OWNERSHIP · 2–4 DAYS A WEEK · MONTHLY RETAINER
Fractional Chief AI Officer
Two to four days a week of senior ownership over your AI direction, without carrying a full-time executive at that level on the payroll.
THE PROBLEM THIS SOLVES
The problem this solves
Companies between twenty and five hundred people reach a point where AI decisions stop being experiments and start having consequences. A vendor contract gets signed. A data pipeline gets built on assumptions nobody wrote down. A department starts depending on a workflow that one person set up in an afternoon.
Nobody owns those decisions. The CTO owns delivery, the COO owns operations, and AI sits in the space between them where it belongs to everyone and therefore to no one. Hiring a full-time Chief AI Officer at that headcount is difficult to justify to a board, and the search itself takes six months if it succeeds at all.
WHAT THE ROLE COVERS
What the role covers
- Owns the AI roadmap, including the sequence in which things get built and what gets refused
- Attends the leadership meeting as the accountable voice on AI decisions, not as a guest
- Evaluates vendors and reads the contracts, including the clauses about your data
- Sets internal governance: who may deploy what, on which data, with which review, mapped against the obligations that actually apply to your company
- Supervises the internal engineers or outside agencies doing the build
- Writes a monthly brief the leadership team can act on, with named decisions and named owners
HOW IT WORKS
How it works
Two to four days a week, or eight to sixteen days a month if that suits your calendar better than a fixed weekday. Three months minimum, because anything shorter produces opinions rather than change. After the first three months the arrangement continues month to month and either side can end it with thirty days' notice.
Work happens on site in Munich and the wider DACH region for leadership meetings, and remotely for everything else.
WHAT THIS IS NOT
What this is not
This is not engineering capacity and it is not a training programme. It is also not a monthly report that arrives and gets filed. The arrangement only works if the person is in the room when the decisions get made and has the standing to make them.
FIT
Fit
This fits when
- AI has moved past a pilot and something is now in production, or about to be
- There is budget for AI work but no single person accountable for where it goes
- Leadership wants one owner rather than three vendors with three roadmaps
- A full-time hire at this level is either unaffordable or unfillable in your market
This does not fit when
- What you need is someone to write the code
- You already have a full-time AI lead and want a second opinion — that is an AI Workflow Audit, not this
- You are under twenty people and one founder can still hold the whole picture
FEE
Fee
A flat monthly retainer, quoted after a thirty-minute conversation. It depends on the number of days and on how much of the roadmap you want owned rather than advised on.
The retainer is optional and it changes nothing about ownership. Everything built during the arrangement stays with your team, the same as in every other engagement here.
FAQ
Common questions.
How is this different from the AI Workflow Audit?
The Audit is a two-week diagnosis with a defined scope and an end date. It tells you where the constraint sits. This is ongoing ownership of what you do about it. Several companies start with the Audit and only then know whether the role is worth filling.
Do I have to commit beyond three months?
No. Three months is the minimum because the first month is spent understanding how the company actually works rather than how the org chart says it works. After that it runs month to month with thirty days' notice.
Can this work alongside our existing CTO?
That is the normal case. The CTO owns delivery and the engineering organisation. This role owns AI direction and the decisions that cross departments, which is precisely the set of decisions a CTO has no time to own and no mandate to force.
Is the work on site or remote?
Both. Leadership meetings in Munich and the DACH region are attended in person. The rest is remote, which is what makes the arrangement affordable rather than the same days plus travel.