Recommended
Not at £9m by March. Offer £7.5m with a 40% earn-out tied to connected revenue, or license first.
Risk · Commercial · Governance · M&A adviser
Sentinel8 · The evolving board
The team evolves. The knowledge compounds.
An evolving team of fractional human experts and agentic advisers that scales and flexes with the ever-changing needs of your organisation. One enduring institutional memory, so each decision benefits from the knowledge of those that came before.
People
AI agents
Human judgement×Agentic capability×Horizon scanning×Institutional memory
Ask the board
A question goes in. Every perspective works it. An answer comes out.
- QShould we acquire Calder Sensing for about £9m?
- QHow do we lift gross margin from 31% to 35%?
- QHire an external COO, or promote from within?
- QWhat should we be preparing for over the next three years?
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Commercial · Culture · Pricing strategist
Recommended
Promote, with a 12-month scaling adviser and a site-launch lead for the second site.
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Prepared
Three signals to prepare for: sensor price deflation, customer consolidation and stricter data rules. An options paper is ready for each.
Innovation · Risk · Horizon scanning
Example questions and answers for a fictional company. People decide; agents advise.
The idea
A living board, aligned to the decisions in front of it.
Sentinel8 is a changing combination of experienced people and specialist AI agents. Human expertise enters for an acquisition, an industry expansion or a leadership transition. Agentic advisers monitor evidence, prepare questions, challenge plans and follow actions through.
Approved learning from each assignment becomes part of the company's enduring knowledge base. The team is fluid. The knowledge is continuous. Board authority remains with the client's appointed directors and authorised decision makers.
Changes with the business
- Human specialists, agentic advisers and their assignments
- Questions, opportunities and risks under review
- Market conditions and operating priorities
- Meeting participants and leadership roles
Continues across the business
- Company context, strategy and agreed objectives
- Decisions, rationales, assumptions and outcomes
- Evidence provenance, action history and lessons
- Permissions, governance rules and knowledge ownership
The team
A team that scales and flexes with you.
A core of permanent members takes part in every decision. Around them the team grows, contracts and changes shape with the ever-changing needs of your organisation: a finance expert for a transaction, an operator for integration, a sector adviser for expansion, and specialist agents active between meetings. Contributors change. The context remains available to authorised successors.
People
Permanent members, and people for a defined mandate.
Your administrators name the permanent members: the people who take part in every decision, are always asked, and whose answer the chair is warned about before deciding without it. Around them, a curated bench of fractional board-level operators, sector specialists, functional experts and independent challengers join for a specific problem, period or mandate, and leave behind a structured handover.
Agentic advisers that work between meetings.
Task-capable agents that distinguish evidence from inference, show their sources and ask for a human decision when authority is required. Every agent declares:
- Scope
- Tools
- Memory access
- Escalation threshold
- Strategy agentTracks the agreed objectives and tests plans against them.
- Commercial growth agentWatches markets, customers and pipeline.
- Finance agentChecks forecasts against actuals and assumptions.
- Operations agentFollows actions through and surfaces delivery issues.
- Technology agentAssesses systems, change and technical exposure.
- People agentMaps leadership, capability and succession.
- Governance agentKeeps decision rights, conflicts and obligations in view.
- Sector specialist agentBrings an industry's regulation and dynamics.
Fractional expertise
Fractional people. Permanent knowledge.
Much of the best board-level expertise is now fractional: a CFO for a transaction, a COO for a scale-up, a non-executive for a season. Sentinel8 makes that model work for you by keeping what they knew after they leave.
- The right seniority, for the time you need. Fractional CFOs, COOs, CMOs, CTOs and non-executives join for a mandate, a deal or a season, on terms that fit the work.
- Their thinking is captured as they work. Decisions, reasoning, models, sources and the context behind each call are recorded with the organisation, not left in one person's inbox.
- When they move on, what they knew stays. Whoever comes next, fractional, permanent or agentic, starts from a traceable handover, not from zero.
The horizon
See it coming. Be ready when it arrives.
The platform never stops looking outward. On a schedule you set, it reads the sources you choose and searches the web for your watch topics, keeps what bears on your organisation, and rewrites the external briefing every agent reads before it advises. What it learns outside shapes the advice inside.
