I Built an Independent AI Practice. Then I Took a Job.

Last year I went independent.

I launched my own AI consultancy. I built 25+ apps using vibe coding tools without writing traditional code. I published a newsletter that grew an audience of practitioners who actually build things. I advised FTSE 100 companies (and start ups) on AI strategy, delivered real work, and answered to nobody but myself.

Atomic Theory Consulting was working. Real clients, real outcomes.

So why did I just take a full-time role as Human Productivity Lead at Tomoro AI?

The ceiling: not revenue, but scale

There's a version of the independent AI consultant story that sounds perfect. You pick your clients, set your rates, build your brand, and own everything.

The reality is messier.

The two things I've poured myself into for the last two years are human productivity with AI and actually building with AI. Not writing about them from a distance. Doing them. Testing what works when real people in real companies try to change how they operate.

I could help one team redesign their workflows. I could show a leadership group what's actually possible with AI beyond the chatbot demo. I could build tools that proved a point. But the thing I care most about, making AI productivity an organisational capability rather than an individual trick, that requires more than one person with a newsletter.

Individual gains don't automatically propagate. I've seen it over and over: one person on a team gets 10x faster with AI, and nothing changes around them. The org doesn't redesign. The processes don't adapt. The team doesn't learn. The capability stays trapped in one person's browser tabs.

Fixing that requires working at enterprise scale. With real clients. Over real timeframes. In partnership with a team.

Why Tomoro

I'm not someone who takes a job because it's a job. After 25 years across Finance, Retail, and the technology sector, I know what consulting looks like when it works and when it's theatre.

Most AI consultancies leave behind a PDF and call it transformation. A strategy deck with 47 slides, a maturity assessment, maybe a roadmap nobody follows. The client feels informed. Nothing changes.

Tomoro does something different. They build things in front of clients. Working tools, changed teams, internal capability that stays after they leave. They're partnered with OpenAI and NVIDIA, and they have the depth to back up the ambition.

This is a company that thinks the way I think: build, don't deck.

My role is to lead Human Productivity. Individual, team, organisation. The exact problem I've been circling for two years, except now with the support and infrastructure to actually move the needle.

What Atomic Theory taught me

Atomic Theory Consulting (ATC) forced me to sharpen every idea I had. When you're the only person in the room, your frameworks either work or they don't. If people aren’t listening, they’re walking away. There's no team to hide behind.

ATC taught me that the best AI interventions start with conversation, not deployment. That sector politics matter before you build anything. That productivity isn't just "do more, faster." It's about helping people navigate a fundamentally new way of working, redesigning roles and processes around new capabilities, not just bolting AI onto old ones. And that the gap between "this person is more productive with AI" and "this organisation is more productive with AI" is the hardest, most important problem in enterprise AI right now.

Those lessons are coming with me. They're the foundation of everything I'll build at Tomoro.

What doesn't change

The Atomic Builder newsletter continues. It remains independent, and it remains mine. I'll still write about what's actually working in human productivity and AI building, with the same voice, the same honest takes.

If anything, having deeper skin in the game makes the writing better.

A few thank yous

To Dave Pit at Tomoro, for making the introduction that led me here.

To everyone who has so far read, shared, and supported The Atomic Builder over the past 18 months. You showed me the ideas were landing, and that gave me the confidence to keep pushing.

The Atomic Builder is written by Faisal Shariff, Human Productivity Lead at Tomoro AI. Views are my own.