it over the fence.

Terry leads organisational design and performance, James leads people and culture, both in house. Specialist partners bring marketing capability in when an engagement calls for it.

Luke has spent two decades doing one thing in very different rooms: making businesses run better. He was Director of Optimization at DMG Entertainment, one of China's largest media companies and the studio behind Iron Man 3; delivered national-scale projects from the $83M Australian pavilion at the Shanghai Expo to scoping a $160M build in Times Square; and scaled a venture studio to 150 people across eight companies. Echelon One is that same discipline, optimization, now with AI as the lever. He built the method in his own companies first, then brought it to clients.

Terence is an organisational psychologist and an economist, and holds a PhD in education. He has spent more than thirty years helping leaders create high-performance cultures at some of the biggest companies in the world: Coca-Cola, Sony, BHP and HSBC among them. He founded his own leadership development practice in 1983, employed hundreds of practitioners, ran programs across five continents, and still teaches in executive education and Master of Psychology programs today. He makes sure process optimisation holds for the long term, through the organisational design and leadership behaviours that carry it.

James makes high-performance culture measurable and sustainable. He founded Culture Amp's London office, and has worked with leaders at top-performing companies across sectors: from Google DeepMind to the World Economic Forum, Lloyd's of London to the McLaren F1 team, and Soho House to Cambridge University. He holds a Masters in Clinical Psychology and studied innovation at London Business School. As a leadership coach, he works directly with the executives who lead the change, not just the teams living through it. He turns people and culture data into the insights and behavioural changes that ensure a business is reaching its full potential now and in the future.

Kiril is the engineering muscle. He has been building production software for over twenty years, from an early engineering role at ING to years as a senior software architect in Amsterdam, and has shipped full-stack blockchain and DeFi platforms since deploying his first smart contract in 2016. He holds a degree in artificial intelligence and was working with it long before the current wave. Today he architects regulated platforms end to end: the platform, the app, and the AI systems built on top. When an engagement needs secure, production-grade build rather than slideware, Kiril is who builds it.

Kieran carries the build. He spent the last year and a half leading AI adoption inside a top-50 AFR-ranked accounting firm of around a hundred people, taking it from scattered experimentation to firm-wide, measured adoption across accounting, audit and advisory: 98% of staff adopted the tools he built and trained them on, with more than 6,000 hours of tracked time saved. An accountant by training who codes, he knows exactly where the mechanical work hides, how to automate it safely, and how to get a sceptical team to actually use what he builds. Few people anywhere have taken an entire professional-services firm through AI adoption end to end rather than a pilot; Kieran has, and clients get that playbook from day one.

Eva is the firm's relationship engine, equally at home in Chinese and Western business. Beijing-born, she has spent her career where cross-border deals are won or lost: running China market entry and negotiations for a leading French aerospace company, then working with KPMG in the US supporting multi-million-dollar transactions and the negotiations around them. Eva now leads business development, bringing that same instinct for reading a room and holding a relationship to client conversations, onboarding and partnerships.