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.

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.

Foto Friday: The Lone Tree

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0600

I stopped at Crater Lake National Park for a few nights on my way up to a longer trip on the Oregon coast. The plan was simple…find a place to get a sunset photo over the lake, the wildfire smoke had other ideas.

The Convergence Problem

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0600

I ran across a study in Science late last year that I haven’t been able to set aside. Researchers analyzed more than 2 million papers and found that scientists using AI tools published significantly more work than those who didn’t. Output jumped 59.8% in social sciences and humanities, 52.9% in biology and life sciences.

Weekly Intel - 2026-03-15

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The theme this week is fragility. Supply chains, financial markets, energy systems, data integrity, cybersecurity. The common thread: the dependencies we’ve built are more interconnected and more brittle than most planning accounts for.

Foto Friday: Celestial Serenity

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0600

Today’s Foto Friday came from a trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in October 2024.

The Exposure Gap

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0600

Anthropic published a research paper last week that tries to answer a question most AI discussions skip entirely: how much of the theoretical AI capability is anyone actually using?

The paper is called “Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence” by Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory. They built a metric called “observed exposure” that combines what AI can theoretically do with what people are actually using it for, weighted by whether the usage is automated or work-related. It’s a more honest measurement than most of what I’ve seen, because it separates “could AI do this task” from “is anyone actually using AI for this task.” I wrote about a version of this disconnect in The AI Value Gap and found that 78% of companies claim AI adoption but only 4% see real value. This research gives that gap a much sharper edge.

Weekly Intel - 2026-03-08

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Two themes running through everything this week: the gap between what AI promises and what it actually delivers, and infrastructure that turns out to be more fragile than anyone assumed.

Foto Friday: Framed Factory Butte

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700

There’s a spot out near Factory Butte where a small hole in a rock formation lines up perfectly with the butte itself. It’s not an arch in any grand sense; it’s barely big enough to shoot through. Most people who visit Factory Butte don’t know it exists, and even if they did, they’d probably walk right past it.

AI Productivity Measurement Just Broke

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0700

I ran across a LinkedIn post last week in which a consultant bragged about helping a client achieve “347% ROI on their AI initiative.” The comments were full of congratulations and requests for the methodology. Nobody asked the obvious question: how exactly did they measure that?

Weekly Intel - 2026-03-01

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700

The boundary between tech company and geopolitical actor basically disappeared this week. Anthropic turns down military contracts and gets banned from government systems. OpenAI picks up those same contracts. A joint US-Israel strike on Iran. I’ve been covering tech for a while now, and the speed at which these companies are being pulled into national security decisions is something new.

Foto Friday: Colors and Shapes

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0700

I drove out to the Moonscape Overlook near Hanksville, Utah, one morning, hoping for a good sunrise, but the sky had other plans with flat light, muted clouds, and not much color happening overhead. The kind of morning where you stand there for a few minutes, look around, and think: well, now what?

The Quiet Failures: How AI Breaks Without Anyone Noticing

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0700

The AI failure everyone loves to talk about is the spectacular kind. You know the ones where the chatbot tells a customer to eat glue or when the recommendation engine suggests winter coats in July. Those make the rounds on LinkedIn and Twitter because they’re funny, visible, and easy to point at.

Weekly Intel - 2026-02-22

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0700

A lot of Solow’s paradox this week: the gap between what technology promises and what it actually delivers. That theme runs through almost everything I’m reading right now.

Foto Friday: Standing in the Rain at Chimney Rock

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0700

In February 2021, my buddy Jeff and I were on our way to Moab, Utah, for some Milky Way photography and stopped near Ridgway, Colorado, for the day. Our plan was to get out for sunset out on Owl Pass without any real ‘subject’ in mind. We finally landed at Chimney Rock as a storm started rolling in.