The internet, in the late 1990s, was a loud, chaotic, and gloriously messy place. It was a digital frontier being settled in real time, a cacophony of dial-up modems, blinking banner ads, and audacious dot-com dreams. It was a world of disruption, moving at a speed that felt both exhilarating and terrifying. And it was here, in the engine room of this nascent digital universe, that a 20-year-old Jessica Fontana-Eddowes found her calling. Her job, at the pioneering web portal XOOM.com, was to make sense of the chaos. Her task was to manage the site’s advertising operations, a firehose of data in a pre-automated world, a place where tracking over a billion ad impressions was not a job for a server log, but for a person, armed with little more than a spreadsheet and an unshakeable belief in the power of systems.That same choice exists today: leaders can clap from the sidelines, or march with us to build the systems that thrive in disruption.
This single, formative experience set the course for a nearly three-decade career spent one step ahead of the next big disruption. Jessica is not just a marketer; she is a translator, an architect, a systems engineer who sees the underlying patterns in the technological storms that leave others scrambling. She now invites leaders to march with her — not just applaud her vision — by applying those same patterns to their own businesses.. From the dot-com boom and bust, through the rise of SEO, paid media, and marketing automation, to the current, world-altering advent of Artificial Intelligence, she has been a steady hand, guiding businesses not by chasing trends, but by building resilient, repeatable growth engines.
Today, as the CEO of the multi-award-winning Forte Agency and the Co-Founder and Chief AI Strategist of Samurai Partners, she is one of the most vital voices translating the immense power of AI into practical, profitable reality. She is a three-time Amazon bestselling author whose book, AI Wrecking Ball, serves as both a warning and a guide for leaders navigating this new era. She doesn’t sell hype; she engineers clarity. For the franchises, agencies, and operators who seek her guidance, she offers a powerful promise: a 20 to 40 percent improvement in efficiency and ROI, not through magic, but through the disciplined application of custom GPT integrations, scalable content systems, and a proprietary framework she calls The Alignment Engine™. Her story is a map of the digital age itself, a journey from a billion manual clicks to the dawn of intelligent automation, guided by a single, unshakable principle: growth should never be a gamble; it should be engineered.
A Billion Impressions, Counted by Hand
Jessica’s path was not the traditional college-to-career route. “I didn’t follow the traditional college-to-career path,” she says. Her education was a baptism by fire in the heart of the dot-com explosion. At just 20, she found herself at XOOM.com, a site that was rocketing up the web’s traffic charts. It was a whirlwind. By December 1998, XOOM was the 13th most visited site in the world; by April 1999, it had climbed to 12th, with nine million monthly visitors.
Shortly thereafter, XOOM merged with NBC’s internet properties to form NBCi, a multimedia behemoth that rose to become the 7th most popular site online, a contemporary of the AOL/Time Warner merger. It was here that Jessica’s core philosophy was forged. “I learned how to operate under intense, fast-moving disruption,” she recalls, “and I discovered the power of building systems.” Manually tracking a billion ad impressions taught her a lesson that would define her career: at scale, efficiency and accuracy are not just goals; they are survival mechanisms.
The Unforgiving School of Affiliate Marketing
After the dot-com era, Jessica spent a decade in the trenches of affiliate marketing, a field she describes as the ultimate meritocracy. “The rules were simple: if I didn’t generate results, I didn’t get paid,” she states. This was not a world of retainers or billable hours. It was a world of pure, unadulterated ROI. Every click, every conversion, every dollar of ad spend had to be tracked with relentless precision. “That decade cemented my obsession with ROI,” she says.
This experience sharpened her skills and solidified her mindset. Jessica learned to think like an owner, not an employee. She understood that marketing was not an expense; it was an investment that had to deliver a measurable return. This performance-driven ethos is a direct throughline to her work today. “ROI isn’t a talking point for us,” Jessica asserts, “it’s the outcome we’re judged by, and we welcome that accountability.” That’s why clients don’t just clap for the results — they march with us, knowing every system we build begins and ends with ROI.
The Architect in Residence
Perhaps the most unique chapter in Jessica’s career, the one that gives her a perspective most agency leaders lack, was her nine-year tenure leading digital and e-commerce for Lice Clinics of America. This was not a consulting gig; she was on the inside, sitting in the executive seat, responsible for the growth of a sprawling network of over 110 franchise locations.
“Because I’ve lived inside a 110-location franchise network, I understand their reality,” Jessica explains. She was not just advising; she was building, implementing, and scaling the digital infrastructure for nearly 200 websites. The results she delivered were staggering: 30 percent year-over-year growth, a cost-per-lead that she cut by 80 percent, and a doubling of conversion rates.
This experience gave her a deep empathy for the real-world pain points of her future clients, franchises, agencies, and companies with revenues between $2 million and $20 million who are successful but stuck. She understands their chaos because she has lived it. “Scaling that increases effort, not efficiency. Teams overwhelmed, operating without systems,” she lists, rattling off the familiar struggles. “We replace duct tape with integrated, AI-enabled systems.”
