Make sense of AI change. Stay in control.

What the trust rests on

What a business that trusts its AI can show.

A business that trusts its AI can show that:

1. 01it keeps what it knows when it changes vendors;
2. 02its AI, and the data it touches, is built to carry its own rules wherever it runs;
3. 03its AI serves what the business is trying to do;
4. 04its AI pays back, measured against a dated baseline;
5. 05its AI stays inside its risk and compliance limits;
6. 06it has the right tool for each job;
7. 07a named person owns every agent.

The record behind each of the seven, whether a dated baseline, a written rule or a named owner, comes with the framework as it runs; it is not a separate service.

How the work runs

Five steps, and you can stop after any of them.

The work runs in five steps: Ground, Align, Plan, Build and Keep. Ground comes first and starts before any AI, with who the business is, what it holds to be right, who decides and where it stood in numbers. By about week three you hold a one-page picture of the business as it stands, ready for your board, with the first answer to the vendor test. A firm that has already started does not start over, because its baseline is drawn from the last closed year before its first pilot.

For a firm of up to ten departments, the first three steps together have a founding price of $22,500 and a list price of $45,000. In the fourth step your own team, your vendor or a specialist we admit does the building, because MortarCloud.ai builds nothing in that step. In the fifth, the Trusted Living Twin, our software licensed to you, presents your map from inside your own environment, and we do not host it.

How it is built, what you own, and what we license

Our process builds your knowledge graph, the graph is yours, and the software that presents it is licensed from us.

Our knowledge-building process is our own method and tooling for turning what your business already knows into connected knowledge with a source behind every entry. Today AI-assisted extraction reads the documents and exports you provide, people review what it finds, and each reviewed piece is added to a versioned graph file. Live connectors to your systems, continuous automated maintenance, analytics, scenario modeling and machine learning are planned, and none of them is part of an engagement yet.

What the process builds is your organization's knowledge graph, which we call the map of your business: your goals, people, processes, systems and data, how they connect, and where each entry came from. You own it and you keep it. It is a file in your own environment, so it stays with you whichever vendor or tool you change.

The Trusted Living Twin is our software, licensed to you, which reads the graph and presents it for decisions. It runs in your environment and we do not host it. The license covers new versions, updates to its rules and templates, and support, and we keep no client data after delivery. The Trusted Living Agent Framework™ is the method that governs the process, the graph and the twin, setting what the graph must hold and where a person must decide.

See it before you decide

A firm where nothing is at stake, and then your own.

Hollister Reed is a fictional demonstration firm, a regional accounting practice built for the purpose, and its living map is built from end to end on trustleague.ai: the outline on the first morning, the register of every agent and vendor, the gaps with their names, the baseline, and the picture at the end. It is the only public map, because a client's map is confidential and stays in the client's own environment. The view after the five steps is an illustrative scenario: its figures are simulated, and none is a client's result.

When you have seen it, a five-question screen on the same site draws your first sketch from your answers. Nothing you enter is sent or stored, and the result page sends you back here when you want what you see.

How it starts

The first step is one engagement.

The first step is the AI Value & Trust Baseline, which we deliver as Ground over about six weeks. By about week three you hold the first picture, a one-page view of the business as it stands, ready for your board; by the end of Ground you hold the written who and why, a dated baseline from your own records, and a register of what was found, each entry marked as supported or still open, all of which you keep whether or not there is a second step. It is contracted as one engagement for a fixed fee, paid half at signature and half after the one-page picture, and the conversation about it begins on the intake page.

When a relationship earns more than the first step, three shapes carry it: a strategy retainer, executive advisory and board service. Each is described on the Readiness page.

Who is behind it

Built on doing the work at enterprise scale.

MortarCloud.ai was founded by Dale Martin, who was the senior manager in charge of program management and responsible AI governance at Thermo Fisher Scientific, a global enterprise of more than 120,000 people, with a team of program managers and AI governance managers. That program was among the first to build AI at enterprise scale: a multi-million-dollar program of custom AI, weekly innovation hours across the field as it evolved, and multi-agent work showcased at a major platform vendor's annual conference in 2024, while two of the largest consulting firms came to learn from what it had built. Many of its pilots failed, and most failed for the same reason: they started in the middle. The method on this site comes from that experience, was built and tested on Dale's own AI operating system from early 2025, and is what we bring now to firms a fraction of that size, where the same pattern runs faster.

MortarCloud.ai is an advisory firm independent of every third-party AI vendor. We take no commissions and recommend no tool we are paid to recommend. The only software we license is our own proprietary software, including the Trusted Living Twin, which runs in your environment, and your own teams or the builders you choose do the implementation work. Our practice runs on the Trusted Living Agent Framework™ from Dale's book, Bears & Mosquitoes: five pillars, each made living by three signatures, so that an agent carries its own governance. The argument for why governance built from the outside falls behind is on the Point of View page.

Bears & Mosquitoes

Building Trusted AI from the Inside Out

The field guide behind this practice. Every engagement runs on the framework the book teaches, and the book states the problem the engagement answers.

bearsandmosquitoes.ai

Follow the work

The essays, as they are published.

We publish one essay for each idea the method rests on, and each one lives on the estate with a copy on Substack. Leave an email address to join the essay list.

Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe.

Start the conversation

Tell us where you stand.

If you want the first step, the intake is the shorter road. For anything else, this form reaches us directly.

Reaches dale@dalemartin.ai directly.