Somewhere in the last year, someone at your company started saying “we need an AI strategy.” Maybe it was the board. Maybe it was your biggest customer. Maybe it was you, at 11pm, after reading a competitor’s launch post.
Now you have a vendor pitch deck, two engineers experimenting with agents on their own time, a pilot that works in the demo, and no one whose job it is to decide what happens next. Hiring a full-time CTO or head of AI is a long, expensive search, and you are not even sure yet what the role should own.
That is the gap a fractional AI CTO fills.
What I actually do
Not a retainer for opinions. These are the things that show up on the calendar.
Decide what to build, buy, or skip
Most AI roadmaps have too many items on them. I help you cut it down to the two or three that move a number you care about, with a cost model next to each one. That includes the unglamorous answer: skip it, wait six months, or do it with a vendor instead of your own team.
Own the architecture review
Before anything expensive gets built, someone should look at the design with an adversarial eye. How does the agent terminate? What happens when retrieval returns the wrong document? Who can the tool calls act on behalf of? What does a bad day cost? I join your design reviews and write down the answers, so the reasoning survives after I leave the room.
Pick vendors and models without getting locked in
Model providers, vector databases, orchestration frameworks, evaluation tools, observability platforms. The market changes every quarter and every vendor has a benchmark that says they win. I help you put a routing layer between your product and any single provider, and run your own evals on your own data, so the choice is reversible.
Build the eval and guardrail habit
If you cannot tell whether last night’s prompt change made things better or worse, you do not have an AI system, you have a coin flip with a UI. I get a golden set, a regression gate and a red-team pass into your pipeline early, while it is still cheap. I maintain agentic_security, an open-source red-teaming kit, so this is not theory for me.
Hire, and coach the people you already have
Writing the job spec, interviewing candidates, setting the bar, and mentoring the engineer on your team who is clearly the one to grow into the AI lead. The best outcome of a fractional engagement is that you no longer need it.
Translate for the board and the exec team
Risk, spend, timelines and what the system can and cannot be trusted to do, in words a non-technical director can act on. For regulated teams, that includes the compliance artifacts and the security review.
What it looks like in practice
| Month | Typical focus |
|---|---|
| First | Read the code, the traces and the vendor contracts. Talk to the team. Written assessment of where you stand and a short list of what to do first. |
| Second and third | Architecture decisions, vendor shortlist, eval harness, first hires or interview loop underway. |
| Ongoing | Weekly or biweekly review, async answers when something is on fire, quarterly roadmap and board update. |
| Exit | Handover to your new head of AI, or a step down to a lighter block. Written into the engagement from day one. |
Fractional AI CTO versus the alternatives
| Fractional AI CTO | Full-time hire | Agency or large consultancy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to start | Days | Months | Weeks |
| Seniority in the room | Same person throughout | Yes, once hired | Often a senior pitch, a junior team |
| Cost shape | Bounded monthly block | Salary plus equity, unbounded | Project fee, scope creep |
| Incentive | System works in production | Long-term ownership | Project delivered |
| Best for | Making the first big decisions well | A proven, permanent function | A large, well-specified build |
If you will have this problem for the next decade, hire full-time. The sensible sequence for many companies is to bring in a fractional leader first, use them to define the role and make the early hires, then hand over. I would rather help you find your replacement than quietly become unfireable.
Who this is for
- Founders and CEOs whose product is about to depend on AI and who do not have a technical co-founder with LLM production experience.
- CTOs and heads of engineering who are strong generalists and want a senior second opinion on the AI-specific parts: evals, retrieval, agent safety, cost.
- Mid-size and regulated companies that need a credible technical voice for the board and the security review, without creating a new executive seat.
- Investors and portfolio operators who want an independent technical read on an AI roadmap before the next round or the next big spend.
Who it is not for
If you want someone to disappear for three months and come back with a finished product, that is an embedded build. If you want a slide deck with a maturity model, there are plenty of firms that do that well, and I am not one of them. And if you are already well served by a strong in-house AI lead, you do not need me, and I will say so.
How we start
A 20-minute call. You tell me where you are, what is pressing, and what you have already tried. I tell you honestly whether a fractional engagement is the right shape, or whether you should do something cheaper first. If it is a fit, you get a short written scope and a monthly block you can cancel. If it is not, you leave with a clearer picture and it cost you nothing.