AI portfolios that earn their budget.
Ayllon Tech Advisory — Aarón Ayllón Benítez, PhD. I own enterprise AI and ML platforms at BASF Digital Solutions: what gets built, what gets scaled, what gets handed to a better owner, and what gets shut down. I bring the same discipline to mid-size companies, scale-ups and publicly funded programmes.
Four things worth paying an outsider for
AI portfolio review & rationalisation
A structured read of every AI and data initiative you fund: what deserves more, what belongs with a better-fit owner, and what should be closed. I have made all three calls on platforms I owned myself and defended them in front of senior leadership.
MLOps platform setup & reusable templates
The plumbing that makes the second project cheaper than the first: standardised pipelines, a peer-reviewed template library, and adoption measured through active users and time saved per user rather than slideware.
Build-vs-buy & vendor evaluation
Proof-of-concept design, benchmarking of competing tools and a written recommendation you can hand to a budget holder — covering delivery and partnership models, not only licence prices.
Team building, hiring & mentoring
Hiring plans, interview design, career paths and coaching for the managers who report to you — including the underperformance conversations most organisations route around.
Mid-size companies
Enough data to matter, not enough people to run a platform team. I help you choose the few things worth industrialising and stop paying for the rest.
Startups & scale-ups
Technical depth on tap for founders: architecture and model reviews, MLOps foundations, and an honest read on what your AI claims can actually support.
Public sector & EU-funded programmes
Work-package design, governance and semantic standards for consortia — from someone who has authored and published an ontology governance model, not only cited one.
Advisory day / diagnostic
A single day, remote or on site, on one decision you have to make. You leave with the recommendation in writing.
Fixed-scope project
A defined deliverable within a few weeks: a portfolio review, a vendor benchmark, a platform blueprint or a hiring plan.
Fractional AI leadership
Recurring presence as the AI leader you do not yet have — typically two to four days a month, steering the roadmap and the people.
Capacity is deliberately limited to two to four days a month alongside a full-time platform role, so engagements are scoped around decisions rather than staffing. Working languages: Spanish, English and French. Based in Madrid, remote across Europe.
Build the bench, not just the backlog
Deliberate hiring, individual career paths and coaching of the managers who report into the role — including the hard conversations, because a team's ceiling is set by its weakest link.
Be willing to kill your own product
I recommended closing a platform I owned once the ROI and adoption data no longer supported it, and transferred another to a better-fit owner — both defended with numbers in front of senior leadership.
Translate between worlds
Challenging model choices with ML engineers in the morning and framing the same problem as a business case for executives in the afternoon. This is where most analytics value is won or lost.
La persona detrás de las decisiones
Soy Aarón Ayllón Benítez, doctor en Informática y especialista en inteligencia artificial. Mi trabajo consiste en convertir ambición tecnológica en decisiones que una organización pueda sostener.
He trabajado entre la investigación, el código y la dirección de negocio. Por eso mi asesoramiento empieza con la realidad: qué problema merece resolverse, qué equipo puede hacerlo y cómo sabremos si la inversión funciona.
Tell me what you are trying to decide
Describe the decision in front of you — a platform you are unsure about, a vendor shortlist, a team that is not delivering. You get a reply within two working days, and a straight answer about whether I am the right person for it.