Senior AI leadership.
Without the full hire.
Embedded with your team 2 days a week. Strategy, vendor decisions, cross-functional rollouts, internal training. The judgment of a $300k full-time CAIO at less than a third of the cost, with zero ramp.
30 days notice to end. No exit fee. The only way fractional works is if it adds real value every month — so we make it easy to walk away.
Operators with budget
but no AI leader yet.
If you have allocation for an AI initiative but the org chart doesn't yet have a seat for someone to own it, this is built for you.
- You allocated AI budget and your team doesn't know what to spend it on
- You can't justify a $300k full-time hire yet but need senior judgment in the room
- Vendors keep pitching you tools without understanding your business
- Your team runs AI experiments in five directions with no strategy holding them together
- You've been told “we need an AI strategy” and you don't know what that's supposed to look like
Need a roadmap first, not ongoing leadership? The 28-Day AI Audit produces a written plan in 4 weeks for $4,500. About 30% of audit clients move into a Fractional engagement after.
In the room
when it matters.
Five areas of responsibility, recalibrated quarterly to whatever your company actually needs. We agree on the priority order in week 1 and adjust as the business changes.
Strategy + roadmap
Set the AI direction your team can defend to the board. Quarterly plan, monthly priorities, weekly tradeoffs.
Vendor + build decisions
Evaluate, negotiate, and pick — Anthropic vs OpenAI vs vendor X — based on YOUR data, latency, and budget reality. Kill bad fits before they sign.
Cross-functional rollouts
Ship AI features the team will actually use. Coordinate eng, ops, support, and sales so launches don't stall in one department.
Internal training
Raise the AI floor of your team. Lunch-and-learns, prompt libraries, decision-doc templates. Your team gets better without you hiring trainers.
Embedded cadence
2 days/week in your Slack and meetings. Not a monthly check-in. You can ping me Tuesday at 3pm and get an answer Tuesday at 3pm.
Roadmap, leader,
or full hire.
All three are real options. Pick the one that matches your stage — and we'll help you graduate to the next when you outgrow it.
Fractional AI Officer
- Deliverable
- Embedded strategy, vendor calls, rollouts, training
- Right fit
- You need senior judgment in the room, week after week
Vendors killed.
Roadmaps shipped.
“Within two months we had a roadmap our board signed off on, killed a $40k/yr vendor that wasn't fitting, and shipped two internal tools. Cheaper than a single quarter of the FT hire we were planning.”
“I needed someone in the room when we evaluated the AI vendor pitches. He killed three deals that would have cost us $80k a year and zero ROI. The retainer paid for itself in month one.”
“Our engineering team had been doing AI side projects for a year with no real direction. Six weeks in, we had a prioritized backlog, named owners, and the team finally felt like they had cover to make decisions.”
Common questions
Real Slack presence, real meetings on your calendar, real Loom reviews of work-in-progress. Not a monthly check-in call. Typical week: 1 leadership sync, 1 to 2 working sessions with eng/ops, async review of decisions in Slack, 1 vendor or hiring call as needed. We agree on a cadence in week 1 and adjust as your priorities shift.
Three reasons: (1) the median full-time AI lead at a 50-500 person company costs $250-400k all-in and takes 6-9 months to ramp, (2) most companies don't actually need a full-time AI leader yet — they need senior judgment 2 days/week, (3) you're hiring someone who's already built this 10+ times instead of someone who will build it once at your company. If you outgrow fractional, we help you hire the full-time role.
The Audit produces a written roadmap and ends. The Fractional AI Officer engagement is ongoing leadership — someone IN the room making vendor decisions, unblocking rollouts, training your team. About 30% of 28-Day Audit clients move into a Fractional engagement after the audit ends because they want the same judgment week-to-week.
Yes. The FAIO often ends up coordinating other vendors and consultants rather than replacing them. If you already have a McKinsey-style strategy engagement, an AI consultancy, and three vendor pilots running, you probably need this MORE, not less.
Mutual NDA signed before kickoff. We work with one company per market segment to avoid conflicts. Data access is read-only by default; write access only where the engagement requires it (e.g. CRM tags, internal Notion).
Six months is the median. Three months is the floor (anything shorter doesn't give us time to actually move the needle). Some engagements run 18 to 24 months — usually when the company is on a multi-year AI rollout and FAIO is doing the work a full-time hire would do, at a lower cost.
30 days notice, no exit fee, no clawback on unused training material. We'd rather you end early than stay in a misaligned engagement — the only way fractional works for both sides is if it's adding real value monthly.
A Nolola partner with 10+ years of operational + AI implementation experience, paired with the same delivery team running the productized builds and the audit engagements. You meet the person before you commit — there's no bait-and-switch to a junior consultant after kickoff.