Ellen Chapin

Meet Ellen

Ellen Chapin is a Partner at McChrystal Group, leading the AI advisory practice to help organizations close the gap between what AI can do and what teams actually use, grounded in the Team of Teams framework and akin to the shift in the information age forced on JSOC: the environment moved faster than the organization, and the organization had to change. She believes leadership is kaleidoscopic - it looks different depending on where someone's standing, and she's been lucky to stand in a lot of places: government agencies, frontier AI labs, research institutions, and more. What holds across all of these places is that the leaders worth following are already asking what's next, and the teams worth being on are built with an operating rhythm that allows the answer to actually reach them.  

Before joining McChrystal Group, Ellen published on terrorist networks through West Point's Combating Terrorism Center. Her PhD at Stanford extended that work as she focused on how extremist language moves into mainstream political discourse, which pulled her toward language models and what they could do for defense and intelligence work. At Rhombus Power as Senior Director of Product, Ellen led product strategy for intelligence platforms deployed with US commands and allied governments. And before all of that, she spent six years as General McChrystal's Speechwriter at McChrystal Group.