Strategy, custom agents, and board-level accountability — delivered by a senior operator on a monthly retainer. The kind of AI leadership a mid-market company actually needs, at a price that makes sense.
Big companies hired their CAIO last year. You're stuck between vendors selling tools and consultants selling decks. Neither moves the number.
Base salary for a credible Chief AI Officer in the US is $300K–$450K, plus equity, bonus, and benefits. Fully-loaded that's $450K–$700K a year. For a company doing $10M–$50M in revenue, that's a quarter of your engineering budget gone before a single agent ships.
You also can't reliably attract one — senior AI talent is choosing between FAANG, well-funded startups, and PE-backed roles. Mid-market job posts sit open for 9 months.
The big firms will sell you a six-month "AI transformation" engagement. You'll get a roadmap, a maturity model, and a PDF. Nothing in production. The juniors who did the work move to the next client; the partner who sold it isn't building anything.
Boutique consultancies often ship — but they ship someone else's platform, the one they have a kickback deal with. That's not strategy, that's resale.
Six concrete deliverables, every engagement. Nothing fluffy.
Prioritized use cases ranked by impact, feasibility, and time-to-value. Each tied to a revenue, margin, or capacity number you actually report on.
Bespoke agents built for your workflows — sales, ops, support, internal knowledge, research. Deployed on infrastructure you own.
Model selection, vector DB, orchestration layer, evaluation framework, monitoring. Vendor-neutral and documented for your engineering team.
We deploy on compliance-ready infrastructure through partners with audited controls. BAAs available where applicable.
Your people learn to use, evaluate, and extend what we build. Workshops, runbooks, and 1:1 coaching with the engineers who will inherit the work.
Quarterly AI-impact reviews written for executives. Metrics, costs, risks, next 90 days. The deck a board chair actually wants.
A 12-month engagement, broken into four predictable phases. Each phase ends with tangible artifacts.
We embed with your leadership for the first month. Workflow audit, data inventory, vendor review, and an AI roadmap that maps to your business goals.
We pick the highest-leverage use case and ship it. End to end — design, build, deploy, train your team, measure impact.
Two to four additional agents across the prioritized backlog. Governance, monitoring, and internal enablement run in parallel.
Your team owns the work. We document, train, and (if it's time) help you hire a full-time CAIO or AI Lead. Or stay on at a reduced cadence.
Vendor-neutral, model-agnostic, compliance-first. We build on partner infrastructure that satisfies enterprise security review.
Frontier and open-weight models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and the leading open-source providers. Picked for the workload, not loyalty.
SOC2 Type II and HIPAA-ready deployments via vetted infrastructure partners. BAAs in place where healthcare data is involved.
Your data stays in your cloud or in a dedicated, audited tenant. No training on customer data, ever.
Native connectors for the operational stack: Salesforce, HubSpot, NetSuite, Snowflake, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, ClickUp, Notion, Slack.
Every production agent ships with an evaluation suite and observability. We measure regressions, drift, and unit economics in dollars.
AI usage policy, decision logs, risk register, and a quarterly review process aligned with NIST AI RMF and ISO 42001.
Retainer-based, month-to-month, no long-term contracts.
Retainer scales with company size, scope of agent fleet, and depth of board involvement. Most engagements land at $15K–$20K/mo for a 12-month commitment.
One senior operator is accountable end-to-end. We ship a working agent in 90 days, not a deck in six months. We're vendor-neutral, so we recommend what fits — not what we have a referral deal with. And we work on a retainer, not a multi-year SOW.
Yes. We can deploy inside your AWS, GCP, or Azure account, or in a dedicated, audited tenant on our compliance partner's infrastructure. Your call.
Plan on 4–6 hours/month from the CEO or COO, plus a small working group (typically 2–4 people) at ~8 hours/month during build phases. The agents save more team time than the engagement consumes by month 3.
We sometimes start with a 30-day audit and roadmap at a fixed fee. If we're a fit, that fee credits toward the first month of a full engagement. If we're not, you keep the roadmap and we part ways.
Yes. We sign mutual NDAs before deep discovery. We can also sign MSAs and BAAs as required.
A small senior team. The fractional CAIO leading your engagement is a hands-on senior operator with prior leadership experience deploying AI in regulated and enterprise settings. The build team are senior engineers, not interns. See the About page for more.
No pitch deck. No pre-canned demo. Just an honest conversation about your AI ambitions and what it would take to ship.
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