Eric D. Brown, D.Sc. — Fractional CTO & AI Strategy Consultant

When to Hire a Fractional CTO (And When You Don't Need One)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Your product is growing faster than your team can handle. Deployments are breaking things. Nobody has a clear picture of the full architecture. Your engineers are making decisions they’re not fully equipped to make, and some of those decisions are starting to cost you.

How to Build an AI Roadmap When You're Not a Fortune 500

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Most AI roadmap advice is written for companies with $50M innovation budgets, dedicated ML teams, and data infrastructure they’ve been building for a decade. If you’re running a mid-market company with five engineers, real product deadlines, and a CEO who just got back from a conference with strong opinions about AI, that advice doesn’t help you.

The Fractional CTO's First 30 Days: What Actually Happens

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Every company I walk into thinks their biggest technical problem is the one they called me about. It almost never is.

They say “our deploys are unstable” and the real problem is no monitoring, so they don’t know what’s actually breaking. They say “we need to migrate to the cloud” and the real problem is they’re paying $40K/month for infrastructure they’re using 15% of. They say “our team is too slow” and the real problem is three engineers are blocked on a single architect who reviews every pull request.

How to Evaluate AI Vendors Without Getting Bullshitted

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

You’ve been in the market for an AI solution for about three weeks. You’ve sat through nine demos, received fourteen pitch decks, and you still can’t tell which vendors are real and which ones are running a glorified if-then statement behind a nice dashboard.

Your AI Pilot Didn't Scale. Here's Why.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

88% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function. Nearly two-thirds of them can’t get past the pilot stage.

The pilot worked. The demo was impressive. The data science team hit their accuracy targets. Everyone was excited. Then nothing happened.

Weekly Intel - 2026-05-10

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The theme this week is ambition outrunning its container: AI models diagnosing patients better than doctors, meme-stock companies making $55B acquisition bids, coding agents scaling across entire fields. Everyone’s acting like the constraints that used to govern their domain no longer apply, and in some cases they might be right.

The Local AI Option

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I keep running across the same kind of post on social media where someone has posted about being on a flight at 35,000 feet, screen open to a coding session, running a local LLM on their laptop with no internet. And another person posts a screenshot demoing Gemma 4 running on a a phone.

Weekly Intel - 2026-05-03

Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The theme this week is alignment, or rather, the speed at which old allegiances are being abandoned for new ones. OPEC, corporate AI budgets, platform exclusivity, Pentagon ethics guardrails, and foreign ownership limits.

Foto Friday – Grand Canyon Sunset

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 -0600

This was the night before my first photography workshop at the Grand Canyon. The conference hadn’t started yet, so I went out solo to catch the sunset and found a spot along the north rim with a clear view west, set up, and waited.

Why AI Sales Agents Convert 3x Worse Than Websites

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash

I’ve been reading about Walmart’s ChatGPT checkout experiment and the results are something worth paying attention to. Starting last November, Walmart offered around 200,000 products through OpenAI’s Instant Checkout, letting users complete purchases inside ChatGPT without ever visiting Walmart’s site. In-chat purchases converted at one-third the rate of click-out transactions. The company’s EVP of product called the experience “unsatisfying” and they are winding it down.

Weekly Intel - 2026-04-26

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The theme this week is succession, in every sense. Apple is handing off leadership, Google is betting its chip roadmap on agents that don’t fully exist yet, and AI-generated music is quietly displacing human artists on streaming platforms. The question running through all of it: when the old guard steps aside, is what’s replacing it actually ready?

Foto Friday – Arches National Park

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

At the end of the day, traffic through Arches picks up as people head back out after watching the sunset. The light is almost gone and cars are still moving through the canyon. I set up along the road and let them drive past.

The 43-Point Gap

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I’ve been following the METR research on AI-assisted development for a while now, and one number keeps coming back to me.

Before the trial, experienced developers expected AI tools to make them 24% faster. After completing the work, and being measurably slowed down in the process, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%. A controlled trial found they were actually 19% slower.

Weekly Intel - 2026-04-19

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The theme this week is trust: who has it, who’s abusing it, and how fast it evaporates. Amazon exploiting seller pricing, Google handing data to ICE, a supply-chain attack hiding in WordPress plugins you already installed. Even the AI story is a trust story: we trusted abundance would last forever, and now scarcity is changing the rules.

Foto Friday – Corona Arch

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Most people driving through Moab head straight for Arches or Canyonlands. Corona Arch is in neither. It sits just outside both parks, off a small pullout on the side of the road, without much fanfare.

The Formation Problem

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Photo by NEXT Academy on Unsplash

A previous post explored the gap between what domain experts know and what AI systems can use. The argument was about getting tacit knowledge into AI.

This one is about what happens to the humans who develop that tacit knowledge in the first place.

Weekly Intel - 2026-04-12

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The thread this week is control: who owns the software you depend on, who’s liable when it breaks, and who gets to fix the machines they already paid for.

Cybersecurity

Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era Anthropic used its Claude Mythos Preview model to find thousands of previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser, most of them autonomously, without human guidance. One flaw had lived undetected in OpenBSD, among the most security-hardened systems in the world, for 27 years. The offensive risk is what deserves attention: if an AI model can find thousands of critical vulnerabilities on its own, the window between discovery and exploitation just collapsed, and any organization running unpatched software is carrying risk they haven’t fully priced in.

Foto Friday – Boot Arch Under the Milky Way

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Alabama Hills sits at the base of the Eastern Sierra, just outside Lone Pine, California. It’s one of those locations where you can point a camera almost anywhere and get something worth looking at: weathered granite boulders, the Owens Valley floor, and Mount Whitney rising behind everything. But Boot Arch is one of the draws for night photographers. The arch frames a clean slice of sky, and if the timing lines up, you can put the Milky Way straight through it.

The Knowledge Problem

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

I keep coming back to a RAND Corporation finding from last year: roughly 80% of AI projects fail to deliver their intended outcomes. That’s twice the failure rate of conventional IT projects. MIT’s 2025 research on generative AI is grimmer — 95% of GenAI pilots never make it past the pilot stage.

Weekly Intel - 2026-04-04

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Two things dominate this week: the AI field is fragmenting faster than most executives realize, and the legal and regulatory walls are closing in on big tech from multiple directions at once. Neither trend is new, but both accelerated this week in ways worth paying attention to.

Foto Friday – The Moving Rocks

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The Racetrack Playa is about two hours into Death Valley, past Ubehebe Crater, down a long rough dirt road with no services. I’d never been out there before but was adamant that I’d visit the playa while in the park.

The Developer Mentoring Crisis

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0600

Photo by Abu Saeid on Unsplash

A post on r/ExperiencedDevs caught my attention last week. The question was:

“Whatever happened to just asking questions at work?”

Weekly Intel - 2026-03-29

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The through-line this week is accountability. Courts are telling tech companies that “we built a platform, not a product” doesn’t hold up anymore. Regulators are fighting over where digital privacy lines get drawn. And the supply chain security problem in open source just got another real-world example. The era of building fast and sorting out responsibility later is running into hard limits.

Foto Friday: Majestic Sunset over Factory Butte

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 07:00:00 -0600

This is my third time featuring Factory Butte on Foto Friday, which probably tells you something.

Two Speeds

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0600

Photo by pine watt on Unsplash

I’ve been listening to a lot of conversations about AI adoption lately, and the same problem keeps appearing. Every company is trying to do two things at once: keep the current business running and figure out what AI actually changes. Most of them are trying to do both with the same teams using the same planning cycles and the same approval processes.