What is a fractional Chief AI Officer?
A fractional Chief AI Officer is a part-time embedded executive who helps a leadership team decide where AI belongs, redesign the work and build repeatable AI capability.
Getting Started
Is a fractional Chief AI Officer the right move for your company?
A short read to help you decide whether AdviceForge is a fit, and what working together would look like in practice.
Quick answers
Quick answers before you book.
When is a fractional CAIO a fit?
It is a fit when a company needs senior AI leadership but does not yet need or cannot justify a full-time Chief AI Officer.
What happens on the first call?
The first call tests fit. Mark looks at the company shape, current AI usage, leadership priorities and whether an embedded engagement would create useful movement.
If this sounds like your company
The work depends on people you cannot get more of.
Companies in this gap usually have at least two of these going on.
01
Your best people do your least demanding work
Pulling numbers out of documents, re-keying between systems, rebuilding the same report. While they do it, the work that needs their judgment waits.
02
You have already cut what there was to cut
Vendors, policies, headcount. Nobody has been able to cut the hours the work itself takes.
03
The work grows faster than you can hire for it
The posting has been open for months, and the backlog lands on the people already there.
What it is and who it's for
A part-time fully embedded leader, for the right kind of company.
I work as a fractional executive, not as a consultant. When I take a retainer engagement, I sit in your leadership team meetings, participate in real decisions and am accountable for outcomes alongside the existing leadership team. I am not a vendor or an external advisor. I am a part-time Chief AI Officer.
"A fractional is a part-time fully embedded leader. The only difference between a fractional and their full-time counterpart is that they are part-time."
Who it's for
The model works best for small-to-mid-market companies that need senior AI leadership but cannot yet justify a full-time hire at $300K+ per year fully loaded. The buyer test is company shape and operational stage, not revenue.
- Privately-held
- Family-owned
- Founder-led
- Early-stage with capital
- Tech-component businesses
- CEO or COO as decision-maker
Background
Where this perspective comes from.
The credibility behind the practice. Four decades across aerospace, financial markets and industrial-tech leadership, plus active AI practitioner work today.
10 yrs
US Air Force and defense industry as a software and systems engineer on satellite imagery platforms and military intelligence software.
13 yrs
Running global technology operations at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange across Europe and Asia. 250-person captive center.
8 yrs
As CEO of Sentry Enterprises, a biometric identity and Web3 payments company, scaling through 10x valuation growth.
15+ yrs
Hands-on AI practitioner across the arc from Bayesian and heuristic methods to classical ML to current LLMs. Makes AI in the Lab, a video series showing real working systems and how they actually get used.
Honest check
Is this the right fit?
01
Probably worth a scoping call.
- Your best people are doing work that does not need them, and you want someone driving the change.
- Your leadership team or owner-operator is willing to engage with workflow redesign.
- Decision-maker authority concentrates at CEO, COO, owner or board chair.
- AI is becoming central to how the business operates, or needs to.
02
Probably not the right fit.
- Companies large enough to justify a full-time Chief AI Officer at $300K+ per year fully loaded.
- Buyers who want to purchase more tools and call that an AI strategy.
- Companies whose leadership team will not engage with the work of changing how work gets done.
On the left side?
Book a Scoping Call
How I work
Diagnose. Activate. Embed.
Engagements typically unfold across three phases.
01
AI feasibility diagnostic
A focused 30-day engagement that maps the highest-value AI workflows in your company and delivers a feasibility-validated roadmap. The entry point for buyers who want to test the relationship before committing.
02
Roadmap activation
A 60 to 90 day engagement that drives the first wave of workflow redesign off the diagnostic roadmap. Where the plan becomes changed work rather than a document.
03
Fractional CAIO retainer
The ongoing embedded engagement. A few hours per week in your leadership team. Weekly working session, monthly written summary memo, quarterly strategic roadmap and always-on Slack or email between scheduled contact.
What the diagnostic usually turns up
Tools deployed, work unchanged. Five or six AI tools. Adoption targets met, usage measured, and the actual work looks the same as a year ago.
A few power users, long tail behind. Two or three people do impressive AI work. Everyone else copies the surface and misses the judgment that makes it work.
Pilots that do not graduate. Promising experiments stall before they become how the company actually operates.
Leadership team not aligned. Different leaders have different answers for what AI should be doing here. No shared picture of good.
How to start.
A 30-minute scoping call is the right next step.
What to expect on the call
- We talk through your situation and what AI has done or has not done so far
- We map where the highest-value workflows might be
- We figure out whether and which engagement shape fits
Not ready yet?