fCMO in the Loop - How AI is breathing life into the “endangered” consultancy model.

*proudly em-dashed by Claude

But I’m not a coder, nor a scientist. I’m a fractional CMO (aka fCMO), my co-founder Adam’s an fCGO, and together we’re a growth strategy team that consults across MENA and APAC.

When old friends tell me “you got me on the internet and onto Hotmail!” part of me smiles and part of me shudders as I realize how old I am. An early’ish adopter of web 1.0, 2.0 and blockchain, it was only natural I’d be fascinated by AI.

And it's because of this I want to open up and share a bit about our business and how AI is impacting it. Because while all the headlines are announcing the death of the consultancy, I’m seeing the opposite — at least in our case.

Running a consultancy that delivers genuine value is by nature hard to scale. Unless you’re charging a fortune or compromising on quality, the trading currency is the personal attention and expertise of the consulting Partner, in our case, myself or Adam.

I love being an fCMO. It means rolling up my sleeves and leaning into my experience as a former event producer, media producer, content marketing leader, PR lead, media planner and brand manager. It can be both high level and at times, quite executional, depending on the needs and resources of the client. The challenge? We don’t have a big team underneath us to do the grunt work — writing paid media performance reports, keeping project management on track, updating media lists. And nor always do our clients.

AI — and specifically vibe coding tools like Replit — are becoming game changers for us. We’re using several of them to build tools that create efficiencies for us and our clients. They are nuanced and built to spec. So far we’ve built, or are actively building:

• An event manager — akin to a CMS — that extracts event participation requests from emails, places them into a unified calendar view, assigns tasks, distributes content and more.
• An integrated marcomms reporter and paid media analyst — two AI roles that take .csv and raw, disparate data and organize it into well-structured, branded reports.
• A PR media CRM — currently underway, geared toward media ID, segmentation, relationship management and performance reporting.

Adam and I are building these personally. It takes me back to when we first became friends, working together in the web 2.0 digital space. We’re also learning as we go — and we want to share that honestly.

Because building with AI isn’t always the fast, cheap and good triangle of joy the headlines suggest. Things cost money, things break, and the wins are sweeter for it.

We plan to document our journey becoming an AI-builder, and incorporating AI tools. We aren't doing it for LinkedIn clicks and likes, but to bring a much needed warts and all view into the AI space, that will genuinely help you to scale and grow your own business.