About
Duess Strategies is an applied-AI advisory practice that builds working systems for agricultural export organizations and mid-market companies in traditional industries.
I'm fluent in business strategy, change management, and technical execution. Most people skew one way. The strategist who can't ship. The engineer who can't read a room. The change consultant who's never built anything.
I do all three. I've built and sold companies, advised C-suites, and I'm technical enough to prototype, evaluate and direct what gets built.
That's what makes a fractional CAIO work. Without all three, you're just hiring another advisor.
Track record
Services
Five services. Every one of them ends with your team owning what was built.
Embedded AI leadership for organizations that need direction but not a $300,000 hire. I join the leadership team two to four days a month, direct implementation alongside your people, and hand the systems over when they run without me.
Automated monitoring of hundreds of sources across multiple languages, filtered down to what your team actually needs to read. Replaces the daily news triage that usually falls to whoever has least to do that morning.
Trip reports, market studies, spreadsheets and years of email turned into something you can ask a question of in plain language. The answer comes back with its source, so it can be checked rather than trusted.
For organizations running MAP, FMD and RAPP funding: the numbers and activities you already track, assembled into the formats FAS asks for. Your staff reviews and signs off. Nobody rebuilds a report by hand each cycle.
A usable AI policy, data-residency guidance, and the change management that makes people actually use what gets built. This is the part most implementations skip, and it is why most of them stall.
Differentiators
There is no account layer and no handoff to a delivery team. You talk to one person from first call to handover, and that person writes the code, runs the evaluations and sits in the room when it is presented internally.
Engagements are measured by what is running at the end of them, not by pages delivered. Current work in the field includes a weekly market-intelligence pipeline covering seven languages and a searchable atlas built from years of field reporting.
Duess Strategies is a USAEDC member, accepted July 2026, and Andreas has spent fifteen years in food, agriculture and CPG. The reporting burden, the funding cycles and the internal politics are familiar rather than researched.
Andreas teaches AI implementation at the Ivey Business School Accelerator. The same explanation your team gets is the one the classroom gets, because the goal is that your staff can maintain the system without a support contract.
Three-month minimum, most engagements run six to twelve months, and ownership transfers at the end. The stated objective is to become unnecessary, which is the opposite of how retained advisory usually works.
Fit
The practice
German-born, UK-trained. Fifteen years in food, agriculture and CPG, following earlier brand and digital work in London for Google, Cisco, Adobe and HP.
He also co-founded FishDog, a synthetic research platform running studies across 14 countries, which is why claims about what AI can and cannot do here come from building it rather than reading about it.
Duess Strategies is deliberately owner-operated. Engagements are delivered by Andreas directly, with specialist contractors brought in only where a project genuinely needs them and always disclosed in advance.
That caps how many clients the practice can carry at once. It is a constraint, stated plainly, rather than a scaling story.
Andreas lectures on AI implementation at the Ivey Business School Accelerator, writes The Field Report, contributes the Future Bites column to Food in Canada, and speaks at industry events including the USAEDC Annual Forum.
Working together
Reference
FAQ
Duess Strategies builds working AI systems for organizations in traditional industries, with a focus on agricultural export. The practice covers strategy, implementation, change management and handover, rather than advice alone.
Embedded AI leadership on a part-time retainer instead of a full-time executive hire. The role sets direction, directs the build alongside your existing team, manages adoption, and transfers ownership when the work is done.
Retainers start at $10,000 per month, against a full-time Chief AI Officer at $300,000 to $400,000 a year. Scope and price are set against your size, complexity and where you are in the work, so the figure is where the conversation starts, not a rate card.
Three months is the minimum. Most run six to twelve. The objective is a self-sufficient team rather than a standing dependency, so engagements are designed to end.
Yes. The pattern holds anywhere a small team carries a large reporting and data burden. Food, agriculture and CPG are where the deepest sector knowledge sits, but the work is not limited to them.
No. It removes the busywork that buries existing staff, which is the whole argument on a small team. The same people produce better work and spend more time on the parts that need judgment.
You do. Systems are built on your data, in your environment, alongside your people. Documentation, credentials and ownership transfer at the end of the engagement.
Remotely by default, on site where the engagement needs it, across the United States, Canada and Europe.
Experience
Get in touch
Twenty minutes, no deck, no pitch. Whether you need a fractional CAIO, help getting more out of your team, or a keynote speaker.
