Built by a business owner, for business owners.
GearHead AI exists because nothing on the market could replace what we'd lost, an assistant who knew the business. So we built it ourselves.
The Kathleen story
Years ago, I had an assistant named Kathleen. She knew every client, every project, every quirk of how I worked. She'd remember things I forgot to mention. She'd connect dots I hadn't noticed.
When Kathleen left, I tried to replace her. I bought every productivity tool on the market. CRMs, calendars, project trackers, knowledge bases. Then came the AI chatbots, ChatGPT, Claude, and the rest. Each one was clever. None of them came close.
The problem wasn't intelligence. The big AI models are genuinely impressive. The problem was memory, and context, and continuity. They didn't know my clients. They didn't remember last week's decision. They couldn't connect a problem this morning to a similar problem six months ago. Every conversation started from scratch.
Kathleen never did. That's what made her irreplaceable.
So I started building what I actually wanted: an AI that worked the way Kathleen did. Remembered everything. Understood the business. Knew when I was stressed about a client, and which other clients had the same problem six months ago. That became GearHead.
What started as a personal project, solving my own frustration as a business owner, grew into something other owners and professionals wanted, too. Lawyers using it to track every matter. Therapists using it to keep clinical continuity across sessions. Contractors using it to handle phones, estimates, and job costing without hiring more office staff.
It turns out I wasn't the only one who needed her.
Why we're different
Most AI companies are racing for AGI. They're aiming at consumer scale, enterprise customers, or government contracts. Their products serve millions of people and know nothing specific about any of them.
GearHead is aimed at the opposite. We're built for the business owner who has spent the last 5, 10, or 30 years building something, who has clients, projects, history, relationships, and decisions that actually matter. We're built for the self-employed professional who doesn't have time to re-explain her workflow to a chatbot every Monday morning. We're built for the team that wants to share knowledge across users without it leaking to the wrong people.
That's a different product than ChatGPT. It's a different product than Microsoft Copilot. And it's a different product than what's coming next from any of them, because the architecture is fundamentally different. We model your business. They process your prompts.
The principles behind every decision.
Honest over hype
We don't claim features we haven't shipped. We don't compare against straw men. Every claim on this site is verifiable in our codebase or in our competitors' published documentation. If we say something works, it works.
SMB first
We're not chasing Fortune 500 contracts. We're building for owners and professionals who run real businesses, solo, with partners, or with teams. Every feature decision asks: does this help someone running a real business?
Your data is yours
Memory, integrations, and conversations belong to your account. Role-based permissions control who sees what inside your team. We don't sell data, we don't train our models on your business, and we don't show your work to other customers.
Show up like a partner
Every customer gets a real walkthrough, real onboarding, and real support, not a chatbot in a help widget. When something breaks, you reach a human who knows the system. That's how we'd want to be treated, so that's how we treat customers.
GearHead AI, at a glance.
GearHead AI, LLC was spun out from Media Mechanic, the Portland-based digital agency that's served small and mid-sized businesses since 2008. The platform's memory architecture and multi-agent system are patent-pending innovations.
From the founder
I'm not trying to build a unicorn. I'm trying to build the tool I wished existed when I was running a small business with too few people and too many things to track.
If that sounds like what you need too, let's talk.
Want to see what we built?
Book a 30-minute walkthrough and see GearHead working with real data from your industry.