Fractional AI Lead

The problem this solves

You know AI matters. Your competitors are talking about it, your board is asking about it, and someone on your team has probably been experimenting with ChatGPT in ways that are either brilliant or terrifying (possibly both). But you don’t have anyone who can turn that scattered experimentation into a coherent strategy, and hiring a full-time AI lead doesn’t make sense when you’re not even sure what the role would look like yet, or whether you’d have enough work to justify someone five days a week.

So you end up in limbo. Too much happening to ignore AI, not enough expertise in-house to do it properly, and every vendor pitch sounds the same: “our platform will change your business” followed by a quote that makes your eyes water and a scope of work so vague you’re not sure what you’d actually be paying for.

A fractional arrangement gives you the expertise without the overhead. I show up for a few hours a week, I attend the meetings that matter, I guide the decisions that need guiding, and I upskill your team so that eventually they don’t need me anymore. That last part is the point. This isn’t a retainer designed to go on forever, and if an AI consultant’s business model depends on you never learning to do it yourself, their incentives aren’t aligned with yours.

What you get

• 2 to 4 hours per week of dedicated time, not “on call if you need me” but scheduled, committed time in your calendar. Enough to stay across what’s happening and be genuinely useful, without the overhead of a full-time hire or the awkwardness of paying someone a salary to sit around waiting for AI questions to come up.
• Meeting attendance, where I join your weekly or fortnightly planning meetings, the ones where decisions get made about tools, projects, and priorities. I’m there to ask the questions your team might not know to ask, and to flag when a proposed approach is going to cost more in headaches than it saves in efficiency. Sometimes the most valuable thing I do in a meeting is say “don’t build that, it’s harder than it looks.”
• Tool and vendor evaluation with honest assessments of what to buy, what to build, and what to skip. I don’t take referral fees or kickbacks from tool vendors, which means when I say “don’t buy that, the free alternative is better for your use case,” I actually mean it. I’ve evaluated and used dozens of AI tools in production, from Claude and Gemini to n8n, Cloudflare Workers, LM Studio, and Ollama, so the recommendations come from direct experience rather than vendor slide decks.
• Implementation oversight, where your team (or a contractor) is building something with AI and I review the architecture, catch the problems early, and make sure what gets built is maintainable rather than a fragile prototype that falls over the moment someone changes an input format or an API updates its response schema.
• Team coaching and skills transfer, which is the most important part. I work with your people directly, teaching them to build their own workflows, evaluate their own tools, and solve their own AI problems. This is what makes me unnecessary over time, which is the whole point of the arrangement.
• Monthly written report covering what’s working, what’s not, what to try next, and what to stop doing. Clear, honest, no filler. The kind of document you can forward to your board without having to translate it from consultant-speak into English first.

Who this is for

• Companies that need AI expertise but can’t justify a full-time hire, either because the budget isn’t there or because you’re not sure there’s enough work to fill five days a week
• Teams that have started using AI but are stuck at “ChatGPT for emails and meeting summaries” and can’t see how to get further without someone who’s done it before
• Founders who know AI matters but don’t have time to figure it out themselves, and are tired of getting pitched by vendors who don’t understand their business and just want to sell a platform
• Organisations where someone tried to lead an AI initiative alongside their actual job and it quietly died because there was no dedicated time for it (which is more common than anyone likes to admit)

How engagements typically run

Most engagements run 3 to 6 months. The first month is the most intensive because I need to understand your business, your team, your systems, and where the real opportunities are (as opposed to where people think they are, which is usually different). By month two, we’re building things. By month three or four, your team is building things themselves and I’m reviewing their work rather than doing it for them. By month five or six, the question becomes “do we still need this?” and if I’ve done the job properly, the answer is often no.

Some clients keep the arrangement going at a lower intensity, a couple of hours a month for oversight and the occasional deep-dive when something new comes up. That’s fine. But I’d rather you step down because you’ve built the capability internally than keep paying me because nothing’s changed. The former means the engagement worked. The latter means it didn’t.

Common questions