Chris Fairfax
Why Mare & Oak
Chris started Mare & Oak for a simple reason: to make life better for real people by bringing clarity and structure to the way businesses adopt AI. This is a genuinely disorienting moment. Executives, team leaders, and the people doing the daily work are all navigating the same fog at once, and the stakes — for companies and for careers — are real. He believes what that moment calls for is real consultative partnership: enterprise-grade expertise paired with a proven process, aimed squarely at the outcomes that matter to the people involved.
Expertise proven in production
That conviction is backed by a decade of building the kind of software businesses actually run on. Most recently, Chris led a product portfolio at Hitachi Solutions spanning workflow, contact-center productivity, and AI — partnering with four engineering pods and helping steer a quarter-billion-dollar pipeline. He doesn't consult on AI from the sidelines: in 2025 alone he took five AI agents from concept to production, including a test case authoring agent that dramatically increased test coverage and QA throughput for new feature releases. When Chris talks about what these tools can and can't do for a business, it's from the inside.
Every seat at the table
That range is unusually broad. Over the years Chris has sat in nearly every seat around the software table — support, training, marketing, engineering, architecture, and product leadership — and helped ship platforms now running on five continents. He came up as a tradesman rather than through a traditional credential, learning the craft one real project at a time. It's the reason he can move fluently between engineers and leaders: he has been both, and he knows the work looks different from every chair.
How he works
That empathy shapes how he works. Every engagement starts with the outcome a client is actually after, not a pre-packaged deliverable. From there Chris maps the real paths to it and weighs the trade-offs alongside the team — and when the terrain is genuinely unclear, he'll run a small, deliberate experiment to learn what's true rather than guess. The plan updates as the evidence comes in, and each step is taken together. Output matters, but it's what good decisions produce; it was never the point on its own.
Under pressure
It's an approach that holds up under pressure. On one early AI project, an initial build fell short on data quality and the client was ready to walk. Rather than push a slicker demo, Chris built a way for the client's own team to test and refine the system until they could trust it themselves. It didn't just save the relationship — over the following year, the product handed a thirteen-person team back five hours each, every week.
Away from the work
Away from the work, Chris's world centers on his family. He's married to the love of his life, and together they're raising two children though adoption, whom they love and couldn't be prouder of. He's also a gardener and a saltwater angler, and by his own admission the kind of person who would rather repair an old thing than replace it. It's more than a preference; it's how he approaches software, teams, and client relationships alike — understand why something is struggling and mend it, rather than tear it down and start over. The name Mare & Oak carries both of those loves, the sea and the tended ground, along with the same patient, restorative instinct he brings to every engagement.
Let's talk about where you're headed.
Every engagement starts with the outcome you're actually after. Book a call and we'll map the real paths to it together.
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