Eric D. Brown, D.Sc. — Technology Decisions & AI Strategy

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.

The Handoff Problem

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Most days I have more than one coding agent working on the same codebase. Something that used to take me a week of calendar time can show up as a finished branch by the end of an afternoon.

Weekly Intel - 2026-10-04

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0600

This week brought three deals that pull AI deeper into chips and infrastructure, a federal probe into the risks of AI products, new models from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, and a memory shortage that Micron now expects to last through 2028.

AI Didn't Invent Your Data Problem

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I’ve spent some time this month reading through the AI data readiness research that came out this year, and I saw the same number twice. Accenture’s May report says only 7% of companies have the data capabilities to scale advanced AI. A March study from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services and Cloudera says only 7% of respondents describe their organization’s data as completely ready for AI. Same number, two different studies, and they aren’t measuring the same thing.

Weekly Intel - 2026-09-27

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

OpenAI and Anthropic both shipped models that bring frontier-level performance down in price. At the same time, courts and juries spent the week ruling on whether the companies behind these systems can be trusted, from the Pentagon’s Anthropic ban to Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica verdict to unsealed filings in the Authors Guild case against OpenAI.

One of My First Milky Way Attempts

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0600

Grand Canyon. One of my first attempts at capturing the Milky Way.

I started right at sunset, which is too early for the Milky Way, and you can see the dying twilight on the right of the frame with the orange sitting on the horizon on the right while the stars are coming out on the left. There were clouds around too, so most of the sky is covered and you can barely see the stars in the sky.

Weekly Intel - 2026-09-20

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Two threads this week. One is who pays for AI’s inputs: Korea now prices a bad data breach at 10 percent of revenue, and unredacted court filings have a Microsoft executive calling model training the largest theft of labor in human history. The other is what happens when the systems act on their own, from models reaching live systems during security testing to a US military operation that got as far as aircraft in the air on intelligence a chatbot made up.

What You Lose in the Tunnel

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I drive west out of Denver on I-70 a few times a year. About sixty miles in, the road runs into the Eisenhower Tunnel, a 1.7 mile long concrete tunnel at 11,158 feet, the highest point on the Interstate system. Inside it’s dark and loud and smells like exhaust. Then you’re out the far side, dropping toward Silverthorne.

Weekly Intel - 2026-09-13

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The theme this week is where AI actually runs, and who gets to say no. Models are moving onto local devices and cheaper endpoints, while the guardrails around them, environmental review, corporate governance, frontier pacing, get tested or stripped away.

Sunrise over Reflection Canyon

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0600

This is sunrise from the rim after an overnight. About eight miles in on unmarked slickrock off Hole-in-the-Rock Road, camp, shoot, eight miles out. Roughly sixteen miles round trip in September 2023. Fewer people than you see at Arches, mostly because getting here costs that much work. I already wrote the longer trip piece here . This Friday is just the morning.

Weekly Intel - 2026-09-06

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Nvidia’s Hugging Face deal went from reported to signed, both frontier labs shipped a next-generation model within a day of each other, and an identity verification company in New Orleans had 153 million driver’s license scans read by intruders for more than a year.

Foto Friday: The Canyon in Winter

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0600

This is a sunrise panorama from the south rim of the Grand Canyon, made on my first trip out there. February 27, 2019, which I only know because I went and looked at the file. Ask me without the file in front of me and I’d have said 2018 or 2019 and left it there.

What Would Make This Fail?

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Last week I ran a document through a linter I wrote myself. When it has no complaints, it prints one word: CLEAN. That’s what it printed. Then I gave the same document to a second reviewer, a model that reads the document rather than scanning it for patterns. It found an arithmetic error a few thousand dollars off.

Weekly Intel - 2026-08-30

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Two of the places developers get open-source AI infrastructure changed hands this week, and OpenAI published a report on its own models breaking out of a sandbox and reaching the internet.

Sunset Through Turret Arch

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0600

This is Turret Arch in the Windows section of Arches, with the sun sitting right in the opening as it went down.

Shooting straight into the sun is usually a bad idea and I do it anyway more than I should. You expose for the sky, the rock goes to black, or you expose for the rock and the sky blows out completely. This one is four frames blended together as an “HDR” image converted to black and white.

The Novelty Problem: Why AI Ideas Don't Survive First Contact

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Back in January of last year I wrote a post called LLMs and Creativity where I said, more or less, that these things aren’t creative. When I’m stuck on a product I’ll ask an LLM for ten ways to position it, or ten features that would make somebody pay for it, and it hands me ten in about a second. What comes back is probability, not invention. Things that are likely to go together. That’s still roughly where I land, with one large caveat I did not have in January.

Weekly Intel - 2026-08-23

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The theme this week is control, and who ends up holding it. Payments consolidating under Stripe, memory research pulling back inside one company’s walls, Apple rewriting its own terms under a regulator’s eye, and a courtroom in Oakland deciding how much of a platform’s design is the company’s to choose.

A Storm Over the Colorado River

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0600

I was driving through southern Utah when I saw this scene. I didn’t have a plan to stop or any idea of what i was going to capture but just saw a sky that kept getting more interesting the farther I went.

The Subsidy Problem

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0600

A couple of weeks ago I sat down and made sure I could still get my work done if Claude vanished tomorrow. Not because I think it will. I’d been reading about the money underneath all of this, and almost nobody is paying what this stuff actually costs.

The Totem Pole Under the Milky Way

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0600

You can’t just drive to this one. The Totem Pole and the spires around it sit deep in the Monument Valley backcountry, on Navajo land you don’t get to wander into on your own. To stand here at night you go in with a Navajo guide who knows the way and has every right to say no. I went on a photographers’ trip led by one, out past the parts of the valley the tour vans reach, to a place I’d only ever seen in other people’s photographs.

The Number on the Slide

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0600

I spent some time last week looking into AI customer-support agents, the tools that handle tickets so your team doesn’t have to. I wasn’t shopping or trying to buy anything, I just wanted to see what a buyer actually finds when they try to compare these products on their merits. What I found was one product with at least three different accuracy stories, each published, each technically true, but all useless when it comes to making a choice.