Sasha Aganova

Sasha founded Optimal Business Design in 2025 to do the part of transformation most firms skip: rebuilding how the business actually runs, then integrating AI into those operations so the gain is measurable rather than promised.

She works directly with COOs and executive teams on operating-model design, process architecture and AI integration — engagements measured in weeks, with a defensible ROI case behind every recommendation.

Twenty-five years in practice. She has built end-to-end business architectures for more than a dozen companies, led over 50 performance improvement projects, and stood up several process management centres of excellence — in banking and financial services, retail and consumer goods, manufacturing, real estate services and the public sector. Client work includes CIBC, Mars, Hudson's Bay, Loblaws and Brookfield.

Sasha teaches at the University of Toronto, where she brings live client problems into the classroom instead of teaching frameworks in the abstract.

She lectures Integrated Systems Design, a four-month undergraduate course for fourth-year Mechanical Engineering students covering business architecture, business process management, process improvement and business design.

Beyond the university she has trained hundreds of practitioners in modern process design through corporate programmes and conference workshops.

Sasha speaks regularly at industry conferences on AI-enabled business architecture, process excellence and the human side of change — the parts of transformation that decide whether the technology ever lands.

Recent stages include the Building Business Capability conference (BBC) in North America and IRM UK's Enterprise Architecture & BPM Conference Europe, where she presented "Optimising the Enterprise: A Unified Approach to Enterprise, Business, and Process Architectures" in 2024 and "Why AI Can't Read Your Process Maps (And What to Use Instead)" at BBC 2026.

She is currently booking talks on AI-ready process documentation, AI-enabled business architecture and building an internal process capability that survives the consultants. Enquiries go through the contact page.

Diagnose with data, size the value, then implement with the people who own the process. No 200-slide deck, no offshore delivery team appearing after signature.

Sasha stays on the engagements she sells — the named lead does the work, and the client executive always knows who is accountable.

Credentials: MBA in Economics, Riga Technical University; Enterprise Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University; Business Architecture through the BPTrends Process Management Program; judge for the EA & BPM Best Practice Europe Awards. She writes for BPTrends and has contributed to the Huffington Post.