We help small teams
build and innovate
with AI.
Stealthy Good helps small teams get new AI initiatives off the ground — from the call about what to build, to the prototype that proves it, to the discipline of watching a real user use the thing. Operating as a fractional CAIO. No pods of juniors. No slide decks that end with a second slide deck.
- What it is
- 0→1 AI Partner (operating as a fractional CAIO)
- Who it's for
- Small teams taking on big AI initiatives
- Pricing
- $5k–$15k/mo — fixed retainer or capped days
- Engagement
- ~6 months, then quarterly
What this actually looks like.
Some firms call this a fractional Chief AI Officer retainer. A full-time CAIO costs $400k, plus equity, plus a recruiter, plus twelve months to find one. Most small teams don't need one. They need a few hours of ours.
Strategy
- 01
Sit in on the executive meetings where AI gets decided
Strategy, prioritization, and vendor pushback — in the room, not in a monthly report.
- 02
Kill the projects that won’t work
Most proposed AI initiatives fail a straight-faced ROI read. Better to find out now than in Q4.
- 03
Run the initiative portfolio
Three to seven real bets at once, scored on effort, risk, and whether they change a P&L line.
- 04
Write the briefs your team builds against
What to build, why it matters, what “done” looks like, and what we will not do this quarter.
- 05
Read the vendor contracts before you sign them
Including the ones the sales team swears are “just a pilot.” Especially those.
Build
- 06
Build when it makes sense
We’ll prototype, ship, and hand off. We’re not an implementation shop, but we’re not above the work — and when AI can do the building itself, we’re the ones making sure it’s building the right thing.
Three things. One person.
Most people in this market sit in one circle. A few sit in two. Almost nobody sits in all three.
The rare overlap — strategist, builder, end-user obsessive — in one person.
Mid-market AI, right now.
- Your board wants an AI strategy.
- Your inbox has forty vendors offering one.
- Three of your VPs have already bought something on a company card.
The good news is that real value is available. The bad news is it’s hiding inside a much larger pile of demo-ware, overfit benchmarks, and slide decks with the word “agentic” on them.
Mid-market companies don’t have the luxury a Fortune 50 has, which is to fund eight parallel experiments and see what sticks. You get maybe two or three honest swings a year. Missing on all of them is expensive; picking the wrong ones is worse.
Someone senior has to make the calls. That’s what we do.
Three problems, recently solved.
- № 004.1 Consumer packaged goods · Engagement · In production
Top Cup → The CX agent that grew without the headcount
The problem. Top Cup’s direct-to-consumer business took off. Inbound customer messages — order status, sizing, custom requests, returns — went from a manageable trickle to hundreds a week. Adding a support team would have eaten the margin the new channel just created.
What we did. Built Luna, a CX agent that handles email and voice. The interesting work wasn’t the agent — that part is close to commodity now — it was the system underneath: the policies, the edge cases, the escalation logic, and the feedback loop that made Luna feel like a teammate instead of a bot. Top Cup added the channel without adding the headcount.
- № 004.2 B2B Consumables · Engagement · Sales intelligence
Mid-market B2B → More sales, same sales team
The problem. A mid-market B2B consumables company wanted to grow sales. The traditional answer — hire more reps at $120k loaded — was expensive and slow, and the reps they had were drowning in the wrong accounts.
What we did. Replaced “more reps” with better intelligence. Predictive churn signals flagged accounts about to lapse before the rep noticed. Proactive outreach nudged customers toward the next reorder window. Just-in-time sales intelligence put the right B2B prospects in front of the reps when the signal was hot, not a quarter late. The sales team didn’t get bigger. It got a better map.
- № 004.3 Venture-backed health tech · Engagement · 12 months → 2 weeks
Health tech → From 12-month product cycles to 2 weeks
The problem. A venture-backed health tech company was a year into a product that wasn’t finding fit. Before writing another line of feature code, they needed to know which version of the business actually worked — different pricing, different customer segments, different service models.
What we did. Two AI systems working in parallel. The first modeled the business — every permutation of pricing, cost, channel, and customer segment, ranked by unit economics. The second stood up real, working prototypes of the top-ranked versions, fast enough to put them in front of actual users. Prototype-to-test dropped from twelve months to two weeks. The team stopped guessing which version of the company to build.
Aaron.
Two decades as the person a CEO calls when a new initiative needs to get off the ground. Most of that was pre-AI — ops, product, go-to-market. The tools changed. The job didn’t.
Now the work is helping small teams figure out which AI bets are worth making, then building the first version of the one that is.
- 01Strategist
- 02Builder
- 03End-user obsessive
Stealthy Good is based in Boone, NC, and takes a small number of retainers at a time.
Notes on AI, mid-market, and the vendor-industrial complex.
Published occasionally. Written for operators, not marketers.
- 10 min
Mythos just moved the goalposts on software security.
What to do if you’re not a Fortune 500 bank — and why specialized software vendors are the ones most exposed.
- 9 min
AI at work isn’t a technology problem.
Why most rollouts are stalling — and the three things mid-market leaders should actually be focused on.
- 7 min
Most of this won’t work.
On the discipline of killing AI initiatives before they eat your quarter.
Questions you were going to ask on the call anyway.
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What does this cost?
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Two shapes. Pick the one that fits how you work:
Fixed-fee retainer. One number per month. I figure out how to add the most value against the priorities we set together. Best when the work is fluid and you trust me to run at it.
Capped-days retainer. 3 to 6 days a month, your pick. Best when your finance team wants a line they can audit, or when your scope is well-defined.
Both $5k–$15k/mo depending on scope. Both renewable quarterly after the first six months. Full pricing on the intro call — no “Contact sales for pricing” nonsense, you’ll hear a number within the first 20 minutes.
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How long does an engagement last?
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Typical retainer is six months, renewed by the quarter after that. Most useful work happens in months 2–5. We’ll tell you when to stop; that’s part of the job.
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What’s out of scope?
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A few specific things we don’t do:
- Full-time executive placement
- 200-person implementation programs
- Computer-vision consulting for autonomous vehicles
- Crypto
- Chatbots whose only job is to be a chatbot
If the work doesn’t change a number on your P&L within a year, we’re probably the wrong firm.
If you got this far, you probably already know whether we’d be useful.
Thirty minutes, no slides, no discovery-call theatre. Bring the problem you’re actually stuck on. We’ll tell you if we can help, and if we can’t, who might.