ZSmyth

AI Transformation Partner · Fractional Head of AI

AI that actually ships — not another strategy deck.

I come in, operationalize AI across your team, and hand over working automations and dev-ready prototypes built to move the business — in your hands in days, not quarters. Most in this space advise. I build and ship, with your people, augmenting the team you already have.

Let's Talk

The role

A role companies are now hiring for — and budgeting against.

Call it AI Transformation Partner, Fractional Head of AI, or Fractional Chief AI Officer. It's the person who walks into a company, finds where AI creates real value department by department, and operationalizes it — turning "we should be using AI" into shipped automations, faster teams, and measurable lift.

It's a real, fast-growing category. In IBM's 2026 CEO study, the share of organizations with a Chief AI Officer jumped from 26% to 76% in a single year. Most companies now know they need this. Far fewer can find someone who does more than talk about it.

The difference

Most AI leaders hand you a framework. I hand you a working tool.

The category is crowded with strategy consultants — decks, governance models, maturity assessments. Useful, but they stop where the hard part begins: actually building the thing.

I'm an operator. I've spent 18+ years shipping product for companies from startups to the S&P 500, and I design and build directly in code. That means I don't stop at "here's what you could do." I automate the workflow, wire up the integration, ship the prototype, and put it in your team's hands — then teach them to run it.

  • Automations that run real work, not slide-ware
  • Dev-ready prototypes you can click, often within a day
  • Internal tools your team keeps using after I leave
  • Delivery measured in revenue, hours saved, and EBITDA — not deliverables

Who it's for

Three kinds of teams I do my best work with.

Founders & tech teams at a build bottleneck

You have more ideas than engineering hours. I use AI to compress the build — prototyping, internal tooling, and automation that lets a small team ship like a bigger one, without adding headcount.

PE-backed & portfolio companies

You need operational lift that shows up in the numbers. I go into portfolio companies and automate the repetitive, margin-eating work — driving efficiency and EBITDA, not a transformation roadmap that sits in a drawer.

Non-tech businesses ready to go further

Trades, healthcare, hospitality, real estate — you've heard "AI" and maybe used it to rewrite an email. I show you what it actually does for operations, then build the automations that quietly run in the background.

How I work

Find the leverage, build it, ship it, hand it over.

The thinking stays human; the delivery gets accelerated. Nothing here is "AI-first" or about replacing people — it's about supercharging the team you already have.

  1. Map the business, department by department, for where AI creates real value
  2. Rank the highest-leverage workflows — the ones that move revenue, cost, or capacity
  3. Build and automate the top opportunities, not all of them
  4. Ship working tools and dev-ready prototypes your team can use immediately
  5. Hand over and enable — your people run it, with human oversight built in

You don't get a strategy. You get things that work, and a team that can keep building.

What I've shipped

Live builds, in production.

Every one of these is something I built and put into use. Clients anonymized here; I'll share names and live walkthroughs on a call.

AI personas for a healthcare provider

For a hospice & palliative care organization, I scored the homepage against 10 real audience archetypes across 7 experience dimensions — establishing a baseline, then re-running it against a redesign to prove the direction.

  • Homepage went from a 4.3/10 baseline to 7.5/10 after the redesign — a 74% lift, every persona higher
  • Biggest gains in the areas that were failing users — clarity, relevance, findability
  • Previously invisible services (like a Medicaid children's program) became reachable in two clicks or fewer
  • The measured lift gave leadership the confidence to approve the direction
AI PersonasUX ReviewHealthcare

Guest-retention automation

For a multi-location men's grooming brand, an AI system that spots loyal guests drifting past their usual visit cadence and nudges them back — closing a gap the client said their loyalty data "never made it back to store teams" to fix.

  • 12,970 loyal guests auto-tracked across 6 locations — zero staff time, updated daily
  • Rebook rate more than tripled in the first weeks (2.3% → 8.5%) and still climbing
  • 56 rebookings directly from automated SMS nudges, ~98% delivered
  • Live in weeks, running on ~$15–30/mo, built on their existing tools — no rip-and-replace
AutomationRetentionMulti-location

Content automation for a training academy

For a sports-performance academy, an AI system that writes and schedules five social posts every week — turning a manual, easy-to-drop content chore into something that runs on autopilot and keeps the brand consistent.

AutomationContentSMB

My own new-business engine

The AI system that runs my own pipeline — it scans job boards and inbound briefs, scores each for fit, drafts tailored outreach, and logs qualified leads to the CRM automatically. I run my practice on the automations I build.

Lead GenScoringCRM Integration

Ways to work together

Three ways to bring me in.

01

AI Opportunity Audit

A focused, senior-level look across your business to find where AI creates real value — ranked by leverage, with a clear build plan for the top opportunities.

Ideal for — Teams who know AI matters but need to know exactly where to start, before spending real money.

02

Build Sprint

I build and ship a real automation, internal tool, or working prototype against your highest-leverage opportunity — fast, hands-on, with your team.

Ideal for — Teams who want proof in production, not a roadmap: pick one thing that matters and ship it.

03

Fractional Head of AI

Ongoing

Embedded, ongoing AI leadership — operationalizing AI department by department, shipping continuously, and building your team's ability to run it. The role, on a fractional basis.

Ideal for — Founders, PE-backed companies, and operators who want a senior AI operator driving value month over month.

One honest boundary: my lane is the operator/builder end — automate real workflows, ship, drive growth. I'm not the governance, compliance, and risk specialist (NIST, EU AI Act, SOC 2). If that's what you need first, I'll tell you, and point you in the right direction.

Where this comes from

The reason I can ship AI is that I've spent 18 years shipping product.

I'm also a Design Product Partner and Fractional Head of Design — I've built and shipped product for companies from startups to the S&P 500. That's not a side note; it's the whole reason the AI work lands. I don't hand off to a dev team and hope. I design it, build it, and ship it myself.

See the product & design work →

Ready to turn "we should use AI" into something that ships?

Let's Talk