The playbook,
not the deck.
Post-shipping AI strategy / Series B–D B2B software
C9D Consulting delivers AI strategy that has already been deployed in production at scale: a $600M-class enterprise portfolio, a public-company acquisition cycle, diligence pressure that compressed nothing.
Most AI strategy hasn't been shipped.
Most has never met a diligence partner. Most has never been edited by a board. Most was built in a slide deck by someone who has never been on the hookfor the recommendation working at scale, under pressure, when an acquirer's counterparts (engineering, security, counsel) start pulling on threads.
The operators who have actually shipped agentic AI into production at growth-stage scale, who have cleared adoption through real legal and IP review, who have led portfolios through public-company diligence: most stay in operating roles. The advisory market is mostly populated by people who looked at the work from a distance and turned it into slides.
C9D Consulting is what we built when we left the operating seat.
Cases, not claims.
Luma for Landslide — shipping agentic AI to tier-one telecom operators.
Spirent's first agentic AI product. Three of five productization use cases live with named tier-one operators today. Multi-use-case roadmap to live production by year-end. Documented at brandonwilburn.pro.
The Seven-Dimension Review — agentic adoption cleared across enterprise R&D.
Legal, IP, security, and operational adoption framework. Cleared portfolio-wide adoption; instrumented via DORA and developer-experience surveys. Documented at brandonwilburn.pro.
Acquisition-grade posture — $600M portfolio, premium close.
Four concurrent strategic initiatives toward a single acquisition-readiness mandate. Closed at premium over a competing bid. Zero critical vulnerabilities. Clean license posture, months before final diligence. Documented at brandonwilburn.pro.
Vantage — built, run, and wound down on its own thesis.
A product built to validate a market hypothesis. When the data did not support the thesis, we made the stop call. Discipline is itself evidence of shipping judgment. Deck-sellers never have to make stop calls because they never ship.
A bounded decision cycle.
A C9D Consulting engagement runs alongside the CEO and the head of AI or engineering through a specific decision cycle. Each engagement starts with a diagnostic against the buyer's existing AI roadmap and ends with the playbook handoff.
Engagement types: Productization Engagement · Agentic Adoption Engagement · Diligence Posture Review · IP Posture Setup · Operating Partner Retainer
Structured review of current AI posture against the engagement's defined decision cycle. Deliverable: prioritized gap analysis and recommended scope of Phase II.
Execution of recommended scope. Weekly working sessions with named principals at the client organization. Deliverables defined in Schedule B.
Independent operating posture established. Documented playbook transferred to client team. Extension by mutual written agreement no later than week 12.
The boundaries of the practice.
What C9D Consulting refuses to do is as load-bearing as the work itself. These are not aspirational; they are operational.
If the shape is roughly right.
If you are staring at an AI productization decision before your next funding cycle, or your acquirer's diligence team is on the horizon, a twenty-minute call may be worth your time.
what we recommend.