Who this is for

You don’t need a head of AI five days a week.

There’s a size of firm, somewhere between fifteen and seventy-five people, where AI has become a real question but hiring for it makes no sense. A full-time head of AI is a big salary, and there isn’t a full week of the job to give them anyway.

So the responsibility lands on whoever runs operations, or the CTO, on top of everything else they take care of. A few LLM accounts get set up, or software licences are bought. Experiments start and grow on individual laptops, outside of full corporate view.

That’s what fractional is for: one person owns the job without the cost of a full-time role.

You’ll hear the role called a fractional head of AI, a part-time AI director, or a fractional Chief AI Officer. Same job, whatever the title: one person takes the AI question off your plate and takes responsibility for it.

The work

The same work I do everywhere else, dedicated to your firm.

Count first. It starts the way everything I do starts: the Orientation, then a Census day, with your people around the table and the unbilled work written down and weighed. Both are part of the first month’s retainer; there is no separate invoice. Everything I bring to the job is included in the one cost.
Decide together. Every job goes through the five-way sort: automate it, assist it, fix the process, keep it human, or leave it alone for now.
Build what the Census points at. The agents get built on your own accounts and your own API keys, the same way my own practice runs.
Mind it, and answer for it. Because I’m now responsible for it, I watch your AI stack, run evaluations, improve it over time, and report at whatever cadence suits you. When something stops earning its keep I say so and retire it. Your people learn as we go, because they’re working alongside me, not reading about it afterwards.

You keep making the calls you’ve always made. I look after the AI ones, and I’m accountable for them.

The aim is that when something involving AI comes up, your firm already knows who owns it. A vendor makes a claim, a new tool appears, a partner wonders about a workflow, and there’s already somebody who knows the history and owns the next decision. The partners get to say “We have Rob looking after that”.

The toolkit

Everything I have comes in the door with me.

A day a week doesn’t mean a narrow slice of what I do.

A decade of product. I spent ten years building software for US technology companies, the last five of them on AI: chatbots, voicebots, prediction models, and the awkward migrations in between. I know how people actually use things, and how to design work they’ll keep using after the novelty wears off.
The frameworks. The Census for finding the work, the five-way sort for deciding what happens to it, and The Seven Shifts™ for judging whether what we’ve built is something your firm genuinely owns.
The build stack. The same architecture my own practice runs on: named agents with narrow jobs, everything on your accounts and keys, stringent evals, drafts queued for a person, and a record of everything that happened.
The making of things. Documents, templates, briefs, the material around a rollout, the explaining of it to your team. If it needs to be documented or created, I take care of that.
The fleet itself. My own agents work alongside me on the drafting, the research and the writing-up, so a day of mine produces a lot more than a standard day would. They’re the same type of agents I’ll be building for you.

To be clear

What it isn’t.

If you already know exactly what you want to build, you need a developer. If you’d like me to work with that developer on a product management basis, as a fractional, I’d be very happy to do so, taking the management of the development process off your team’s plate.
A larger AI transformation programme fits the same arrangement — owned week by week, rather than landed on the firm all at once.
It isn’t training days. Your people learn by working alongside the build and helping improve it over time.
Nothing sends, files, or decides without a person answerable for it.
It isn’t open-ended. We review it at three months, both of us.

Not sure this is the shape of help you need? I’ve written a decision guide on consultant versus agency versus fractional, and it’s comfortable telling you the answer is none of us yet.

How it runs

A flat month, two places.

About a day a week — some weeks more, some less, depending on what’s on. One flat monthly figure, with no day rates and no timesheets. Three months to start, monthly rolling after that, and leaving works the same way it does with the Fleet: you keep the agents, the accounts, and everything on the roadmap.

Hybrid. The Census day is always in person, and so is any day where I need to be present with you, your clients, or your staff. The rest happens wherever the work gets done best — a build day is a build day whether I’m at your boardroom table or my own. Either way the day is dedicated to your firm. Of course, I’ll always try to take calls and attend meetings whenever required; we’ll manage it between us.

Two places is a real limit. Two firms at a day a week each is what I can do properly while still running my own practice, and my own practice is where everything gets tested before it reaches yours. If both places are taken, you can express an interest and I’d be happy to add you to a waiting list.

You’ll notice there’s no price on this page, which is how I treat the Fleet too. One flat figure, settled in a conversation and held for the term. I’d rather have that discussion in person, once I understand what you want me to own and what a useful first three months would look like.

Same method as everything else on this site: the Census, the five-way sort, and the Fleet.

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Make it somebody’s job.

If AI in your firm is everybody’s question and nobody’s job, it starts with a conversation. It costs nothing to have a quick chat.

Talk to me