Fractional digital & AI direction · Hampshire
Anyone can rent a Large Language Model (LLM) - ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok. Nobody can rent the judgement that decides what to do with it. Perfect Union is fractional direction - the senior digital and AI head you need two days a week, not five.
Four waves of technology change delivered since the late 1980s. A year on the front line of building AI products. A machine learning grounding underneath both.
Six elements. One keystone.
Sound familiar?
None of them are really technology problems. They are all the same problem wearing different clothes - nobody senior enough owns the decision, and the people who could are already at capacity.
You need an answer that survives questioning, not a slide deck of possibilities. And you need it from someone who will still be there when it has to be delivered.
Licences bought in a hurry, a pilot that quietly stopped, and no honest account of what any of it returned. The next request for budget is going to be harder.
Your team can't move at the pace the rest of the organisation now expects, and the people who built the site have moved on.
Everything reads fine and nothing sounds like you. Without someone applying taste and judgement, volume just makes the problem bigger.
There isn't five days a week of the work, or a budget line for a director. But there are two days a week of decisions being postponed.
Staff handed a licence and a login, experimenting in private, with no pattern to follow and no safe way to try it on real work.
Services
01 - Build
Thirty years of CMS delivery - Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, SharePoint, Drupal Commerce - now built at a different speed. AI-assisted development means prototypes in days rather than weeks, and a real site rather than a slide about one.
From £350/day · fixed scope
02 - Strategy
Thirty years in business and marketing roles, applied to the question everyone is asking badly. Not an adoption programme - a short, specific answer to where this technology earns its keep for you, and where it doesn't.
From £350/day · fixed scope
03 - Practice
Three years of experimentation, six months of machine learning at the University of Portsmouth, and a year helping develop and deliver AI products. Delivered as production work for you, or as training that leaves your team able to do it themselves.
From £350/day · fixed scope
Perfect Union in action
The arch is the whole argument. Every machine element has a human counterpart of equal importance. AI models are typically rented and generic - it’s in the other elements that true value is created.
Machine side
The crown
Human side
Who you get
Every one arrived the same way: overclaimed, badly understood, and eventually ordinary. The technology was never the hard part - the hard part was always the people who had to run it on Monday morning.
You get a head of digital, not a pair of hands waiting for tickets. I hold the roadmap, make the calls, and can put the case to a board or a funder.
A year building and shipping AI products: a nine-agent brand intelligence platform and an AI film production company, both delivered. I'm not learning this on your budget.
Six months of machine learning, Python and dashboard build at the University of Portsmouth, on three years of hands-on experimentation. I can read the model, not just the marketing.
Proof
A complex website and journey planner covering a large area and many stakeholders - we could not have achieved our goals without James's professional approach and dedication to getting the job done.
He bridges technical necessities and trends with client demands, and understands the importance of the customer journey.
Where marketing-speak often detaches from reality, his approach translates into real, measurable results - more traffic, more enquiries, more business done.
Many further builds across Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and SharePoint. The earlier portfolio is still online.
The keystone
Thirty minutes, no charge, no deck. If I'm not the right answer I'll say so and tell you what is.