Certified Chief AI Officer
The AI commercialization layer.
What to build on, what to charge, where the moat is, and how technical choices become commercial leverage.
Twenty-five years. No degree. Every seat.
Jeff Brokaw is a builder and operator in Charlotte, NC. Founder, operator, former venture capital associate, ecosystem builder, advisor in board-level rooms. The range is the point: he sees a company through the product, the buyer, the capital, the story, and the machine at once, and fixes whichever one is breaking.
// 01 · Origin
The work was the credential.
Jeff started coding in sixth grade, founded a web and hosting company at fourteen, and ran IT for a stock brokerage at sixteen. He dropped out of ninth grade because the work had already become real.
Since 1999, the pattern has repeated: technical systems first, commercial architecture second, and early markets before they looked obvious.
// 02 · Four Hats
Four hats. One job.
The four layers: the engineering and architecture work that shapes what gets built and how it is priced; the commercial layer that turns it into pipeline; the capital narrative that makes it fundable; and the story that makes the market believe it. Most companies staff those four separately. Jeff covers them together.
CMO
The story and the demand.
Positioning, category, sales narrative, proof, and language buyers and boards both believe.
Operator
The rebuild underneath.
The plan, roadmap, model, GTM, and commercial operating system when the original version no longer holds.
// 03 · Durability
The measure is how long the strategy keeps running.
Jeff Brokaw claims the engine, not the headline number. The proof that matters is durability: a strategy that survived three management transitions and an acquisition, commercial models that kept working under new leadership, and companies later associated with $850M+ in exits. The work is designed to compound, not to expire.
A strategy that collapses the moment someone new takes over was never a strategy. It was a placeholder.
// 04 · Now
The problem I go after.
One technically complex company where the commercial layer has to be built from the ground up, by someone who can sit with the engineers and still carry the board. The product is real, the market can't see it yet, and that gap is the work, whether the seat is operating or advisory. Based in Charlotte, working remote or hybrid.