Fractional AI Officer
Senior AI leadership, two to four days a month. Someone accountable for the plan, the vendors, the governance and the board answer — without a full-time executive hire.
Four Days a Month of Decisions, Priced Like a Full-Time Role
The mid-market AI leadership problem is not that the work is unimportant. It is that there is not enough of it to hire for, and too much of it to ignore.
Somewhere between 20 and 200 staff, a specific gap opens up. AI decisions start arriving weekly — every software vendor you already pay has launched an AI module and wants a meeting, your staff are using tools you have not approved, a customer has asked whether their data touches AI, and the board wants a paragraph for the next pack. None of these are optional. But add them up and you have perhaps four to six days a month of genuine work.
So the business does one of three things, and all three are bad. It hires full-time, which means paying a scarce and expensive senior person to be substantially idle — and idle senior people invent work, which costs you the salary plus everything they build. It hands AI to whoever is most enthusiastic, usually a capable operations or IT manager who now has a second job they have no time for and no market context to do well. Or it defaults to nobody, which means the decisions still get made — by vendors, in demos, one department at a time — and you find out later.
The fractional model matches the commitment to the volume. You get a named person, genuinely senior, accountable for the AI plan and present on a predictable rhythm. They are in your board pack. They chair the quarterly review. They take the vendor calls so your executives do not have to sit through them. And because they work across several businesses, they see the market from more angles than any single in-house hire could — including which vendors have quietly gone sideways and which capabilities are about to become a $30-a-month feature you should wait for.
The arrangement is meant to end. When the volume of decisions justifies a full-time role, we write the role description, sit on the panel and hand over. A fractional officer still in place in year four, when you clearly needed a real one in year two, is a fractional officer protecting their invoice.
What the Role Owns
Accountability, not access. These are the things that go wrong when nobody senior is holding them.
Holding the Plan
Someone senior keeps the roadmap current and makes the reprioritisation call when the market moves — which it does about quarterly, whether or not anyone is watching.
- Quarterly reprioritisation, actually run
- Kill criteria enforced when they trigger
- Drift caught before it becomes a write-off
- Sequencing decisions made by someone accountable
Vendor Filtering
Every product you already pay for has an AI module now. Most are not worth the meeting. Someone has to take those calls and tell the difference — and it should not be your CFO.
- AI module claims assessed against reality
- Data residency and privacy checked before the demo lands
- Pricing and lock-in scrutinised
- Independent — no reseller margin, no partner tier
Governance & Risk
The acceptable-use policy, the risk register, and the standing position on where customer data can and cannot go. Maintained, not written once and filed.
- Acceptable-use policy kept current with the tools
- Risk register maintained per initiative
- Privacy Act 1988 obligations tracked as use cases change
- Shadow AI monitored rather than assumed away
Board & Executive Reporting
The AI section of the board pack, written by someone who can answer the follow-up question. Directors are increasingly asking; "our IT manager is looking into it" is not an answer.
- Board-ready reporting on progress, spend and risk
- Present for the questions, not just the paper
- Plain English, no capability theatre
- Honest about what has not worked
Building Internal Capability
The role exists to make itself smaller. Every engagement transfers judgement to your people so that the eventual full-time hire inherits a functioning practice.
- Judgement transferred, not hoarded
- Your team trained to evaluate AI claims themselves
- Documentation your staff maintain
- Exit plan: role description, panel, handover
Delivery Oversight
Whoever is building — us, your team, or a third party — someone independent checks that the evaluation is real, the costs are tracking and the thing is actually in production.
- Evaluation results reviewed, not accepted on trust
- Run costs tracked against the business case
- Third-party delivery held to the same bar as ours
- Escalation when a build is quietly failing
When It Fits — and When It Does Not
We would rather talk you out of this than sell you a retainer you do not need.
Good fit
- Roughly 20 to 200 staff, with AI decisions arriving weekly
- A board or owner asking questions nobody can answer confidently
- Several AI initiatives running or planned, with no single owner
- Vendors pitching AI modules faster than anyone can assess them
- A build in production that needs independent oversight
- Staff already using AI tools that nobody has approved
Poor fit — we will say so
- Under about 20 staff — you need two good tools and a policy, not a role
- One specific problem to solve — buy the implementation, not the oversight
- You already have a capable Head of AI or CTO with capacity
- Enough decision volume to justify a full-time hire — then hire
- Nobody internally with authority to act on the advice
- Looking for a name on a slide rather than someone accountable
How the Arrangement Works
Three-month initial term, then rolling. No lock-in, and an ending we plan for from the start.
