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.

Weekly Intel - 2026-07-12

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

The theme this week is control: who owns the technology, who gets to fix it, who gets to build on it. Apple’s trade-secrets suit against OpenAI, the right-to-repair win against John Deere, and the push to make more chips on U.S. soil all come back to who holds the keys.

The Rainbow

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

This one is from 2019, one of my first trips to the Grand Canyon. I was there a few days ahead of a workshop, which meant I had time to run around and explore with no agenda beyond seeing what the canyon wanted to do.

The Verification Problem

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0600

A few weeks ago, I had AI rebuild a chunk of one of my products. Two coding agents running at once with full test coverage. Every test passed. Then I sat down and went through it by hand anyway, and found that a new customer without a subscription couldn’t actually sign up. The one thing that makes the business money was broken, and nothing in the automated suite said a word about it.

Weekly Intel - 2026-07-05

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0600

This week brings a new mid-tier Claude model, a proposal to hand the US government an equity stake in OpenAI, and lifted export controls on two Anthropic models. It also brings price-fixing cases against egg and memory-chip producers, Spain’s move to push Palantir out of its state companies, Virginia’s new limit on geolocation-data sales, a 50-year low in labor force participation, and the first synthetic cell to grow and divide on its own.

Moon Over Park Avenue

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

We were at Arches National Park at ‘Park Avenue’, the first real pullout you hit after the entrance to Arches, shooting sunset down into the canyon. That’s the view everyone comes for, the tall walls of Courthouse Towers catching the last warm light, so that’s where all the tripods were pointed, mine included.

Inevitability

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

My first reaction to a lot of AI predictions about the workforce is pretty similar to my reaction to most technology timeline claims: skepticism. Self-driving cars were a couple of years out for about a decade. Quantum computing has been five years away since roughly the 1980s. At some point the pattern becomes its own data point, and I’ve learned to pay as much attention to who’s making the prediction as to the prediction itself.

Weekly Intel - 2026-06-28

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The theme this week is a split screen: new models, new chips, and new architectures arriving in quick succession, while the cost of actually using any of it becomes the real constraint. The frontier keeps moving, and access to it keeps getting more expensive and more gated.

We're All Wrong in the Same Places

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash

A paper published earlier this year compared more than 350 AI models and looked at the questions they get wrong. When models fail, they tend to fail together, agreeing on the same wrong answer about 60% of the time. Random chance would land at 33%. The best models were worst at this, clustering on incorrect answers more reliably than weaker models did.

Weekly Intel 2026-06-21

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The theme this week is institutional trust breaking down in slow motion. Consumers recoiling from AI branding, scientists losing faith in federal funding, enterprises fleeing vendors who changed the deal: these are all stories about organizations and publics deciding that the people in charge of powerful systems aren’t acting in good faith.

Foto Friday: Pika Gathering Food for Winter

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I took this up in Rocky Mountain National Park, a few years back. The pika had a mouthful of something green and wasn’t stopping to acknowledge me or anything else.

Your Second Opinion Agrees With You

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Photo by Antenna on Unsplash

When I ask people how they pressure-tested a recent decision, a growing number say they asked AI, which is fine, as far as it goes. AI is useful for a lot of things. But I’ve noticed that AI-assisted second opinions have a pattern: in my experience, they almost always conclude you’re on the right track.

Weekly Intel - 2026-06-14

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

A lot of what I read this week was about accountability: who’s responsible when AI gets it wrong, who owns data collected for one purpose and used for another, and what happens when a government can pull your AI provider offline in hours.

The Judgment Problem

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I’ve been reading Anthropic’s piece on recursive self-improvement, When AI Builds Itself . The argument is that AI is getting good enough at writing AI that the systems may soon design and train their own successors with little human direction. Anthropic puts a rough timeline on it of years, not decades, lays out three scenarios for how it could play out, and argues for some kind of coordinated slowdown before the last of those scenarios arrives.

Weekly Intel - 2026-06-07

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

A pattern ran through most of what I read this week: enormous piles of money are chasing AI and energy infrastructure, and the institutions that decide who’s officially arrived keep moving the line.

Foto Friday: Fog in the Canyon

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

This is the Grand Canyon in 2019, one of my first trips out there. I was completely taken with the place and spent most of my time looking for spots that don’t show up in everyone else’s photos, angles and views I hadn’t already seen a hundred times before I got there.

The Confidence Problem

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I use AI tools constantly: writing, research, code, analysis. They’re part of how I work now and have been for a while. The more I’ve used them, the more I’ve noticed something about how they communicate that I didn’t pay enough attention to early on: they sound the same whether they’re right or wrong.

Weekly Intel - 2026-05-31

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 -0600

A lot happened this week in AI and tech. Capital keeps concentrating into a smaller number of bets, enforcement is getting real in Europe, and a couple of industry leaders are publicly admitting they got the AI jobs story wrong.

Foto Friday: Grand Canyon Sunrise

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 -0600

This was my first photography trip to the Grand Canyon and my very first photography workshop. I didn’t really know what I was doing and I knew I wanted to get better at this, and the workshop seemed like a way to do that.

The Craft Problem

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I’ve been reading Brad Stulberg’s “The Way of Excellence ” over the past few weeks, and one idea keeps nagging at me: genuine excellence in a craft requires something that most AI productivity advice is actively working to eliminate.

Weekly Intel - 2026-05-24

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I read a lot this week and the same pattern kept showing up. The big AI players are settling things into place: court cases resolving, acquisitions stacking up, layoffs being repackaged as AI investment. The expansive, anything-goes phase of the AI race looks like it’s ending. The consolidation phase has started.