Who’s behind it
Business thinking. Hands-on building.
Sentinel Consulting is a two-founder AI firm in Cincinnati, Ohio. Eric Rakestraw comes from engineering and Collin Bass from finance, which means the person deciding whether something is worth building and the person building it are the same two people. We run our own company on systems we built.
Why we exist
We exist to help people spend more time on work that moves their business forward.
Most of the businesses we meet are not short on effort. They are short on hours, because too many of those hours go into copying information between systems, chasing updates, and answering the same question again. That work is invisible on a P&L and expensive in practice.
We also run our own company on systems we built: our CRM, our email triage, our meeting debriefs. The first client we automated was us, which is a large part of why we are comfortable saying what does and does not work in deployment.
Cincinnati, Ohio · Roebling BridgeEric Rakestraw
Co-Founder
LinkedIn ↗Eric Rakestraw is co-founder of Sentinel Consulting. He comes from an engineering background, builds our systems himself, and keeps current on the tools and platforms: what each one is good for, and where it falls short. He is the reason a recommendation and the thing that gets built come from the same person.
Collin Bass
Co-Founder
LinkedIn ↗Collin Bass is co-founder of Sentinel Consulting. He comes from a finance background, runs the audit, and knows where businesses lose time and money whatever the industry. He is the one asking what a process actually costs before anyone gets excited about automating it.
Practical AI. Hands-on experience.
Our founders have trained 200+ professionals and built 700+ AI agents through enterprise training programs.
Engineering + finance
Both sides of the same problem, which is why the recommendation survives contact with the build.
Founder-led
The people who scope the work do the work. No account manager in between.
Cincinnati, Ohio
Local, and in the room when that is what the work needs.
Common questions
About Sentinel
Sentinel Consulting LLC is an AI strategy and implementation firm in Cincinnati, Ohio, founded in 2026 by Eric Rakestraw and Collin Bass. We work with privately held companies in the region, typically 10 to 100 employees, finding where AI creates measurable value and then building it.
Because we are from here and the businesses we serve are here. Being local means we can sit in a room with an owner and their team, which matters a lot in the assess phase. Owner-operated companies in this region are exactly the businesses large consultancies do not serve well.
Small on purpose. Two founders and a small team, which means the people who scope your work are the people who do it. There is no account manager between you and the person building the system.
Ask us how we would deliver it and what happens if you stop working with us. We build in your accounts, on your infrastructure, and hand systems over so they keep running without us. A firm that cannot answer that clearly is a bigger risk than a small one that can.
Find where AI pays in your business.
The audit is free and the roadmap is yours to keep, whether you build it with us or not.
Free · No pitch · A plan you keep