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
You are not getting real value from AI yet.
Companies in this gap usually have at least two of these going on.
01
Tools deployed, work unchanged
Your team has five or six AI tools. Adoption targets are met. Usage gets measured. The actual work looks the same as a year ago.
02
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.
03
Pilots that don't graduate
Promising experiments stall before they become how the company actually operates.
04
Leadership team not aligned
Different leaders have different answers for what AI should be doing here. No shared picture of good.
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. Three decades across aerospace, financial markets and industrial-tech leadership, plus active AI practitioner work today.
8 yrs
As CEO of Sentry Enterprises, a biometric identity and Web3 payments company, scaling through 10x valuation growth.
13 yrs
Running global technology operations at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange across Europe and Asia. 250-person captive center.
10 yrs
US Air Force and defense industry as a software and systems engineer on satellite imagery platforms and military intelligence software.
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 build series where real applications get built on camera with AI as an active partner.
Honest check
Is this the right fit?
01
Probably worth a scoping call.
- You have tried AI, recognize the gap and want someone driving the work of closing it.
- 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.
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?