A Fractional Chief AI Officer, with a team behind them
Board-level AI judgement, governance and vendor stewardship for organisations that need direction before they need headcount. One senior operator accountable for it. Behind them sit our delivery teams.
Senior AI leadership, without the full-time commitment
A Fractional Chief AI Officer is a senior executive who joins your leadership team on a part-time, ongoing basis to own AI strategy, governance and commercial direction: the same judgement a full-time CAIO would bring, sized to a business that isn't ready to make that a permanent hire yet.
This isn't a consultant who visits occasionally. The leader sits at board and ExCo level, chairs the AI governance committee, and is the accountable owner when the board asks "who's responsible for this?" Because right now, in most organisations, nobody is.
If more than two of these are true, the gap is already costing you
No single person is accountable for AI outcomes at board level, so it sits across IT, ops and individual champions.
AI pilots keep launching, generating enthusiasm, and quietly dying before they reach production.
The board asks about AI risk or governance and nobody has a confident, complete answer.
Multiple teams are buying or trialling AI tools independently, with no shared governance or vendor view.
You can't say with confidence where the business stands against EU AI Act obligations.
AI vendor conversations happen deal-by-deal, without a strategy or architecture behind them.
Four areas of ownership, not a vague advisory retainer
Discover & Strategise
AI readiness audit across operations, data, talent and governance. Use case discovery and prioritisation against real ROI potential, not novelty. A 12–36 month roadmap the board can actually fund and track.
Govern & Comply
EU AI Act risk-tier assessment and high-risk system identification. Chairs the AI governance committee. Owns board-level reporting on AI risk, spend and value, in plain English rather than model-risk jargon.
Vendor & Portfolio Stewardship
Independent commercial review of AI vendor contracts and renewals. Consolidates a scattered tool estate into a coherent portfolio. No vendor kickbacks, no favoured platform. Judgement stays yours.
Optimise & Scale
Ongoing performance monitoring against the roadmap. Decides what scales past pilot and what gets shut down before it wastes another quarter. Refreshes strategy as the model and vendor landscape moves.
When there's real delivery work, it gets done one of three ways
The CAIO's job is judgement and direction, not writing the data pipeline or building the governance dashboard themselves. When the roadmap calls for a defined build (a use case implementation, a data foundation, a governance framework rollout), we take it on through our delivery partners, manage the suppliers you already have, or run a vendor selection on your behalf. The leader stays accountable for the outcome in all three, so there is no second relationship to build and no context to re-explain. If we run the selection, neither we nor our partners can win it. See how we run a selection.
Before you take this to the board
A consultant advises and leaves. This sits inside your leadership structure on an ongoing basis, is accountable at board level, and stays through the decisions that follow the first recommendation, including the ones that are inconvenient.
The goal is always a defined handover to internal ownership once governance and strategy are embedded, not an open-ended dependency. This gets scoped explicitly at the start of the engagement.
No. Vendor and tooling recommendations are made on fit, not commercial arrangement. This is a non-negotiable part of how we operate.
If you sell into, serve customers in, or process data connected to the EU, elements of the Act likely apply regardless of where you're headquartered. This is exactly the kind of question this exists to answer properly, not generically.
The evidence behind this work
Why 97% can't show AI value
The full market sentiment research behind the stats on this page.
Read the researchProblem before platform
Why agentic AI programmes are being cancelled at scale, and it isn't the technology.
Read the articleTake an assessment
Six scored assessments, seven areas each, a rating on screen, and a PDF if you want it.
See the assessmentsTalk to us about AI accountability
A direct conversation about your board's AI accountability gap, not a sales script.