Most AI projects fail.
We help you pick
the ones that won’t — and ship them.
Stealthy Good helps mid-market companies figure out what to do with AI, and then actually do it. Strategy, vendor pushback, and the zero-to-one work of getting a new initiative off the ground. No pods of juniors. No slide decks that end with a second slide deck.
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.
So: someone senior has to make the calls. That’s what we do.
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 mid-market companies don't need one. They need a few hours of ours.
- 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.
- 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.
What happened, in three parts.
A six-figure “AI platform” contract was coming up for renewal. It hadn’t shipped anything a plant manager had touched.
Regulatory binders were eating forty analyst-minutes per clinical trial site. Every vendor demo looked great and broke on the second document.
The product team wanted to ship a summarization feature. The clinical team wanted to know what happens when the model is wrong.
Twenty-seven AI vendor evaluations across four business units. No central thesis. A very tired CIO.
Aaron.
Two decades building companies, launching new things, and solving problems with technology — usually as the person a CEO called when a new initiative had to get off the ground, or the first AI vendor didn’t work out. A strange combination of problem solver, end-user obsessive, and the guy who gets zero-to-one work across the line. 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. Skippable entirely.
- № 005 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.
- № 004 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.
- № 003 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.
What does this cost?
How long does an engagement last?
What’s out of scope?
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.