Home/Fractional CAIO
04 · FRACTIONAL CAIO
For UK service businesses with a CEO and no CTO. A named senior AI executive inside your business — two to three days a week, with sign-off authority, change management, and continuous build capacity. £10,000 a month. Six-month minimum. Replaces the role, not the headcount.
01 · THE PROBLEM
You don't have a CTO. Your IT director is keeping the lights on. Your team is buying ChatGPT subscriptions on personal cards. Your competitors are name-dropping AI in pitches. Somewhere between the noise and the budget, decisions need making — and nobody senior owns them.
The pattern: a tool gets bought, a pilot runs, the report is written, nothing ships. The licence renews. The next pilot starts. Six months later you can't point to a number that moved.
MIT Project NANDA · July 2025
Sales-led demos, overlapping tools, vendor lock-in, and no one inside the business with the standing to say no. The maths slips quietly across the year.
Resultsense UK Mid-Market Report · October 2025
The mid-market average is 1.1 abandoned per firm. Sunk cost: multi-million per initiative. The killer isn't the tool — it's that no senior person owned adoption.
Deloitte AI Initiative Tracker · 2025
Not cost. Not regulation. Expertise. Sending the team on a course doesn't fix it. Asking IT doesn't fix it. Hiring a £200K Chief AI Officer fixes it — but it's overkill at £5M revenue.
UK Gov. AI Adoption Research · September 2025
02 · WHAT IT IS
Not advisory. Not consultancy. A named executive on your org chart, in your senior team meetings, with the standing to sign things off and the operator weight to actually ship.
01 · THE ROLE
A named senior person on your org chart with the title Chief AI Officer. Two to three days a week of dedicated capacity — roughly 40 to 60 hours a month. Email signature, phone in pocket, seat at the senior team table. Sign-off authority on every AI decision above the threshold you set.
02 · CHANGE MANAGEMENT
The reason most AI projects die isn't the technology — it's that nobody redesigned how the work gets done. Three to five functions get a role-by-role workflow rebuild. Adoption KPIs per team. Drop-in clinics. A champion network. The cultural resistance pattern that kills 35 to 45 percent of UK projects, handled directly.
03 · STRATEGIC ROADMAP
A costed, risk-tiered 18-month roadmap mapped against your business priorities — not a Silicon Valley playbook bolted on. Includes the AI register every UK business is now expected to maintain under ICO guidance, FCA Consumer Duty, and the EU AI Act extraterritoriality rules.
04 · ONGOING OPTIMISATION
Monthly spend audit across every AI tool, licence, and consultancy on the books. Underused licences killed. Contract renewals renegotiated. Tool consolidation where two products do the same thing. Target: 20 to 40 percent reduction in existing AI spend within the first six months — paid for by the engagement itself.
05 · FULL INTEGRATION
The Embed retainer includes one Quarterly Build. The Fractional includes a continuous build pipeline — workflow automations, document templates, custom GPTs and agents, CRM integrations, practice management hooks, accounting platform connections, all wired into your existing stack and supported on an ongoing basis. Plus vendor implementation oversight for anything you buy externally.
03 · THE STEP UP
Same operator. Same methodology. Different operating model. The Embed gives you direction. The Fractional gives you an executive who owns the function.
| Dimension | £5K Embed | £10K Fractional CAIO |
|---|---|---|
| Time | Up to 8 hrs / month | 40 – 60 hrs / month (2 – 3 days / week) |
| Role | Senior advisor in your leadership team | Named executive officer with sign-off authority |
| Build capacity | One Quarterly Build (60 hrs / quarter) | Continuous build pipeline, multiple builds per quarter |
| Change management | Strategic input | Full ownership: workflow redesign, adoption KPIs, training |
| Compliance | Strategy and vendor evaluation | Maintains AI register; runs ICO, sector, and EU AI Act reviews |
| Vendor management | Evaluation and procurement support | Full vendor lifecycle: contracts, renewals, kills |
| Accountability | Strategy quality | Business outcomes: hours saved, £ saved, adoption % |
| Outcome | "We have AI direction" | "We have AI running, governed, and compounding" |
04 · WHO IT'S FOR
A CEO without a CTO. A senior team without an AI expert. A balance sheet that can't justify a £230K hire — but can't afford to keep paying for unused licences either.
05 · THE RHYTHM
A weekly heartbeat. A monthly review. A quarterly reset. Predictable, written, decision-led — so the function doesn't depend on you remembering to chase.
Slack and email availability during the working day. Hallucination incidents, vendor questions, and staff queries handled live — not queued for the next scheduled call.
Standing AI agenda item on your weekly senior team meeting. A 45-minute experiment review session: pilots assessed against pre-set thresholds, kill or scale decisions made in the room.
Written monthly board pack: spend, adoption percentage, hours saved, incidents, roadmap status. Full spend audit across every AI tool and consultancy on the books. Action list for the next month signed off.
Every tool, contract, and use case categorised: Stay (working, keep), Scale (working, expand), Sunset (kill or replace). £ values attached to each decision. AI register refreshed. Roadmap re-baselined for the next quarter.
06 · WHAT IT COSTS
PER MONTH · 6 MONTH MINIMUM
£60,000 MIN COMMITMENT · VAT EXCL
A full-time Chief AI Officer in the UK costs £200,000-plus a year by the time you've added employer NI (now 15% above the £5K threshold), pension, and benefits. Total all-in: comfortably north of £230,000 before they've shipped anything.
The Fractional CAIO is roughly half that — for the executive function plus a delivery team. One avoided wrong vendor decision pays the year. One AI initiative that doesn't get abandoned pays for the next three.
If you've taken the £3,000 Audit and signed within 30 days, the audit fee credits against the first invoice.
07 · THE OBJECTIONS
The five questions every CEO asks before signing. Answered straight, with the trade-offs visible.
A part-time senior officer, embedded in your business, with sign-off authority and a seat at your executive table. Not a consultant. Not a contractor. The same role a full-time Chief AI Officer would do — at the right size for a £3M to £20M business.
A full-time Chief AI Officer costs £200,000-plus a year by the time you've added employer NI, pension, and benefits. £10,000 a month is roughly half that — for an executive function plus a delivery team. The average UK SME spends £321,000 on an AI implementation; 70 percent of those exceed budget by 20 to 70 percent. One avoided wrong vendor decision pays the year.
No. By month six, the engagement includes succession readiness — a named internal lead chairs the AI governance forum independently. Past month six, the engagement either steps down to the £5,000 Embed retainer or steps out entirely. The role is designed to be replaceable, not indispensable.
Independence clause in every engagement: no vendor commissions, no affiliate revenue, no kickbacks. Every vendor evaluation is documented with named alternatives considered, and the CEO signs off on every contract above the agreed threshold. The economics make tool consolidation a feature, not a conflict.
Different remit, different skillset. IT optimises for uptime, security, and procurement. A CAIO redesigns how fee-earners work, runs change management with the team, and owns adoption — not deployment. Most AI pilots that "died in the IT department" died because IT was the wrong owner. The IT director stays in their lane; the CAIO runs the function above them.
Almost every Fractional engagement starts with the £3,000 14-day Audit. It lets both sides know whether the fit is right before either of us commits to six months. If you sign the Fractional within 30 days of the audit, the £3,000 credits against the first month. Effectively making the audit free if you continue.