About Chief Of Life
The Fortune 500 hired their Chief AI Officer last year. Everyone else is stuck between vendors selling tools and consultancies selling decks. Chief Of Life exists to give mid-market companies a third option: a senior fractional CAIO who designs the strategy, builds the agents, and is accountable for the outcome.
AI is no longer optional. In 2026 a board chair asking "what's our AI strategy?" is as routine as asking about pipeline or cash. But the market response has been confusing: an explosion of point-solution SaaS, a wall of generic consultancy decks, and a price tag for full-time AI executives that only fits a handful of companies on the planet.
The companies in the gap, anywhere between $5M and $100M in revenue, are stuck. They know AI matters. They don't have a credible senior voice in the room. And the consultants they call are either too junior to land in their boardroom or too senior to actually build anything.
Chief Of Life was built for those companies. One senior operator, accountable end to end, on a retainer that costs a fraction of a full-time hire.
The work includes the decisions. When the build forks, you get the call and the reasoning behind it, not a vendor’s default and not a bill for the deliberation.
A Fractional Chief AI Officer at Chief Of Life is a senior AI executive who sits at your leadership table on a part-time basis. They own your AI strategy and roadmap, design and oversee the build of custom agents on infrastructure you control, report quarterly to your board, and stay accountable for measurable outcomes: typically increased capacity, reduced cost, or new revenue.
We are not a consultancy that hands you a deck. We are not a vendor reselling someone else's platform. We are not "AI advisors" who show up for monthly calls. We are an operating function: fractional in time, full in accountability.
Founder & Principal CAIO. Two decades turning data into decisions, now doing it with AI.
Chief Of Life is founded and led by Brian Schmitt, an operations leader who has spent more than two decades designing the processes that make companies run. He was VP of Operations at an online university from 2004 to 2012, then Director of Operations at a San Francisco marketing agency from 2012 to 2017. In 2017 he started his own digital marketing agency and leaned on automation and machine learning to run it until 2021, when he began using AI and dramatically increased the agency’s revenue per employee. His team did work for brands people actually know, including Peak Design, Hydro Flask, Brooklinen, and OXO. He has always been a process architecture and automation person who builds measurable, production-grade systems, and helping companies design agentic processes and put agents to work, so they get more done, with better quality and at greater speed, is the work he enjoys most.
That same instinct is exactly what AI demands and rarely gets: ship something real, measure it, and let the data settle the argument. Brian's thesis is simple. The playbook that works for the Fortune 500 (disciplined strategy, vendor-neutral architecture, real production agents, executive-level governance) works just as well for mid-market companies. It just has to be delivered fractionally, by one senior person, on a price tag that fits a $20M company. So that's the practice he built.
Brian is also available to be booked for speaking engagements and panels on AI implementation. A longer bio and prior work is available on request during a strategy call.
Brian was talking about using AI inside a working business in print in 2023. Today he teaches business owners to set up and run agents of their own.
Guest speaker at Session 1 of the quarterly series BlueIvy Communications runs with the Greater Delray Beach Chamber of Commerce, for owners and teams of 5 to 50. Brian’s segment: where the shift is already showing up, and eight questions that find the first job in a business an agent should be doing.
Speaker at the Nonprofit and Education Committee Breakfast of the Chamber of Commerce of the Palm Beaches in West Palm Beach. The talk moved the room from “Who does the work?” to “What to delegate to AI?”, with four places to look first, five questions to ask before handing anything off, and a one-page worksheet to take back to the office.
A live demonstration for the AI & Technology Committee of the Chamber of Commerce of the Palm Beaches, with agents handling email, calendars, research and routine workflows.
A hands-on session at 1909, West Palm Beach’s community for startups and creatives, on setting up a personal agent with the open-source Hermes Agent.
A Q&A in Palm Beach Illustrated’s New & Now section on how Brian’s agency put ChatGPT to work: finding clients, writing copy, and mining years of test results and user research for new hypotheses.
An education session on experimentation and conversion optimization strategy at the outdoor industry’s trade show in Salt Lake City.
Six principles run through every engagement. They are choices, not features, and they're the reason we look different from a big-firm consulting engagement on the inside.
A production agent in 90 days, not a strategy phase in 180. Strategy is real only when something is running.
One Fractional CAIO owns the engagement end to end. No partner-sells, junior-builds, hand-off carousel.
No referral fees, no kickbacks, no "preferred platforms." We recommend what fits your stack and walk away if you choose differently.
Where your data lives and who can reach it are decided on day one, not retrofitted at the end when someone sends a security questionnaire.
Internal fluency is a contractual deliverable. We don't keep the keys, and we don't lock you into a multi-year retainer.
Every production agent gets an evaluation framework and unit economics in dollars. If it doesn't pay back, we sunset it.
A 30-minute strategy call. No pitch deck, no obligation. Honest answer or honest referral.
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