Strategy engagements
We help leadership figure out where AI fits in your operations. What to build first. What to leave alone. How to introduce AI to your team without losing trust.
karinda
AI coworkers
AI coworkers
for the creative sector.
Karinda helps arts, culture, and creative organizations build the capacity they need to do the work that matters. Strategy engagements, bespoke builds, and a roadmap toward named AI coworkers your team can hire and onboard.
The reality
Capacity is the constraint.
Most creative organizations do the work of two or three teams. The volume keeps growing while headcount doesn’t.
You’re barely keeping up with the Urgent, but you got into this to do the Important.
What if we finally had the capacity to do both?
Donor relationships. Audience development. Programme delivery. Organizational learning. Karinda builds AI tools that expand the work your team can do, without burning them out or hollowing out your mission.
What we do
From strategy to systems
to AI coworkers.
We work with arts, culture, and creative organizations across three modes.
Bespoke builds
We design and ship AI tools tailored to your specific workflows. Custom integrations. Custom voice. Custom guardrails. Real production deployments, not proofs of concept.
AI coworkers
Our roadmap is toward named AI team members. Coworkers your team hires, onboards, and works alongside. The first is in active pilot conversations now.
Wherever you are, we start with a conversation about where your team is stretched thinnest.
Where we focus
Built for the
creative sector.
Our work is centred in arts, culture, heritage, and the broader creative industries.
- Performing arts
- Museums & galleries
- Heritage organizations
- Film & television
- Design studios
- Creative agencies
- Festivals & presenters
- Community arts
- Creative nonprofits
We pick this sector deliberately. It’s where we have decades of operational experience, the deepest relationships, and the strongest conviction that AI can expand the mission rather than narrow it.
How we think about AI
AI for the work,
not for the spectacle.
A few principles that shape every engagement.
AI that expands human capacity, not replaces it.
We build tools that give your team back time and energy, not tools designed to take their jobs.
Honest about what AI can and can’t do.
No magic. No hype. If a tool isn’t ready, we say so. If a problem isn’t AI-shaped, we say so.
Your data stays yours.
Privacy is a baseline, not a feature. We don’t train models on your data. We don’t keep what isn’t ours.
AI for work we believe in.
We choose our engagements deliberately. We turn down projects we don’t think serve the public good.
Transparent and reviewable.
Every output is yours to approve, edit, or reject. AI works in plain view of your team.
Photo by Grace Murrell
Why I’m building Karinda
Twenty years in the sector.
One year inside the shift.
I’m Owais Lightwala, founder of Karinda. I’ve spent twenty years building things in Canadian arts and culture. I was the first Managing Director of Why Not Theatre, co-leading the company through landmark projects including RISER and The Mahabharata. I’m an Assistant Professor at The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University, where I teach innovation and entrepreneurship in creative industries, and the founding Director of The Creative School Chrysalis. Over the past year I’ve been developing AI solutions for arts organizations as part of a Canadian Heritage-funded initiative.
The same conversation keeps happening in every meeting I take. The team is smart. The team is committed. The team is underwater. The work that compounds long-term value gets dropped first. Leaders are exhausted from doing three jobs and being asked to do more.
Karinda exists because the sector has no shortage of consultants with decks. The shortage is tools and partners that actually understand how the work gets done, who do the building, and who stick around to make it work. If you’re running a creative organization and you’ve been told for years that the tools weren’t built for you, we’d like to change that.
— Owais Lightwala, founder
Ready to talk
Let’s start with
a conversation.
30 minutes, no pitch deck. We’ll talk about where your team is stretched, what you’ve already tried, and whether Karinda is a fit for what you need.