Fractional digital & AI direction · Hampshire
Anyone can rent the models. Nobody can rent the judgement that decides what to do with them. 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.
Seven stones. 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 [FIXED FEE] · 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 [FIXED FEE] · fixed scope
03 — Practice
Three years of experimentation, six months of machine learning at the University of Portsmouth, and a year building and shipping AI products. Delivered as production work for you, or as training that leaves your team able to do it themselves.
From [FIXED FEE] · fixed scope
Each of the three is sold as a fixed-scope first piece of work. Most turn into the retained arrangement below, because the second month is where the value is.
Fig. 1 — Assembly
The arch is the whole argument. Every machine stone has a human counterpart at the same height, and the keystone goes in last. Models is the only stone everyone rents identically — the moat is the other six.
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.
Twenty-eight further builds across Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and SharePoint. The earlier portfolio is still online.
Terms
Fractional: two days a week, three-month minimum
Named days agreed up front. Remote, on site as needed
Monthly in arrears, [PAYMENT TERMS]
Retained rate on request. Project work quoted fixed
Fractional means you buy the seniority, not the headcount — a director-level head on a known day each week, at a fraction of the cost of the post. The retained rate is lower than the project rate because the commitment is what buys the discount.
The keystone
Thirty minutes, no charge, no deck. If I'm not the right answer I'll say so and tell you what is.