The Birth of a New Model
Armed with this unique combination of experiences-the systems-thinking from the dot-com era, the ROI-obsession from affiliate marketing, and the real-world operational knowledge from her time in franchising—Jessica founded Forte Agency LLC. The agency was built on her core principle: engineering growth. Forte is a full-service digital marketing agency that has garnered significant recognition, named a Top SEO Company in both 2024 and 2025 by Neil Patel, and also honored by RankWatch and FindBestFirms. But awards aren’t the end goal — results are. That’s why leaders don’t just clap at the recognition; they march with us to engineer growth in their own businesses.”
But as the AI revolution began to accelerate, Jessica noticed a troubling pattern. “Business leaders were rushing to adopt AI and new digital tools,” she says, “but without alignment across their teams, messaging, and systems, they were creating more chaos than clarity.” This observation led to the creation of her next venture, Samurai Partners, which she co-founded with business-building veteran Scott Sullivan. Together, Jessica and Scott also co-authored the Amazon bestsellers 10X AI Amplifier and Mastering Influence — playbooks their clients now march with to scale confidently in the AI era.
Samurai Partners was designed to be a new model of guidance for executives, business and franchise owners. “We serve as a fractional AI officer for growth-minded leaders who want to scale without losing their humanity,” Jessica explains. Their mission is to stop the chaos, to bring a sense of order and alignment to the frantic adoption of new technology. The solution they engineered to do this is at the core of their work: The Alignment Engine™.
The Alignment Engine™ in Action
“The Alignment Engine™ is our proprietary framework designed to eliminate chaos and make growth repeatable,” Jessica states. It is the culmination of her life’s work, a system that synchronizes leadership, strategy, and technology. It is not a product; it is a process, a diagnostic and strategic intervention that transforms how a company operates.
The process begins with an Alignment Audit, a tight, 90-minute diagnostic session designed to immediately uncover the misaligned systems, messaging gaps, and hidden inefficiencies that are holding a business back. From there, clients move into an Alignment Engine Sprint, an intensive four-week engagement where the Samurai Partners team helps reset the company’s voice, streamline its processes, and implement AI-driven systems that connect seamlessly. For those seeking a deeper partnership, they offer an Embedded Alignment Partner model, guiding the rollout across teams over 90 days.
The results are not just theoretical; they are concrete and transformative. Clients typically see 20 to 40 percent efficiency gains. They achieve forecasting accuracy that is within 2 to 3 percent annually. Most importantly, their teams are finally able to shift from a constant, reactive firefighting mode to a proactive, strategic state. “The Alignment Engine™ gives leaders the clarity, confidence, and capacity to scale without losing their mission or their soul,” Jessica says. The Alignment Engine™ is how we help leaders stop clapping for possibilities and start marching with us toward measurable transformation.
Wielding the AI Wrecking Ball
Jessica’s role is not just to implement AI, but to be a thought leader on its responsible and strategic use. This conviction is what led her to write her bestselling book, AI Wrecking Ball. “AI is one of the most powerful tools of our time,” she warns, “but without ethical guardrails, it risks becoming a wrecking ball.” That’s why executives don’t just nod at the warning — they march with us to adopt AI responsibly, with clarity and soul.
The book, like her consulting work, is a blueprint for navigating the disruption with clarity and integrity. At Samurai Partners, this philosophy is non-negotiable. “We ensure AI is used responsibly: protecting customer data, being transparent about automation, and ensuring technology augments human creativity instead of replacing it,” she explains. Their work is grounded in the belief that AI’s highest purpose is to enhance trust and free human teams from the drudgery of repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on the creative, strategic work that only people can do. “The future of marketing belongs to those who can leverage AI with wisdom, alignment, and soul,” Jessica declares.
Engineering a Life
For Jessica, the principles of alignment and systems-building are not just for her clients; they are the operating system for her own life. “Balance, for me, is about alignment in action,” she says. “I’ve designed my businesses so that systems-not people-carry the weight of repetitive work.” This is a radical departure from the “hustle culture” that often defines entrepreneurship. By automating the mundane, she has engineered the freedom to step out of “busy” mode and be fully present in the parts of her life that matter most.
“My family,” she says, “are my anchor and my why.” This clarity allows her to enjoy traveling, exploring new places, and spending quality time with the people she loves. “For me, work-life balance isn’t about perfection—it’s about creating harmony through clarity and presence in every area of life.”
“It’s the same outcome we design for our clients: freedom to stop admiring balance as an idea and start building harmony with us.”
Looking ahead, Jessica’s mission is to scale this impact. With Samurai Partners, she is expanding the Alignment Engine™ and preparing to launch Lead Aligned: Scale Without Selling Out, a program designed to help leaders harness AI without sacrificing their humanity. They are also building a licensing model so other coaches and fractional executives can use the framework with their own clients.
From her early days in the dot-com crucible, navigating a world of chaotic disruption, Jessica Fontana-Eddowes has been on a relentless quest to create order, clarity, and repeatable success. She has proven, time and again, that she has the vision to see what is coming and the engineering prowess to build the systems that will thrive in that future. She is a true architect of the digital age, not content to ride the AI wave, but to lead it — and she invites leaders not to watch from the shore, but to stand beside her as they build what comes next.”
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“The future of marketing belongs to those who can leverage AI with wisdom, alignment, and soul.”
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