Landscape scanning
What is moving around you.
Markets, competitors, customers, regulation, supply chains and capital markets, watched continuously for signals that touch your strategy. A weekly landscape brief, with sources.
Innovation scanning
What could change the game.
Emerging technologies, new business models and adjacent entrants, each assessed for relevance, maturity and time to impact on your business.
Preparation
Ready before the question is asked.
Scenario rehearsals, pre-mortems and prepared options, so when a signal becomes a decision the board already has the evidence, the alternatives and the right people lined up.
Example signalAreaHorizonStatus
Low-cost sensor entrant targets the mid-marketCompetitionNowWatching
Sector regulator consults on metering data rulesRegulation6–18 monthsPreparing
Consolidation among large utility customersMarket6–18 monthsOptions ready
Solid-state flow sensing reaches pilot scaleTechnology3–5 yearsWatching
The memory
A company that remembers.
Decisions, evidence, actions and outcomes form a traceable company memory. New contributors arrive informed. Existing contributors see what has changed. Earlier judgements remain connected to their reasons and results.
The knowledge layer is client-owned. Contradictions and stale information are surfaced for review rather than silently treated as truth.
The work continues between meetings.
Agentic advisers monitor agreed signals, develop options, challenge assumptions, surface emerging issues and follow through on actions. Human advisers guide, test and decide with the people accountable for the business.
The orchestration.
Sentinel8 identifies the expertise a question calls for, convenes the relevant people and agents, prepares a board-ready view, records the decision and follows execution. The team adapts when the company's priorities change.
The decision
You choose who decides.
For every question, the chair chooses whose input the decision rests on, and how much weight each side carries. Your people stay accountable whichever you choose.
People
Your people decide.
Your permanent members, and anyone else the question needs, are each emailed a short questionnaire: their position, their confidence and the questions that matter. Their view is summarised faithfully, with no AI opinion added.
Agents
The shadow board forms the view.
Six AI agents, each with a persona and a remit, give independent opinions. The Chair hears them and recommends a resolution for you to adopt or reject.
Collaborative
Two rounds, weighted by you.
People and agents give independent views. Then the agents challenge the people's answers and the people can revise theirs. You set the weighting, say 70% people and 30% agents, and the recommendation reflects it.
Agents you develop.
The chair educates each agent for the company: principles to apply, facts about the business, board preferences, and documents to study. Every agent keeps a track record of how its advice compared with what was decided and how it turned out.
Agents that learn here.
They learn from your feedback on their opinions, from decision outcomes and from horizon scanning. Everything the platform proposes waits for the chair's approval; only approved lessons shape an agent's advice.
How it works
One cycle, carried forward.
- 01
Understand the company
Establish priorities, sources, permissions and decision rights. With permission, connect the documents, systems, plans, meetings and people that matter, and establish what is known, uncertain, outdated or restricted.
- 02
Assemble the right team
Name the permanent members who sit on every decision, then add human and agentic advisers for the work at hand. Their remit, access, duration and authority are explicit.
- 03
Work the decision
Choose who decides: people, agents or both together. Examine evidence, alternatives, dissent, consequences and next actions. Agents research, test assumptions and challenge; human advisers bring experience, judgement, relationships and challenge of their own.
- 04
Learn and carry forward
Record what was decided, why, by whom and on what evidence, then review it against the result. The agents learn from the outcome, with the chair's approval. When advisers rotate, a successor receives the authorised context and can trace it to source.
For boards
Built for change.
For founder-led companies, ambitious mid-market boards, PE-backed businesses and groups whose priorities, leadership and opportunities change faster than a fixed advisory structure can serve.
First Decision
What is assembledA focused team of human and agentic advisers around one live board question.
Continuing valueDecision brief, evidence map and an initial memory record.
Living Board
What is assembledA team that flexes with recurring priorities, with agentic work between meetings.
Continuing valueOngoing decision cycle, action follow-through and maintained company memory.
Group Intelligence
What is assembledTeams across business units or portfolio companies, with appropriate separation.
Continuing valueShared patterns where permitted, local decision histories and group-level learning.
Expertise changes. Understanding deepens.
An evolving team connected to a durable record of what the organisation knows, decides and learns.
Try the interactive demo