Rick Hartwig

We help boards and senior executives turn AI investment into measurable organizational performance — through diagnostics, operating-model design, and governance artifacts their leadership teams own permanently.

The work begins where most AI strategy ends. We are not technologists, implementers, or embedded consultants. We are the advisors who name what is actually broken in the leadership system, facilitate the decisions that fix it, and leave behind the frameworks that sustain the change.

The thesis is simple and uncomfortable. The bottleneck on AI ROI is not the model. It is the organization absorbing it. Sixty-five percent of organizations cannot scale AI beyond pilot. Executives trust AI for complex decisions at a rate of sixty-one percent; their workers, nine. A fifty-two-point trust gap is not a technology problem — it is a governance failure that most boards have not yet named as such.

More than two decades at the intersection of leadership, strategy, and technology — coaching executives, advising boards, and building high-performing teams at Google, Pinterest, Salesforce, Intel, VMware, and others. An MBA from Kellogg in Organizational Behavior and Marketing. A Private Equity Analysis certificate from Wharton. A Certified Professional Coach.

We bring an unusual combination: deep experience in how leaders actually think and make decisions, combined with hands-on fluency in building with advanced AI. We do not just advise on AI — we use it daily as core infrastructure in our practice. That lived experience informs everything we bring to client engagements.