Diagnosed by a founder. Delivered by a vetted operator. Working systems in 90 days — not a strategy deck.
Every board is asking the same question this year: what is our AI strategy? Most companies our clients' size can't answer it — and can't justify a $400,000 Chief AI Officer to find out. The big consultancies will sell you a transformation roadmap. The platforms will sell you software. Neither will stand in your operation, find where AI actually pays, and be accountable for making it work. That accountability gap is what this engagement closes.
Mid-market manufacturing, industrial, engineering, supply chain, and B2B services companies — the operators with the most to gain from AI and the fewest credible partners offering it at their scale.
"What's our AI position?" — and you don't have one yet.
Investors and boards now expect a credible AI strategy the way they expect a forecast. "We're looking into it" stopped being an acceptable answer sometime last year.
"We tried AI. It didn't go anywhere."
88% of AI pilots never reach production — and the failures are operating problems, not model problems. Unclear success criteria, untrusted data, no named owner. The 12% that ship return roughly 171%.
"We need the leadership, not the $400K seat."
A full-time Chief AI Officer runs $350,000–$450,000 before equity. Mid-market companies need the judgment and the accountability — at 8–20 hours a week, not 40.
The same structure behind every ETHOSLINK engagement — a founder diagnoses, a vetted executive delivers, and ETHOSLINK manages the relationship end to end.
Every engagement begins with the AI Opportunity Diagnostic, led personally by an ETHOSLINK founder. We map where AI genuinely reduces cost or accelerates revenue in your operation — and where it doesn't, we say so.
A fractional Chief AI Officer from the ETHOSLINK bench deploys against the map — contracted, pre-vetted, and matched to your industry. No search. No delay.
Working systems in 90 days — not a strategy deck. Delivery standards are owned at the partner level, and the engagement compounds for as long as you're building.
A fixed-fee, founder-led assessment of where AI pays in your business. In two to three weeks you hold a document your board can act on — whether or not you ever engage ETHOSLINK again.
We don't advise on AI from the outside. We build with it. StageFlow is the proof.
StageFlow is ETHOSLINK's AI-native revenue platform, running RISQ™ risk-intelligence scoring inside client pipelines today. When your diagnostic shows revenue operations as the highest-payback system — and for most companies between $1M and $20M ARR, it is — your first AI implementation is a platform we built ourselves, deployed by the people who built it.
And because ETHOSLINK is an executive search firm at its core, the engagement never dead-ends. When you're ready for a permanent AI leader, we recruit and place them — and the fractional executive who built your systems hands off to a hire who fits them. Explore StageFlow →
One strategy call. A founder on the line. A clear answer on whether this is worth your money — either way.
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