- Which engagement is right for us?
- It depends on whether you need a decision or a standing decision-maker. A strategy intensive suits a company facing one large AI choice. The fractional CAIO retainer suits a company making AI decisions continuously and lacking anyone accountable for them. Advisory sits between the two.
- Do you implement, or only advise?
- The retainer is an executive seat, so the work is direction, vendor selection, governance and measurement. Implementation is delivered by your team or by an implementation partner, with me accountable for whether the result was worth the money. Keeping those separate is deliberate — the person choosing the vendor should not be the vendor.
- How long is a typical engagement?
- Retainers are ongoing with no fixed end, because the value comes from continuity. Strategy intensives are scoped to a defined question and finish. There is no minimum multi-year commitment; if the seat stops earning its place, it should end.
- What size company is this for?
- Most commonly businesses between roughly $5M and $100M in revenue — large enough that AI decisions carry real cost, small enough that a full-time Chief AI Officer would be an over-hire. Below that, an assessment and a roadmap usually serve better than a retainer.
- What happens in the first month?
- An audit of what you already run, what it costs and where data is exposed, followed by a shortlist of use cases ranked by value and feasibility. The output is a decision set, and often the most valuable finding is which existing spend to stop.
