I help CEOs in financial services, insurance, and other regulated industries turn AI from a board-deck topic into a working capability — without hiring a $400K Chief AI Officer or signing a $1.5M Big Four engagement.
You are the CEO of a $50M–$300M company. Your board has asked for an AI strategy. Your team can’t tell you the difference between a real opportunity and a vendor demo. Hiring a Chief AI Officer would take nine months. The Big Four want $1.5M and a year.
You need senior judgment, this quarter, in a shape that fits your company.
That is the work — sitting beside the executive team for as long as it takes for the roadmap to be real, the vendors to be honest, and the board to hear the AI plan from someone who has shipped systems that handled the kind of data a board worries about. Not a quarterly slide deck. Not a department to staff up. A peer who can be in the room when the decision is made.
Most engagements start with the four-week audit. Roughly a third continue into a fractional retainer. The audit fee credits against the first month of retainer if you continue.
A four-week diagnostic of where AI can move the needle, what to build versus buy versus partner, and what risk and compliance work has to come first. You walk out with a roadmap a board will accept.
Right when the board has asked the question and you need an honest answer in a quarter, not a year.
Apply for an Audit→Ongoing senior counsel for the CEO, CIO, and board. I am in your weekly leadership rhythm, in front of vendors when they show up, and in the room when the board wants to hear it from someone who has shipped.
After the audit, when the roadmap is real and someone has to keep the trajectory honest.
Book an intro call→The audit fee credits against the first month of retainer. If we continue past the audit, the first invoice is $0. Roughly one in three engagements continues; the rest leave with a roadmap and a relationship.
Four specifics, in plain prose. There is no logo wall and there will not be one. The work is the wall.
Designed and built — not directed, not advised on — Citorum, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) platform with single-tenant, multi-tenant, and on-prem deployment topologies, sovereignty controls, and an inference layer that does not call OpenAI with the buyer's data. The patterns I will recommend to you are patterns I have already shipped against.
Hired July 1999 as the first employee and CIO of the cloud-accounting startup that became NetSuite, the company Oracle acquired in 2016 for $9.3 billion. I built the production stack — 500 Linux servers running several hundred Oracle databases — before SaaS was a category most CIOs would say out loud. The advice I will give you about running multi-tenant production comes from having done it from the inside.
Built one of the early commercial cloud platforms — a real one, not branded virtualization. Acquired by Zayo Group in 2017. I have signed the term sheet on the other side of a venture deal, taken the integration meetings, and watched what happens to architecture decisions a year after the founder leaves.
“Why Cloud Computing Will Never Be Free,” May 2010 — peer-reviewed in the flagship journal of the Association for Computing Machinery. The reason this matters: the buyer of a fractional Chief AI Officer should be able to verify, in five minutes, that the advisor can write a complete sentence about a hard topic.
Citorum is the multi-tenant Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) platform I built. It runs on customer infrastructure with explicit data sovereignty guarantees and adjudicates every answer for grounding and faithfulness before it returns. The same architectural patterns apply to whatever you build.
That is more than most consultants will give you for free. If we are a fit, the next step is the four-week Readiness Audit.
I reply within one business day.
Pre-call NDA available on request.
U.S.-based. Travel for on-site within retainer.
If a 20-minute call is not the right starting point, this is. Replies within one business day.