Mark Bennett

I'm the former CEO of Sentry Enterprises, an industrial-tech startup I led through eight years of growth and 10x+ valuation appreciation, scaling the company well into 8-figure territory before stepping away in 2025. Since then, I've focused on a problem most companies are quietly struggling with: how to adopt AI as a real operational capability across an organization. Before Sentry, I spent 13 years at CME Group leading global technology operations across Europe, Asia and the Americas, including building a 250-person global operation. My career spans 35+ years in technology, from aerospace to financial markets to industrial tech.

AdviceForge is my fractional Chief AI Officer practice for small-to-mid-market companies. A fractional is a part-time fully embedded leader. When I take a retainer engagement, I sit in the leadership team and am accountable for outcomes alongside the existing leadership. I am not a vendor or an external advisor. The pattern I keep seeing across the conversations I have: companies have already piloted AI in three or four places, none of it is producing what they hoped, and no one is sure what to do next. The work is workflow redesign and AI proficiency, not more tool licenses.

I can talk to your audience about how small-to-mid-market companies should approach AI adoption, why most AI pilots stall and what to do about it, what embedded fractional Chief AI Officer work looks like from inside the leadership team and how to turn AI experiments into operational capability.