For small and mid-size businesses and professional services firms that want AI working in their day-to-day operations, and the infrastructure to support it. Delivered by an operator who has run AI in production inside a regulated firm.
Most professional firms and growth-stage companies reach an inflection point where the systems, vendors, and processes that got them here are actively holding them back. The problem isn't a single failure — it's accumulated drift. Here's what it looks like from the inside.
Software gets added when a problem surfaces. Contracts auto-renew. Redundancies compound. Three years later you're paying for tools that overlap, underperform, or serve a need that no longer exists — and no one owns the audit.
The firm's technology didn't follow a strategy — it followed headcount. A capable associate built a workaround that became permanent. An IT vendor made a recommendation that stuck. The result is a stack built by availability, not architecture.
No one designed your operations layer — it accumulated. What started as a workaround became policy. What was temporary became foundational. Now you're running on inherited decisions made under different constraints, different headcount, and different revenue.
Accounting firms, consulting practices, law firms, and advisory organizations that have grown past the point where informal systems and accumulated workarounds are sufficient. The infrastructure needs to be redesigned — not patched.
Seed through Series B companies that have found product-market fit and need the operating infrastructure to match their ambition — without the cost or commitment of a full-time COO and CTO.
Fractional COO & CTO · Anthracite Advisory
Anthracite Advisory is the practice of Joseph Narvaez — a technology and operations executive who held the CTO and COO roles simultaneously at a regulated investment management firm for over fifteen years. He built the technology stack from inception, ran operations, managed vendors, oversaw compliance readiness, and led the teams responsible for making it all work.
That experience spans both sides of the house: technology infrastructure, cybersecurity, systems architecture, and AI implementation on one side — operations, vendor oversight, service provider management, and governance on the other. Clients get both, integrated, from a single advisor who has done it at scale.
What kept drawing me back to professional services firms and growth-stage companies was a consistent observation: the problems were familiar, the judgment required to solve them well was genuinely hard to access, and the gap between what these firms had and what they needed was entirely closeable.
"Not a consultant who delivers a report. An operator who has sat inside a regulated, high-stakes environment and built something durable out of it."
Most clients start with a focused, fixed-fee AI Readiness Sprint. When it proves out, the three engagement tiers take the work further, from operating architecture to ongoing fractional leadership.
For businesses that know AI should be helping but aren't sure where to start. We map where your team's time actually goes, identify the highest-value use cases, and stand up one working pilot with your people. You leave with results in hand, not a slide deck.
Book a Sprint ConversationA structured 2–3 week diagnostic of your firm's full operating layer — vendors, systems, workflows, and decision-making infrastructure. For firms that sense something is wrong but don't have language for it yet.
Hands-on redesign of the operating foundation. Vendor negotiations, technology stack rationalization, AI workflow integration, and implementation oversight — executed alongside your team, not handed off to them.
Retained fractional COO/CTO coverage — strategy, vendor governance, technology planning, AI roadmap, and operational accountability. Available as the firm grows, with full context and no handoffs.
Most firms are being sold AI. Few are actually implementing it in ways that hold up — that integrate with real workflows, respect compliance requirements, and produce measurable operational improvement rather than demos.
Anthracite Advisory has built and deployed practical AI implementations in a regulated, high-stakes environment: automated reconciliation workflows, document review and drafting systems, knowledge management pipelines, and AI-assisted governance and SOP generation.
This isn't theoretical. It's been done in production, under scrutiny, where getting it wrong had real consequences. That's the standard we bring to every engagement.
We don't implement AI for its own sake. Every recommendation is grounded in whether it solves a real operational problem, integrates with your existing stack, and can be governed responsibly.
Start with a short, scoped engagement rather than a large program. Anthracite Advisory's two-week AI Readiness Sprint audits where your team's time goes, ranks the highest-value AI use cases, recommends tools that fit your existing stack and budget, and deploys one working pilot with your team.
An AI implementation consultant identifies where AI can save time or reduce errors, selects the right tools, builds and deploys the workflows, trains staff, and puts data, security, and usage guardrails in place so the results hold up in daily operations.
Recommendations are vendor-neutral and matched to the client's stack, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure OpenAI, ChatGPT, Claude, Power Automate, and other automation platforms. Anthracite Advisory has no vendor relationships that bias recommendations.
A fractional COO or CTO is a senior operations or technology executive who works part-time or on retainer, giving a business executive-level leadership without the cost of a full-time hire.
Yes. Anthracite Advisory works with small and mid-size businesses, professional services firms such as accounting, consulting, and law firms, and growth-stage companies, nationally and remotely.
A 30-minute conversation is enough to understand whether there's a fit. No pitch deck. No proposal until there's mutual interest. Just a direct conversation about where you are and whether we can help.
Anthracite Advisory · Available nationally · anthraciteadvisory.com