About

Dr. Kenny O’Connor

Business Leader. Professor. Researcher. Builder.

Kenny O’Connor works at the intersection of business, technology, supply chain, sales, and human behavior—bringing executive experience, academic research, and hands-on teaching together to help students and organizations build what’s next.

Read My Story

Biography

An Unconventional Path

Dr. Kenny O’Connor is a business professor, researcher, former senior executive, and builder of programs and partnerships at the intersection of business, technology, supply chain, sales, and artificial intelligence.

A Pensacola native, O’Connor began his career in the construction industry while completing his undergraduate degree at the University of West Florida. He helped expand his family’s construction company and later assumed senior executive responsibilities, gaining firsthand experience in growth, operations, sales, leadership, supply chains, and customer relationships.

Rather than leaving that experience behind, he brought it into the classroom—building a career that connects business practice with higher education in a way that is highly applied, current, and deeply relevant.

Students learn business best when they are given opportunities to actually do business.

Kenny O’Connor

Driving Impact Across Disciplines

Operations

Supply Chain

Technology

Leadership

Journey

From the Executive Suite to the Classroom

After earning his BSBA from UWF and MBA from Auburn, O’Connor returned to the University of West Florida in 2009 as an adjunct instructor. For more than a decade, he balanced teaching with senior executive work, living in both worlds at once.

That experience shaped a distinctive philosophy: students learn best when business education is connected to real decisions, real challenges, and real expectations. After earning his Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of South Alabama, he joined UWF full-time and continued building programs that bridge academia and industry.

Today, his work crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries, spanning supply chain logistics, professional selling, marketing, emerging technology, and management education. Rather than treating teaching, research, and industry engagement as separate activities, he actively looks for ways to connect all three.

By the Numbers

20+Years of Business & Leadership Experience

2009Joined the University of West Florida

3Business Degrees

4+Core Disciplines: Sales, Supply Chain, Marketing & AI

Research

Researching What Comes Next

O’Connor’s research explores the forces reshaping modern business, with particular emphasis on artificial intelligence, technology adoption, supply chain resilience, consumer and organizational behavior, autonomous systems, transportation, and the future of business education.

His work has explored issues ranging from AI anxiety and emerging-technology acceptance to global supply-chain vulnerability, Arctic transportation chokepoints, autonomous logistics, and the skills humans will need as artificial intelligence assumes a larger role in organizational decision-making.

A recurring theme throughout his research is the relationship between technology and people: what happens after a new technology becomes technically possible, whether people trust it, whether organizations adopt it, and how behavior changes around it.

Impact

Turning Ideas Into Things That Actually Happen

O’Connor develops learning experiences designed to move beyond lectures and into action. His teaching and program-building focus on giving students opportunities to practice, solve, present, compete, and engage with the professional world before graduation.

Through O’Connor’s Sales Lab, students can practice sales conversations, presentations, objection handling, and other professional skills in an AI-supported environment designed around repeated practice and feedback. His work also includes sales competitions, industry-engaged projects, student organizations, and partnerships that create stronger connections between the university and the business community.

Whether he is developing a new research idea, designing an experiential project, collaborating with industry, building a student initiative, or experimenting with AI-enabled education, O’Connor is most energized by building something useful and moving it forward.

Mission

Where Business, Technology & Education Meet

O’Connor’s career sits at the intersection of executive leadership and academia, research and practice, technology and human behavior, and the classroom and the marketplace.

The goal is bigger than teaching students about the future of business.It is helping them build it.