Free Consultation
We establish whether you need a role at all. If the honest answer is two workshops and a policy, we sell you the two workshops and the policy.
Establish the Rhythm
Days per month, the standing meetings, the board reporting cycle, and where the role sits relative to your existing technology leadership. Written down before we start.
Run It
Roadmap held, vendors filtered, governance maintained, board pack written, delivery overseen. Predictable presence rather than reactive access.
Plan the Exit
When the decision volume justifies a full-time hire, we write the role description, sit on the panel and hand over. That is the intended ending.
Related Services
Most fractional engagements start with one of these.
AI Governance Consulting
If the pressing need is policy, risk and a defensible position rather than ongoing leadership, start here.
GovernanceAI Roadmap Development
A fractional officer holds a plan. This is where the plan gets built in the first place.
The roadmapAI Training for Teams
The fastest way to reduce how much AI leadership you need to buy is to build judgement in the people you already have.
Team trainingFrequently Asked Questions
What owners and boards ask before creating a part-time AI role.
Four things, mostly. They hold the plan — someone senior keeps the roadmap current and makes the reprioritisation calls when the market moves, which it does roughly quarterly. They filter vendors, which is a bigger job than people expect: every software company your business already pays has launched an AI module and wants a meeting about it, and most of those modules are not worth the meeting. They run governance — the acceptable-use policy, the risk register, the position on where customer data can go. And they translate, in both directions: turning executive intent into something technically buildable, and turning technical constraints into something a board can act on. Typically two to four days a month, structured so the recurring rhythms — board pack, quarterly review, vendor assessment — actually happen.
If you can find one, can afford one, and have twelve months of work to keep them busy, hire one — we will say so. The problem is that all three conditions rarely hold at once for a mid-market Australian business. The market for genuinely experienced AI leaders is thin and expensive, a full-time senior hire is a substantial annual commitment plus on-costs, and most businesses of 20 to 200 staff have perhaps four to six days a month of genuine AI leadership work. Hiring full-time for that produces one of two failures: you overpay for idle capacity, or the person invents work to justify the role, which is worse because it costs you the role plus everything they build. Fractional matches the commitment to the actual volume of decisions.
A retainer buys you access; a fractional officer takes accountability. The distinction shows up in what happens when nobody asks. A retained consultant answers the questions you bring them. A fractional AI officer is the person whose job it is to notice that your staff have started using an unapproved tool, that the roadmap has drifted, that the vendor demo your CFO loved has a data residency problem, or that the model your build depends on has been deprecated. They chair the review, write the board section, and own the answer when someone asks who is across this. It is a named role in your organisation that happens to be part-time.
Work with them, always. A fractional AI officer who cuts across your CIO or IT manager is a governance problem wearing a solution costume. In practice the relationship is complementary: your technology leadership owns the systems, security posture and delivery capability; the fractional AI officer owns the AI-specific questions those roles rarely have the bandwidth or the current market knowledge to hold — which model, which vendor, what the evaluation says, where the regulatory line sits this quarter. Where a business has no technology leadership at all, the role gets broader by necessity, and we would flag that gap rather than quietly fill it forever.
It is quoted on the number of days a month and the scope, and it is a fraction of a full-time senior hire including on-costs — that arithmetic is the entire reason the model exists. We typically start with a three-month term so both sides can see whether the rhythm works, then move to rolling arrangements with sensible notice. There is no lock-in and no minimum term beyond that initial period. Start with the free consultation: if your real need is two workshops and a policy rather than an ongoing role, we would rather sell you the two workshops.
You hire, and we help you do it — that is the intended ending, not a failure of the engagement. A fractional officer who is still there in year four when you have a genuine AI function is a fractional officer who has been protecting their position. When the volume of decisions justifies a full-time role, we write the role description, sit on the interview panel, and hand over to whoever you appoint. We would rather run a good two-year engagement that ends in a successful hire than a mediocre five-year one that ends in you wondering why you never built the capability internally.
Nobody Owns AI in Your Business Right Now
That is normal, and it is fixable without an executive hire. Start with a free hour and we will tell you honestly whether you need a role, a project, or neither.