About Chief Of Life

Senior AI leadership for the other 99% of companies.

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.

the engagement running

Support agent cleared 214 tickets overnight06:10

Board deck refreshed with this week’s numbers07:02

Second agent in eval before productionnow

Quarterly governance review with the boardFri

Why we exist

Why this exists

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 model

What "Fractional CAIO" means here

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.

model · phase 3 your call

Which model for the routing agent?

Claude (Anthropic) recommended

Best refusal handling for your policy: slightly higher cost per 1k

Open-weight, self-hosted

Lowest marginal cost: you carry the ops burden

Keep the incumbent

No migration: fails two of your evals

The founder

Brian Schmitt

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.

Prior work

Press and speaking

In print and on stage

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.

Brian Schmitt presenting at the Chamber of Commerce of the Palm Beaches, beside a slide titled Your own agent. Connected to your life.

Talk · June 2026

Building AI Agents That Actually Work

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.

Event page

A full room at 1909 in West Palm Beach, laptops open, with Hermes Agent on the screens and Brian Schmitt leading the session

Workshop · Summer 2026

AI agent workshop at 1909

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.

Press · August 2023

ChatGPT with Me

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.

Read the page See the issue

Talk · June 2023

Outdoor Retailer Summer

An education session on experimentation and conversion optimization strategy at the outdoor industry’s trade show in Salt Lake City.

Show recap

How we work

Operating philosophy

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.

Principle 01

Ship in 90, not 180.

A production agent in 90 days, not a strategy phase in 180. Strategy is real only when something is running.

Principle 02

One senior, accountable.

One Fractional CAIO owns the engagement end to end. No partner-sells, junior-builds, hand-off carousel.

Principle 03

Vendor-neutral on purpose.

No referral fees, no kickbacks, no "preferred platforms." We recommend what fits your stack and walk away if you choose differently.

Principle 04

Security is upstream.

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.

Principle 05

Your team owns the work.

Internal fluency is a contractual deliverable. We don't keep the keys, and we don't lock you into a multi-year retainer.

Principle 06

Measure in dollars.

Every production agent gets an evaluation framework and unit economics in dollars. If it doesn't pay back, we sunset it.

Want to see if we're a fit?

A 30-minute strategy call. No pitch deck, no obligation. Honest answer or honest referral.

Book a Strategy Call →