Fractional AI Officer
You don’t need another AI. You need somebody who has already built one that works.
The companies that call here rarely have an AI problem. They have twenty pilots, no way to tell which ones are working, and nobody senior enough to kill the rest. That is a judgment gap rather than a headcount gap, and closing it does not require a full-time hire. It requires somebody who has built agentic systems that hold up under real use, and who will tell you which of your twenty to stop paying for.
The comparison
Priced against the hire, not against an agency.
A senior AI leader who has actually shipped production systems is a permanent line on the payroll: salary, equity, benefits, and a search fee before any of it starts. You know what that band looks like inside your own company better than we do. The search alone runs months, and that assumes the right person says yes.
This engagement starts in weeks rather than quarters and carries no severance risk. The tradeoff is honest: you get senior judgment and a working operating layer, you do not get somebody in every internal meeting.
A full-time senior hire
This engagement
What it costs
A full-time senior hire
Salary, equity, benefits and a search fee, permanently on the books
This engagement
From $15,000 per month, on retainer
Time to start
A full-time senior hire
Months of search, if the right person says yes
This engagement
Weeks
If it does not work
A full-time senior hire
Severance, and the search runs again
This engagement
End the retainer
What you are buying
A full-time senior hire
A person, and whatever they have built before
This engagement
Senior judgment and a working operating layer
Presence
A full-time senior hire
In every internal meeting
This engagement
Not in every internal meeting
The engagement
What the retainer covers.
A real inventory, and a kill list
Every AI initiative in the company, what it costs, what it actually returns, and a recommendation on which to fund, fix or stop. Usually the highest-value month of the engagement.
The operating layer, built
Agent workflows for the functions where the return is provable, with verification gates so output nobody checked never reaches a customer or a regulator.
Governance that fits your regulator
Approval gates, provenance on published claims, and an audit record. Built to the standard your industry is actually held to rather than a generic policy.
Your own material, run safely
Most teams are either pasting sensitive material into consumer tools or avoiding AI entirely because nobody can say which is safe. The useful answer is a setup that runs against your own data under your own controls, and a clear line about what never leaves.
Your team, made capable
The internal people who will own this after the engagement ends get trained on the systems while they are being built, not handed a document afterward.
Vendor and buy decisions
An independent read on what to build, what to license and what to walk away from, from somebody who is not reselling anything.
Platform access
Contero seats where content production is part of the mandate, so the capability is running rather than described.
Fit
Who this is and is not for.
A fit
- Companies with real revenue, a regulated or reputation-sensitive market, and AI spend that nobody can currently defend.
- Leadership that wants somebody accountable for the call rather than a report recommending further study.
- Organizations where published output carries the company name and being confidently wrong is expensive.
Not a fit
- Pre-revenue companies. The work here assumes there is an operation to make better.
- Anyone who has already decided and wants the decision validated. Cutting a program is a legitimate finding here. Supplying a conclusion somebody arrived with is not.
- Teams who want a shopping list. Which platform to standardize on is a real question and gets a real answer. Which of this quarter’s tools is best is not one worth paying for.
The first conversation is free and specific.
Bring one initiative you cannot decide about. If there is nothing useful to say about it in half an hour, there is no engagement here worth either of our time.