Advisor, builder, and operator.
Benjamin Douglas Ray is a founder, CEO, investor, and board advisor who helps leaders translate AI opportunity and complex strategic choices into commercially grounded action.
Over 30+ years, Benjamin has built, scaled, funded, advised, restructured, and exited companies across AI, fintech, financial services, real estate, hospitality, energy, wellness, and consumer markets.
His work combines founder experience, investor logic, boardroom perspective, growth strategy, product and venture design, capital readiness, executive intelligence, and AI-native operating practice.
A specific, verifiable pattern.
Founder of Forum 21 Integrated Communications. Founder and CMO of Xylem CCI, running digital campaigns for CPG and QSR brands from Denver to NYC, Chicago, and London, England through to its acquisition. Founder of Jett Brand Companies — launched, scaled, and exited. Founder of Eight Saints Organic. Founder of STRT Fund, LP. CMO at Tread Global International, driving a 40% increase in global brand awareness. SVP of AI & Digital Transformation at Spotsurfer, architecting a patent-pending AI-driven marketplace for resort partners, and since 2011 has helped numerous founders prepare for fundraising, launch and scale, and has launched numerous products, services, and applications.
Decision Governance, and AI Hubs.
His advisory practice, operating since 2011, is built around the Decision Governance framework. FIN (Financial Intelligence Navigator) — an AI-powered intelligence hub for wealth-management teams, pulling client documents, discovery inputs, CRM records, and planning workflows into one source-linked, advisor-reviewed plan — is the clearest example of what decision governance looks like built into an actual product. A parallel AI hub built for the insurance vertical is already in motion.
Also a standing interest: hospitality and consumer engagement, bridging new AI-enabled data into genuinely new business models.
Benjamin works with leaders not only to advise on AI strategy, but to identify opportunities, shape commercial models, build AI-enabled products and intelligence platforms, and create the conditions for those bets to produce measurable value.
AI can improve analysis, expand options, and accelerate execution. It cannot replace the leadership judgment, accountability, and responsibility required to make high-stakes business decisions.