Fractional Chief AI Officer
A fractional Chief AI Officer who runs the work, not the slides.
A fractional Chief AI Officer is a part-time executive who owns your AI agenda, at a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire. Codos runs the role with software and forward-deployed engineers: what the weekly review decides ships as production automations, and impact is verified against a baseline finance signs.
- Format
- Part-time executive + engineering team
- Cadence
- Weekly C-level review (AI Office)
- Built for
- Companies of 300–5,000 people
- Start
- 30-day diagnostic. Either side can stop at day 30.
The role
What a fractional Chief AI Officer does.
The job is the same as a full-time Chief AI Officer, compressed into an operating cadence:
- Own the AI roadmap and rank initiatives by financial return, not by novelty.
- Make build-versus-buy and vendor decisions, and kill pilots that will never reach production.
- Set the governance that lets automations run safely: evaluations, guardrails, human review.
- Report to the CEO, CFO, and board in financial terms they can verify.
- Build the habit: process owners who run their own automations after the engagement.
Most fractional CAIOs are solo operators, so everything above becomes advice for your team to execute. Codos pairs the operator with a system: the company brain holds the context, forward-deployed engineers do the building, and the AI Office keeps score.
The decision
Fractional vs full-time vs an AI Office.
| Full-time Chief AI Officer | Typical fractional CAIO | Codos AI Office | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | $300,000–550,000 a year, before equity | $5,000–30,000 per month | 30-day diagnostic, then a monthly retainer plus a success fee |
| Time to start | 3–6 months of executive search | Days to weeks | 30-day diagnostic, weekly reviews from day 30 |
| What you get | One executive; hires a team over quarters | One advisor, part-time | Operator + company brain + forward-deployed engineers |
| Who does the building | The team they eventually hire | Your existing staff or contractors | Codos engineers, with your process owners |
| Failure mode | Expensive mis-hire in a role most companies have never scoped | Good advice, no one accountable for shipping it | Contained: the diagnostic is a two-week commitment, and you keep the plan either way |
How the engagement runs
A weekly rhythm the C-suite can sit in.
The engagement starts with the 30-day diagnostic: AI-led interviews with the workforce, in-person interviews with executives, a workflow map, and ranked opportunities with a baseline your finance team signs. From day 30 the fractional CAIO rebuilds one core workflow end to end every two months and runs the program through the AI Office, a weekly C-level review where:
- every initiative has an owner, a named blocker, and one next action;
- annualized impact, realized impact, and confidence stay separate;
- freed capacity is not called savings until the financial mechanism is visible;
- adoption, quality, and override rates are visible beside the money.
The full program around the role is described on the AI transformation consulting page, and the product on the enterprise AI transformation page.
For PE operating partners
One operator across the portfolio.
Hiring a Chief AI Officer into every portfolio company does not scale. Leaving each management team to improvise does not compound.
The fractional model does both: one operator, a 30-day diagnostic per portfolio company, the same impact-accounting standard everywhere, and a portfolio view for the operating partner. Wins in one portco become the playbook for the next.
Questions buyers ask
Before we begin.
A fractional Chief AI Officer is a part-time executive who owns a company’s AI agenda: the roadmap, the priorities, vendor and build decisions, governance, and reporting to the CEO and board.
Advertised market rates run $5,000–30,000 a month depending on scope and cadence. Codos prices the role as part of the transformation engagement: a fixed-price 30-day diagnostic first, then a monthly retainer plus a success fee on realized, finance-verified impact. We quote on the first call.
We commit to outcomes and a cadence, not hours: the weekly C-level review, an owner and next action on every initiative, and the engineering capacity to ship what the review decides.
Companies of 300–5,000 people that want AI to show up in the cost base, and PE operating partners who need one accountable operator across several portfolio companies. If AI is your core product, you should hire full-time instead.
Hire full-time when AI is the product, when you are past roughly 5,000 people with a platform organization to lead, or when the role must own a large permanent team. A common path is to start fractional and convert the role once the portfolio of automations justifies a permanent executive.
Start with the diagnostic
Meet the operator, keep the plan.
The 30-day diagnostic shows you exactly what the role would run: the workflow map, the ranked opportunities, and the baseline. You keep all of it, and either side can stop at day 30.
founders@codos.ai