Senior Advisor
Chad Boersema
eleved.ai
Our House
Porch & Main is a community of small business advisors serving the people and places traditional finance was never built for. Every engagement is worked as a team, the knowledge is shared instead of gatekept, and every client served helps fund the start of the next business coming up behind them.
The advisors on this porch chose that work on purpose.
Step onto the porch to see our whole house.
Why I’m here
Every time a new technology arrives, the same sorting happens. The organizations with money and staff get consultants, pilots, and a roadmap. Everyone else gets a free trial and a warning. I’ve spent thirty years inside institutions watching that gap open, and it has never once been about who was smart enough. The people doing the hardest work with the least were never the ones who couldn’t figure it out. They were the ones nobody bothered to teach.
AI is the widest version of that gap I have ever seen. Eleved.ai is where I help close it.
The background
Chad started inside higher education in 1991 as a resident assistant and never really left. He found his way into a registrar’s office, got hooked on the machinery behind how institutions actually function, and has spent every year since on the inside of it. He didn’t learn how organizations handle change by studying them from a distance. He learned it by being the person responsible when the change showed up.
He has spent more than thirty years building the data and information systems real organizations run on: first on the vendor side helping colleges run their student and data systems, then back inside leading student information systems, business intelligence, and information services, and today as Chief Data Officer. He has been in the room when a new technology gets approved, and still there two years later when it either works or quietly doesn’t. Not the demo. The deployment. He advises with Porch & Main because the same shift is now landing on small businesses and nonprofits, and most of them have no one in that room at all.
He holds a Master of Science in Information Systems, which means the person advising you on AI understands not just what the tools promise, but what happens to an organization after they’re installed and everyone goes back to work. He is the founder of eleved.ai, where he does practical AI readiness and education, and writes Before the Committee Meets, a newsletter on AI, data, and leadership. It’s the thinking that happens before the formal decisions get made.