Take the seat. Skip the salary.
A Chief AI Officer is the right role and the wrong cost for most companies. So we take the seat part-time — a fixed fraction of our week, on a flat monthly retainer, for as long as it's useful and not a month longer.
The decisions keep coming. The headcount doesn't.
The work that needs senior AI judgment isn't full-time work — but it isn't nothing, either. It arrives in bursts. A vendor pitch that needs evaluating. A build-or-buy call. A board question about what the team is actually doing with AI. A model release that quietly changes what's possible for one of your workflows.
Hiring for it means paying an executive salary to wait between those moments. Not hiring for it means the decisions get made by whoever happens to be nearest, or they don't get made at all — which is how companies end up with six overlapping tools, four stalled pilots, and nothing they can point a CFO at.
A fraction is the shape that matches the work. You buy the judgment and the fast answer, not the chair.
What the seat covers
- Strategy sessions with your leadership team, on a cadence you set
- Tool and vendor evaluation — we resell nothing and take no commissions
- Build-or-buy calls, with the reasoning written down
- Business reviews tied to the metrics you chose, not the ones that flatter us
- A standing answer to “should we be doing something about this?”
- The same person every month, who already knows your business
Four sizes. Same person.
Pick the fraction that matches how often the decisions arrive at your desk. Every tier is a flat monthly retainer. Smaller fractions carry a per-hour premium — context-switching is real and we'd rather price it than pretend — and larger ones earn a commitment discount.
A standing answer to “should we be doing something about this?” You send the question, you get a considered reply — not a link to an article you'd already found.
- One 60-minute call a month
- Async access in between
- Sanity checks on tools and vendor pitches
- A flag when something in the market genuinely affects you
Best when the decisions are occasional but expensive to get wrong.
Everything in the advisor tier, plus real time between calls — enough to read your material, look at what you've built, and come back with something specific rather than something general.
- Monthly session with your leadership team
- Tool evaluation and vendor negotiation
- Review of work already in progress
- A roadmap that gets revisited, not filed
Best when there's a plan and it needs someone to keep it honest.
A standing weekly presence. Close enough to the work to catch a project drifting in week three, rather than reading about it in the quarterly review.
- Weekly working sessions
- Hands on the actual build-or-buy decisions
- Vendor negotiation, end to end
- Quarterly business review against your metrics
- Direct access for your team, not only leadership
Best when something is being built or rolled out right now.
Half our week is yours. We own the function outright — the roadmap, the vendor relationships, the internal communication, and the reporting that goes to your board.
- The AI function, run rather than advised
- Roadmap ownership and board-level reporting
- Vendor and partner relationships held directly
- Internal enablement and training
- Named to your team and to your board
Best when you'd otherwise be opening a req — and want the work moving during the six months it takes to fill one.
Rates are per tier, flat, and identical for everyone at that tier. We'll give you the number on the first call, before you've told us your budget.
Five rules we hold ourselves to.
Hours are a soft cap, averaged across the quarter
A heavy month doesn't cost you extra and a light one doesn't get clawed back. We track it, we show you the tally, and we say something before a pattern turns into a problem for either of us.
Unused hours don't roll over
You're buying a standing seat and a fast answer, not a block of time to draw down. Rolling hours forward turns a retainer into a ledger, and ledgers make people hoard their questions until the balance justifies asking — which is the opposite of the point.
Three months minimum, then month to month
A quarter is the shortest span in which any of this is fair to judge. After that it's thirty days' notice, no penalty, and no conversation about renewal terms.
We cap the book
We never sell more than our whole week. In practice that's three to five clients at a time. When we're full you go on a waitlist rather than getting a thinner version of the service — the alternative is quietly shortchanging everyone already on it.
The retainer buys judgment, not delivery
Building is a separate engagement, scoped and priced separately, and sometimes the honest answer is that you should hire someone else to do it. See how the delivery work is scoped.
When we'll tell you not to.
Saying so costs us a retainer and earns a referral. We make that trade often.
You need hands, not judgment
If the decision is already made and you need it built, a fractional seat is an expensive way to buy engineering. Hire the engineer.
Someone internal could own this
Often there is someone, and they've simply never been asked. We'd rather point at them than bill you for standing where they should be.
Nothing will change in six months
No budget, no mandate, no appetite. A retainer under those conditions doesn't break the stall, it documents it.
You want a name on the org chart
We'll be named to your team and your board and we'll answer for our calls. But we're not staff, and a fractional seat that pretends otherwise misleads everyone in the building.
Find out which fraction fits.
Thirty minutes on your actual situation. We'll tell you which tier makes sense, or that none of them do — and you keep the roadmap either way.