Managing Partner at Ethikos Services in Portugal
Rethinking how companies show themselves and how they run
Postgraduate in Technologies and AI Applied to Business, with distinction
Afonso Gonçalves is the Managing Partner of Ethikos Services in Portugal. People work Monday to Friday, nine to five, doing the same repetitive tasks every day. If that is not being a robot, he asks, what is?
Ethikos Services came to free them from that, and to bring them back to the human side of work, where it has the most value: connection with other people. A client trusts a person. A patient remembers a person. That is what makes your company worth choosing, and it is where your people should spend their day.
He looks at your company as a manager first. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Management and runs Ethikos Services day to day from Lisbon: he reads every brief, shapes each engagement and answers for the result. He asks about clients, margins and people before he asks about tools, so the plan fits your business, not the latest fashion.
He wants to completely change how companies show themselves to the world. Most still hand the market a brochure: a list of services and a phone number. He starts with who the company is, gives it a personality and a story people remember, then puts it in front of the right clients and makes sure someone follows up. Your company stops looking like everyone else’s.
He wants the same for how they run. Where does the work pile up? What gets typed twice? Which decision waits days for one person? He finds that first and redesigns how the work flows. Only then do automation and AI take the repetitive part, while the judgement stays with your people. That is how a company grows its turnover without growing its workload.
Afonso found his passion when he discovered AI, because it makes this possible: real impact in organisations, and value for society. In AI, he says, everyone is a beginner: the technology is new and it changes fast. He completed his postgraduate programme at Iscte Executive Education with distinction, and he keeps learning online.
Tell him what keeps your people away from your clients.
Areas of focus
- Growth strategy and market launches: a written diagnosis of where a company stands, the order of the work and a pipeline with someone accountable for it
- Marketing and business development: how a company shows itself to the market, who sees it and who follows up
- Processes and operations: what repeats, what blocks and how the work should flow, before anyone buys a tool
- Back offices and sector apps that bring the way a company runs into one place and automate the work in between
- Client onboarding, run for the client so the team can focus on the work that grows the business
- AI agents that prepare the work, with people in control and every action logged
- The systems a new company needs to run properly from its first day
How he works
- A diagnosis before a tool: how the company sells, how it is seen and where it loses time, written down before anyone buys or builds anything.
- A story before a list of services: he starts with who you are and why you exist, so people remember your company, not only what it sells.
- Your own words: he works from what your people say and write, and changes them only when he has to. The result sounds like your company, not like a machine.
- The real thing, early: you react to a working version, not to a long document, and changes often come back the same day. Mistakes get fixed while they are still cheap.
- Built for whoever uses it: if many of your clients are older and struggle with small type, the type gets bigger. Your system is shaped around your people, not around the tool.
- Other people’s secrets stay safe: systems are built with invented data, never your clients’ real data, so a law firm or a clinic can move forward without exposing anyone.
- Decisions written down: each important decision is recorded, with who took it and why, so you can check every step and nothing depends on one person’s memory.
Vision
- Most companies already know what they should change. What they lack is the time and the people to carry it out. Afonso and his partners set up Ethikos Services to close that gap, between what a company decides and what it becomes.
- Good advice rarely fails on the idea. It fails in execution, split across suppliers who share no context, while nobody answers for the result. Afonso’s answer is one team that builds the operation, runs it and puts its name to the outcome.
- AI has made work cheaper to produce. It has not made it easier to trust. The companies that pull ahead will be the ones that use it with control: at Ethikos Services, AI agents prepare the work, people decide, and every agent action is logged.
- Law firms, clinics and other regulated companies carry duties an ordinary supplier never sees: professional secrecy, advertising rules, sensitive data. At Ethikos Services, those rules are the brief, not friction. That is how a regulated company moves faster without taking on new risk.
- His ambition is for Ethikos Services to be the first call for companies in Europe that want to grow their turnover without growing their workload.
Principles
- Accountable: one team answers for the result. Scope, exit criteria and exclusions are agreed in writing before work starts, so you know exactly what you are getting.
- Verifiable: we do not ask to be taken at our word. Every claim points to something you can check, and every automated step leaves a record.
- Yours to keep: everything we build runs without us. You get plain-language manuals and full access from day one, and you are never locked in.
- Within the rules: professional and regulatory rules set the specification. When a request falls outside them, we say no and explain why.
- Discreet: your name stays yours. No client is named without written permission.
Education
- Bachelor’s degree in Business Management, Universidade Lusófona
- Postgraduate Programme in Technologies and Artificial Intelligence Applied to Business, Iscte Executive Education– Passed with distinction. Iscte Executive Education is ranked in the Financial Times Executive Education Ranking.
- Ongoing online learning in AI and technology
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