You can get AI into engineering. Nobody’s given you the weeks for sales and ops.
That’s the half I do. Inside the business with the teams that don’t write code, then I hand you the tools to run.
Sound familiar?
- 01There’s an AI channel in Slack. It’s dormant unless you’re the one posting in it.
- 02You’re too busy managing sub-agents to roll this out company-wide.
- 03Every AI question in the building comes to you, on top of the job.
- 04Your answers get checked against ChatGPT, and the discussion reopens.
- 05Someone senior said “AI-first by the end of the quarter”. Nobody knew what it meant.
- 06The licences renew next month and finance wants to know who’s using them.
None of this is a failing on your part. It’s what happens when the role that handles it doesn’t exist, so it lands on whoever is technical.
Enterprises hired for this half.
When AI arrived, the big firms created jobs for the part that isn’t engineering. Private equity now hires for it across the companies it owns.
You know what you can do. You’re just not sure how to get there. At 0 to 200 people, none of these roles exist. The engineering rollout is the almost easy half, and it’s done. The other half needs weeks with each team, product sense, and someone who understands the business as well as the tool. That’s the job I do, and then I allow it to continue without me.
I’ve been you.
Product and tech lead at Wildgoose for four years. CTO at Hanover through a change of ownership. Getting AI into the engineers was the easier half: they wanted it, understood it, and could tell when it was wrong.
I never had the weeks to sit with sales, ops or marketing and rebuild their work with them. Nobody in that seat does, so it became a Slack channel and a lunch-and-learn, and quietly nothing changed. That’s the half I now do for other people’s companies, the way I’ve always worked: using every model the week it shipped since 2023, and the first thing I gave Claude was my own notes. The second was structuring a client’s knowledge base. And I’ve been client-facing, building products for people, for fifteen years. I know how to get to what someone actually wants.
With you, not around you.
The bit that matters if you’re the one introducing me.
You stay the owner.
Anything technical goes through you. I don’t set up a second stack behind your back, and I don’t pick tools you’ll have to live with without asking.
I take sales, ops and marketing.
Small group sessions plus 1:1 time on each person’s own work. We find the jobs eating their week and rebuild them on real work, with the person who does them.
You get a short note each week.
What changed, what’s being built, what I need from you. Occasionally a service account or a sign-off. Never a steering committee.
What I build is yours.
Sometimes an automation. Sometimes nothing exists and I build it. Either way it’s handed to you, documented, when I finish. No maintenance, no retainer by stealth. What you inherit: the repo, the runbook, the eval suite, and the accounts in your name. What it takes to keep running is written down next to it.
One way to ship, not forty web apps.
Your team will go off and build their own thing. The fix isn’t stopping them. It’s a harness: one set of accounts, one set of guardrails, one list of what exists. Anyone can ship something and it’s secure and standard by default. No shadow apps, no duplicate seats.
Data stays where you’d put it.
Accounts your business owns, ringfenced from everything else. Every conversation logged, nothing trained on your data, and nothing goes anywhere you haven’t signed off. Written down before we start, in your words rather than a vendor’s.
“As a line-manager Steve was supportive and caring at all times. He actively fostered an environment that encouraged professional growth.”Steve Batcup, senior engineer, reported to Steve at Wildgoose
“He was always available for questions and code reviews, providing constructive feedback without hesitation.”Roberto D’Amico, engineer, Wildgoose
How I’d actually do it.
For the technical reader. Everyone else can skip this.
MCP servers over your systems.
Your CRM, your documents and your job sheets exposed to the models through MCP, read-only until you say otherwise, so the answers come from your data and not the model’s memory.
Sub-agents and skills, not one giant prompt.
Each recurring job gets its own agent with a written skill: the quote, the handover, the Monday report. Inspectable, versioned, and yours to change after I’ve gone.
The glue between them.
Scheduled runs that assemble the report before anyone’s in. Slack bots that carry a multi-step task in the background and come back when it’s done.
Evals before it touches a live process.
A few dozen real cases from last year’s work, run before and after every change. If it can’t pass on your history, it doesn’t go near your customers.
Off-the-shelf first, a build second.
Claude Cowork and the tools you already pay for cover more than people expect. When they don’t, the build lands in your repo, documented, with the eval suite next to it.
Not a follower.
I build products in these tools, open-source what works, and say what I’ve found out loud. That’s how I know which bits are worth your team’s time and which are demo-ware.
Products I’ve shipped in it
Live, with real users, built the same way I’d build yours.
Open source that works
If it helped me, it’s published.
Said out loud
Early, in public, and dated.
Three ways to start.
Don’t just improve processes. Enhance what’s possible. Fixed scope, fixed price, agreed on the call.
A day
I sit with two or three people and watch how the work actually gets done. You get a list of what’s worth building and what it would cost, and so does your MD. Some people stop here, which is fine.
Comes off the price if you go on to the three months.
[BOOK A CALL]Three to six months
In the business every week, on the sales and ops side. We find the jobs eating the week and I build the tools that do them. Your team learns to use them because they watched them get made. More than one team asking? We pick the first on the call.
You own and run what I build. No maintenance, no retainer by stealth.
Ongoing
A weekly call, and me on Slack in between. For building the next thing, or just for direct contact with a terminally online, AI-pilled human.
What to send your MD.
You’re the one who’ll be asked “who is this?”. Here’s the answer, in one paragraph, in your voice.
Ex-CTO who sits with sales and ops, finds the work eating their week and builds the thing that does it, then hands it to us to run. There’s a fixed-price day first. I’d like to run that and bring you the list and the cost. yume.co