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Justin McKelvey | Fractional CTO & AI Consultant

I help business owners put AI to work — for real revenue, not demos.

Fractional CTO in Austin — 15 years, 50+ products shipped. Every Tuesday, The AI Leader's Weekly Playbook sends one practical AI play for your business: real builds, real numbers, what actually worked. No hype, no "10 ChatGPT prompts" filler. If you want AI doing real work in your company, this is your Tuesday edge.

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The $43K AI agent that should've been a $20 prompt — The AI Leader's Weekly Playbook
Featured Post

The $43K AI agent that should've been a $20 prompt

A client built custom infrastructure for something ChatGPT does in 4 seconds. Hi there, Got a story for you. A founder I know spent $43,000 building a custom AI agent for their business. Six months of dev time, a contracted AI engineer, a vector database, "agent orchestration framework," the works. You know what the agent did? It categorized customer support emails into eight buckets and routed them to the right person. That's it. I tested the same task in ChatGPT — paste an email, ask which...

5 days ago • 1 min read
20 checks I run on every AI-written codebase before it touches real users — and the three most teams skip.

Three of the points will surprise you. Most teams miss all three. Hi there, Your team shipped code an AI wrote. Did they check it? Not "does it work." That's table stakes. I mean: did anyone check whether it'll get you sued, breached, or shut down? I just built a 20-point security checklist specifically for codebases where AI did the writing. Cursor, Claude Code, Lovable, Replit, Bolt — doesn't matter which tool. The mistakes rhyme. Three of the points that surprise people the most: 1. API...

12 days ago • 1 min read
The 5 types of business owners using AI — The AI Leader's Weekly Playbook

I've watched all five hire me — usually too late. Hi there, Five types of business owners using AI. I've watched all five hire me — usually one rung too late. There are patterns. Five, specifically. 1. The Tourist. Tried ChatGPT once. Said "neat" and went back to email. No system, no curiosity, no urgency. 2. The Tinkerer. Has 14 AI tools. Uses three. Can't articulate which one made them money this month. Mistakes activity for progress. 3. The Embedded Operator. Picked one tool, made it part...

19 days ago • 1 min read