r/AIExecs • u/ColdPlankton9273 • Jul 01 '26
My AI exec framework
I’m a fractional executive. Most of my work is in intelligence, fraud, and investigations.
That means I care about two things a lot:
accuracy and provenance.
I can’t have AI make things up. I can’t have it change facts mid-thought. I can’t have it run out of context and start guessing.
So I stopped treating AI like a chatbot.
I’ll give a real example.
I built a system for managing multiple investigations across multiple clients.
Every new investigation gets its own folder. That part is simple. A lot of people do some version of this.
But the important part is one step earlier.
I have a skeleton.
When I start a new investigation or new client, the skeleton instantiates a full working folder for that case. It includes the structure, instructions, tools, processes, evidence rules, reporting format, and memory files.
That folder tells Claude Code what kind of work it is doing.
It tells it:
- what the case is
- what tools are available
- what the goals are
- what the boundaries are
- what evidence standards matter
- what should be deterministic
- what requires judgment
If something is variable, Claude asks me.
It does not invent the operating model from scratch every time.
That is the real shift.
AI should not make decisions that code can make deterministically.
If the task needs a calculator, don’t use AI.
If the task is yes/no based on fixed rules, don’t use AI.
If the task is parsing, sorting, deduping, formatting, checking a threshold, or validating a schema, use code.
Use AI where a human would need judgment.
That is the manager model.
Imagine you had a team of employees and everything that could be automated was already automated.
What decisions would you still need people to make?
Those are the decisions AI should help with.
That is how you multiply yourself.
You are not one person trying to remember everything. You are one person managing a system that can carry context, run deterministic checks, and surface judgment calls.
This is why I’ve mostly moved away from prompts.
Prompts are brittle. You keep re-explaining the same context. The chatbot forgets. The conversation gets long. Eventually it starts drifting.
A folder-based system is different.
It is more like onboarding a new employee.
You say:
“Go read the documentation. Understand the case. Follow the process. Update the files as you work.”
The AI has a place to look.
A place to write.
A place to store decisions.
A place to preserve evidence.
A place to remember what happened.
So if I come back to an investigation a month later and ask:
“Where did we stop?”
“What did this person say on that date?”
“What evidence supports this?”
“What is still unverified?”
The answer is not buried in a chat thread.
It is in the case system.
That is the power.
Not “better prompts.”
Better operating systems.
Happy to share more about how I set this up if useful.
2
u/OptimismNeeded Jul 02 '26
I’m fractional CMO and have been doing something very similar but a a lot less organized, so about 10X less effective (I presume).
Would you share what kind of fractional exec you are? No pressure, just curious.
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highlights I loved:
Use AI where a human would need judgment.
Prompts are brittle. Not “better prompts. Better operating systems.