Six Months Independent: What AI Actually Made Possible

By Keith Townsend, The Advisor Bench & The CTO Advisor

Six months ago, I stepped away from The Futurum Group and relaunched The CTO Advisor, which is now proudly owned by The Advisor Bench LLC, as an independent practice. No team. No corporate machinery. No safety net. Just my experience, my frameworks, and a belief that modern AI tooling fundamentally changes what a single practitioner can build.

This isn’t a victory lap. It’s an honest accounting of what happened, what worked, what didn’t, and what I’ve learned about the future of advisory work in an AI-accelerated world.

Why Go Independent—Again?

I’ve spent most of my career helping CIOs, CTOs, and architects navigate change—from VMware shifts to cloud strategy to hybrid AI infrastructure. After selling The CTO Advisor to Futurum, I continued that work inside the firm. But I eventually faced a fork in the road:

Would I keep building inside a large structure, or return to operating with autonomy—closer to practitioners and closer to impact?

The answer became obvious once AI tooling matured enough to remove the “you can’t do this alone” barrier. What used to require a team of analysts, editors, producers, and operations support now scales through intelligent workflows, coding assistants, and a set of playbooks I’ve refined over years.

So I jumped.

Six Months of Output: More Than Any Prior Year

When I built The CTO Advisor the first time, scaling past a certain point required a team—eventually five full-time equivalents. Writers, editors, production support, operations. The infrastructure of a small media and advisory company.

This time, I matched that output alone. Same client caliber, same scope of work, fraction of the overhead.

Here’s what I actually built—solo—in the first six months:

⚙️ Virtual CTO Advisor (vCTOA)

An interactive advisor that packages 25 years of enterprise IT decision-making patterns into a guided experience for practitioners. It’s become the entry point for many conversations with CIOs and IT leaders.

🧱 Stack Builder

A diagnostic tool that combines six strategic questions with my 4+1 Layer AI Infrastructure Model to help buyers understand their architectural fit for different platforms. Over 200 enterprise sessions completed—and already cited in vendor meetings.

📚 The 4+1 Layer AI Infrastructure Model

This became the backbone of everything. Vendors like Articul8 and Qlik are sharing it with customers. Practitioners are using it to make sense of the AI platform landscape. And it sparked the most unexpected outcome: market adoption without a licensing push.

📄 The 4+1 AI Platform RFP (Open Edition)

A practitioner-driven alternative to vendor-shaped RFP templates. By giving it away, I’ve saved organizations tens of thousands in advisory costs—while strengthening the reach of my IP.

🔍 CTO Scanner

An automated system that ingests enterprise-tech signals, evaluates relevance using my frameworks, and produces insights for executives. Not a content generator—an analysis amplifier. Built it, learned what I needed, moved on.

💻 Zero to Builder

A 100-day series teaching non-developers how to build with AI-assisted coding tools. This forced me to codify how modern application development really works when you’re pairing with AI tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot.

📈 Sponsored Content That Reached

The lightboard video I produced with Qlik at AWS re:Invent generated 10,000+ YouTube views and 15,000+ LinkedIn impressions.

Current projects with Intel and Kamiwaza are extending the 4+1 model into what I’m calling the “factory floor” narrative: the insight that GPU utilization is constrained not by GPU speed, but by the preprocessing and orchestration layers that feed it. That’s where the real optimization opportunity lives.

The Biggest Surprise: What the Market Really Valued

I thought customers would lean heavily on AI-generated content, frameworks, and templates.

I was wrong.

The market still values trusted practitioner judgment more than anything else. AI accelerates production; it doesn’t replace perspective.

Vendors aren’t buying videos. They’re buying access to an enterprise buyer community, interpretation, narrative placement, and the trust built over a decade.

Executives aren’t buying AI tools. They’re buying clarity in a cycle defined by noise and hype.

This six-month experiment validated something important:

AI doesn’t replace the advisor. It replaces the overhead that used to prevent advisors from operating independently.

What I Learned About the Future of Advisory Work

1. Autonomy is now a competitive advantage

A single strategist with modern tooling can move faster than many firms.

2. Frameworks matter more than content

Once the 4+1 model hit the market, vendors adopted it because it helped them tell a clearer story. That’s the real power: giving the industry a mental model.

3. Influence beats production value

A vendor can create content with AI. They can’t replicate a decade of trusted practitioner relationships.

4. AI is reshaping how experts package expertise

A framework, a PDF, a decision model, a tool—these used to be separate. Now they are all outputs of the same reasoning engine.

5. Independence opens a new dimension of creativity

I’ve built more in six months than any period of my career. Not because I worked more hours, but because friction was removed.

What’s Next for 2026

The next phase of The Advisor Bench will double down on three things:

1. The Buyer Room – executive-level sessions generating unfiltered CIO/CTO feedback for vendors.
2. Embedded Advisory – providing long-term strategic guidance for enterprise IT vendors.
3. The Advisor Stack – a suite of AI-assisted tools built on the 4+1 framework to help practitioners evaluate platforms.

Independence isn’t an end state. It’s a platform for the next build.

A Final Note of Gratitude

Many of you reading this have supported the transition, shared my work internally, pointed teams my way, or simply offered encouragement. Thank you.

And none of this happens without Melissa, who rebuilt this business beside me—quietly, consistently, and with an insistence on excellence that keeps the whole thing steady.

Six months independent. A foundation built. A horizon opening.

More to come.

This article represents the views of The CTO Advisor. To state plainly, The Futurum Group no longer owns the CTO Advisor brand. It was re-acquired by Keith and Melissa Townsend.