Getting Started

Is a fractional Chief AI Officer the right move for your company?

A short read to help you decide whether AdviceForge is a fit, and what working together would look like if it is.

Mark Bennett portrait
If this sounds like your company

You are not getting real value from AI yet.

Companies in this gap usually have at least two of these going on.

01

Tools deployed, work unchanged

Your team has five or six AI tools. Adoption targets are met. Usage gets measured. The actual work looks the same as a year ago.

02

A few power users, long tail behind

Two or three people do impressive AI work. Everyone else copies the surface and misses the judgment that makes it work.

03

Pilots that don't graduate

Promising experiments stall before they become how the company actually operates.

04

Leadership team not aligned

Different leaders have different answers for what AI should be doing here. No shared picture of good.

What it is and who it's for

A part-time fully embedded leader, for the right kind of company.

I work as a fractional executive, not as a consultant. When I take a retainer engagement, I sit in your leadership team meetings, participate in real decisions and am accountable for outcomes alongside the existing leadership team. I am not a vendor or an external advisor. I am a part-time Chief AI Officer.

"A fractional is a part-time fully embedded leader. The only difference between a fractional and their full-time counterpart is that they are part-time."

Who it's for

The model works best for small-to-mid-market companies that need senior AI leadership but cannot yet justify a full-time hire at $300K+ per year fully loaded. The buyer test is company shape and operational stage, not revenue.

  • Privately-held
  • Family-owned
  • Founder-led
  • Early-stage with capital
  • Tech-component businesses
  • CEO or COO as decision-maker
Background

Where this perspective comes from.

The credibility behind the practice. Three decades across aerospace, financial markets and industrial-tech leadership, plus active AI practitioner work today.

9 yrs

As CEO of Sentry Enterprises, a biometric identity and Web3 payments company, scaling through 10x valuation growth.

13 yrs

Running global technology operations at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange across Europe and Asia. 250-person captive center.

10 yrs

US Air Force and defense industry as a software and systems engineer on satellite imagery platforms and military intelligence software.

Daily

Hands-on with AI tooling since the original GPT betas. Hosts Frontier Tech, a weekly live build series.

More About Mark
Honest check

Is this the right fit?

01

Probably worth a scoping call.

  • You have tried AI, recognize the gap and want someone driving the work of closing it.
  • Your leadership team or owner-operator is willing to engage with workflow redesign.
  • Decision-maker authority concentrates at CEO, COO, owner or board chair.
  • AI is becoming central to how the business operates, or needs to.
02

Probably not the right fit.

  • Companies large enough to justify a full-time Chief AI Officer at $300K+ per year fully loaded.
  • Buyers who want to purchase more tools and call that an AI strategy.
  • Companies whose leadership team will not engage with the work of changing how work gets done.

On the left side?

Book a Scoping Call
How I work

Three shapes of engagement.

The right shape depends on where your company is starting from.

01

Embedded retainer

The primary engagement. A few hours per week in your leadership team. Weekly working session, monthly written summary memo, quarterly strategic roadmap and always-on Slack or email between scheduled contact.

02

30-day diagnostic

The entry point for buyers who want to test the relationship before committing to a retainer. A focused engagement that maps the highest-value AI workflows in your company and delivers a feasibility-validated roadmap.

03

Scoped build work

When a retainer surfaces build work that needs dedicated attention, I take that on through a separate statement of work. Fixed-fee or value-priced based on scope.

How to start.

A 30-minute scoping call is the right next step.

What to expect on the call

  • We talk through your situation and what AI has done or has not done so far
  • We map where the highest-value workflows might be
  • We figure out whether and which engagement shape fits