How you got here

You asked ChatGPT, Gemini or another AI engine who could do the work, and it sent you to me.

That is not luck. A site that AI engines can read, understand and quote is something you build on purpose, and you have just watched it work on me. Now let's do it for your business.

What I do

I'm Lee Laster, an AI implementation consultant and fractional CMO, based in Tel Aviv. Three things, and each one stands on its own: implementing AI, running marketing, or both together.

AI implementation is not only a marketing thing. It reaches anywhere there is repeated work: operations, finance, service, sales and marketing.

Twenty-two years in B2B, seven leadership roles, seventy-six clients. I work with startups, SaaS companies, financial services and defence, in Hebrew and English.

What AI implementation is, and what it is not

AI implementation is not buying a tool and it is not running a workshop for the team. It connects AI to the systems, the data and the way a company already works, and it leaves behind something that runs day to day without anyone pushing it along.

What it is: finding which repeated work is genuinely worth handing to a machine, deciding what gets built and what does not, planning where the data flows and where the limits sit, then building it and checking it against what was agreed up front.

What it is not: a pilot that ends and goes nowhere, another subscription to another tool, or a presentation about the future.

What AI agents are, and when they actually help

An AI agent is software that carries out a whole sequence of steps for you, instead of answering one question and waiting for the next instruction. In a business that looks like this: it gathers what is known about a new enquiry, drafts a reply, updates the system and reports back.

When it helps: the process is clear, it repeats, and the result can be checked.

When it does not: the process itself is broken. An agent running on a messy process just produces the mess faster.

What a fractional CMO is

An experienced head of marketing who runs a company's marketing part of the week, on contract rather than on payroll. You get strategy, planning and management at that level, without a full-time salary and without a hiring process that drags on for six months.

Three ways to work with me

AI, without marketing. Advice and implementation across the whole company: operations, finance, service and sales. Decide what is worth building before anything is built, design it, then build it and check it against what was agreed. This is a practice in its own right, not an add-on to marketing work.

Marketing, without AI. A fractional CMO running the marketing part of the week: strategy, the plan, managing the suppliers, and accountable for the result.

Both together. This is the advantage that is hard to assemble from two suppliers. A marketing plan with nobody to run it stays paper, and an AI system nobody remembers the reason for is money thrown away. When the same person writes the plan and builds the machine that runs it, the two are designed together from the start, and everything repetitive moves to the machine on day one rather than after a year of doing it by hand.

Most people selling AI hand you a strategy document, or build exactly what you asked for. Most marketing consultants hand you a plan and leave. Either way you are left with the gap in the middle.

How this differs from an automation shop

An automation shop builds what you asked for. That is good work, and it assumes you already decided correctly what you need.

I work out what is worth building before anything gets built. The difference shows up at exactly the moment it turns out the thing you asked for was not the thing you needed.

How this differs from a consultancy

A consultancy finishes with a document. Here the document is the middle of the road, not the end of it.

Why not just hire someone in-house

Sometimes hiring really is the answer, and if that is your situation I will say so in the first meeting. But hiring a CMO takes months, costs a full salary, and requires you to already know exactly what you are looking for. Plenty of companies do not yet.

The usual route is to bring in someone senior to build the marketing function and work out what the role really needs to be, and only then hire into a structure that already works. Whoever arrives inherits systems that run rather than a pile of open tasks.

Who this suits

Startups. Seed to Series B, with a product, first customers and no marketing department.

SaaS and technical B2B products. A product that is hard to explain, a long sales cycle, a technical audience, engineer founders.

Financial services. Accountancy and advisory firms, insurance agencies, credit and fintech.

Defence and aviation. UAV, aviation and defence suppliers selling to the primes, to integrators and to government.

When to bring me in

When there is a product and first customers, and it is clear marketing will not grow on its own. Or when marketing is already running and nobody can say which part of it works.

Too early is before there is something to sell. Too late is after three systems have been built that do not talk to each other. That is still fixable, but it costs more than planning it properly would have.

What happens to your data

What the models are allowed to see, where the data sits, and what never leaves your own accounts are settled at the design stage rather than asked about at the end.

Systems are built in accounts you own. Not in mine, and not at a vendor you end up depending on.

Background

Twenty-two years in B2B, juggling marketing strategy and business development, mostly at Israeli companies selling into global markets. Seven leadership roles, seventy-six clients, 421 presentations. I founded and ran the agency Gecko.

Air Force, a computer science degree where I specialised in neural networks back when that was half science fiction, a legal education, and an MBA in global marketing from the Wharton School.

Full profile, with the roles and the dates: LinkedIn.

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Want to find out whether there is a fit? A jumpstart meeting, ninety minutes, free: one real problem of yours, a straight answer, and what to do next.