Choosing an AI consulting firm in 2026 is harder than choosing almost any other kind of professional partner, because the market is young, crowded, and inconsistent. Thousands of firms now advertise AI transformation expertise, and a large share of them pivoted into it recently, from general IT, ERP implementation, or process consulting, as late as…
A Head of AI decides what AI the company builds and buys, kills the parts that do not work, and owns how AI is used across the business. What they do not do, mostly, is build the AI themselves. That single distinction clears up most of the confusion about the role, because the title makes…
A Chief AI Officer, or Head of AI, is the senior executive responsible for how a company uses AI across the whole business: the strategy, the portfolio of AI initiatives, the governance, the vendor decisions, and whether any of it actually produces a return. The role exists because AI became consequential enough to need a…
A fractional CMO and a fractional Head of AI are both senior executives you hire part-time on a retainer, and they answer two different questions. A fractional CMO owns your marketing: the strategy, the budget, the channels, the number the marketing function is accountable for. A fractional Head of AI owns how your company uses…
A fractional executive is a senior leader, a CFO, a CMO, a COO, a Head of AI, who works with your company part-time on a retainer instead of full-time on a salary. They do the executive job, setting strategy, owning a function, making the decisions that carry real risk, but scaled to what a growing…
A fractional CFO is a chief financial officer who works with your company part-time, on a retainer, instead of full-time on a salary. They do the same job a full-time CFO would, financial strategy, forecasting, cash management, fundraising, board reporting, but scaled to what a growing company actually needs, which is usually senior judgment on…
Most advice on how to get clients answers the wrong question. It hands you a list of channels, cold outreach, referrals, content, ads, networking, as if the problem were not knowing the options. For a founder who is already good at their craft, the options are not the constraint. The constraint is time and attention:…
Customer acquisition cost, or CAC, is the total amount a company spends to win one new customer. The formula is simple: take everything you spent on sales and marketing in a period, including salaries, ad spend, software, content, and commissions, and divide it by the number of new customers you won in that period. Spend…
B2B sales and demand generation are three jobs that most companies run as one blurry activity called “marketing.” Demand generation creates demand: it makes the right buyers aware of a problem and of you, and builds enough trust that you are the name they think of when the problem gets urgent. Lead generation captures that…
A sales pipeline that doesn’t depend on you is one whose input, conversion, and follow-through are systematized well enough that it produces qualified meetings whether or not the founder spent the week selling. The stages are the same as any pipeline: prospect, qualify, meet, propose, close. What is different is that none of them runs…