Alicia M. Kidd, MPA, is an AI strategist and the founder of CoCo Noir Labs, an Oakland-based consulting firm focused on AI strategy, governance, and security. Over nearly 20 years, she has led enterprise system implementations and organization-wide training programs across healthcare, biopharmaceutical, higher-education, and public-sector organizations — environments where data integrity, compliance, and user adoption were non-negotiable. She specializes in the change-management side of technical programs: turning policies and tools into habits that hold.

Alongside that work, Alicia spent a decade as an entrepreneur in the wine industry. In 2016 she founded The Wine Noire, a wine import, distribution, and consulting company, and parlayed it into CoCo Noir Wine Shop & Bar — an Oakland tasting room, event space, and bistro championing underrepresented, women-led, minority-led, and small producers. That decade of running a tasting room, an import book, and a consulting practice gives her a ground-level view of how the beverage business actually operates.

Through CoCo Noir Labs, she now advises organizations across hospitality, the public sector, and education on AI strategy, governance, change management, and project implementation — helping them decide where AI belongs, build the guardrails that keep it accountable, and carry it through to adoption rather than stopping at the pilot. That practice also produced Uncorked AI, an AI-powered platform that helps tasting rooms and wineries grow direct-to-consumer foot traffic and revenue. Her focus throughout is making AI practical, governed, and accessible — especially for the small and independent organizations most often left behind by it.

She received her AI Consultant Certification through AI InnoVision (CPD-accredited), and holds certificates of completion from Anthropic in Introduction to Model Context Protocol, Introduction to Agent Skills, Claude Code in Action, and Building with the Claude API. Alicia holds an M.P.A. with an option in Public Management and a B.S. in Business Administration with an option in Finance, both from California State University, East Bay.