Mortar Cloud · Independent advice on artificial intelligence (AI)
We make your business durable through AI change.
You own one living map of your business, so you can show your board what AI changed and replace any tool or vendor without starting over.
The vendor test
If your main AI vendor disappeared tomorrow, how many days until you were running again, and who would decide?
- 01We start before the AI. Your goals, rules and owners are written down, and your own ledger is frozen into a dated baseline.
- 02Every agent has a name beside it, and the ones nobody owns are shown.
- 03You keep the map, and we sell no tools.
- 04The method comes from running responsible AI governance at Thermo Fisher Scientific, a company of more than 120,000 people, and we apply it to firms a fraction of its size.
The first step has a founding price of $7,500, and you can stop after the first one-page picture at $3,750.
The evidence
Seven things a durable business can show.
A durable business can show that:
- 01it can change vendors without starting over;
- 02its AI, and the data it touches, is built to carry its own rules wherever it runs;
- 03its AI serves what the business is trying to do;
- 04its AI pays back, measured against a dated baseline;
- 05its AI stays inside its risk and compliance limits;
- 06it has the right tool for each job;
- 07a named person owns every agent.
Each of the seven is shown on the map with the evidence behind it, whether that is a dated baseline, a written rule or a named owner, so that you and your board can check it for yourselves rather than take our word for it.
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.
The first three steps together have a founding price of $22,500. In the fourth step your own team, your vendor or a specialist we admit does the building, because Mortar Cloud builds nothing. In the fifth, the map runs in your own environment and is kept current under a license; we do not host it.
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 every real client's map is confidential and stays in the client's own environment.
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, Ground, has one scope, one deliverable and a dated baseline 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.
If you want this
How an engagement begins
Who the first step is for, what we each commit to, and how the conversation starts.
Alongside the first step
Readiness
Where trust in your AI is already strong, where it is missing, and what that exposes you to.
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.
Mortar Cloud 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.
Mortar Cloud is an independent advisory firm, and we sell no tools and build nothing. 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.aiFollow 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.