Your company needs AI leadership. A full-time hire is overkill.
One senior operator with a full AI stack, strategy, builds, training, and governance. Monthly retainer. No headcount. No ramp-up.
A fractional head of AI is a part-time AI leader managing strategy, building systems, training your team, and enforcing governance, without the cost of a full-time hire. Fractional engagement is a monthly retainer that includes hands-on execution, not just advice. You work directly with one person, start to finish.
Monthly Retainer•Strategy + Build + Governance•You Work With Me Directly
What you get every month
Governance & Risk
Shadow AI monitoring (we catch when your team is leaking data into ChatGPT before it becomes a security incident). Policy enforcement review. Incident response if needed. Approved tool list updates. Compliance documentation. You'll know what your team is doing with AI, and what data is exposed.
System Optimization
Dashboard health check. Automation performance review. KPI tracking against the baselines we set during the initial build. If something breaks or underperforms, I catch it before you notice.
New Capabilities
1-2 new automations, integrations, or AI features per month. The scope adapts to what your business needs. Last month it might be a new reporting dashboard. This month it might be a WhatsApp bot for a department that wasn't in the original scope.
Team Enablement
Monthly 60-minute AI Office Hours, open Q&A with your team. Async support via Slack, Teams, or WhatsApp (response within 24 hours). Quarterly training session on new capabilities. The goal is your team using the tools confidently, not depending on me to do it.
Executive Reporting
Monthly 1-page AI Operations Report: what's working, what's at risk, what's next. Quarterly strategic review with leadership. 60 minutes. You always know where things stand.
Vendor Intelligence
New AI tools emerge every week. I evaluate them and tell you: adopt, wait, or skip. You don't have to figure out what's real and what's hype, that's my job.
The cost comparison
Your savings: 60 to 75% versus a full-time hire. 50-60% versus team-based fractional firms. No recruiter fees. No benefits overhead. No ramp-up period. I've already built these systems for companies like yours. And you work with one person who builds, deploys, and governs. Not a team that rotates.
Full-time Chief AI Officer
Salary + benefits + recruiting + 3-6 month ramp-up. Senior AI leaders command some of the highest salaries in the talent market.
Full-time salary
Full-time AI Director (your competitor's approach)
Still competing against Fortune 500s for the same talent pool.
Full-time salary
Fractional AI firm (team-based model)
You get a team, not a person. Multiple handoffs. Advisory-heavy.
Team-based retainer
Fractional Head of AI (Work-Smart.ai)
One person. Builds, deploys, and governs. No team. No rotating.
Monthly retainer
"Here's what I see across every engagement: the companies that get results from AI are the ones with a single person accountable for making it work. Not a committee. Not a vendor. Someone who understands the operation and owns the outcome. The difference isn't the title. It's having someone whose only job is making AI work in your operation."
What this actually looks like
For a $14B wealth advisory firm
Their institutional expertise was invisible to the AI systems their prospects use. Now 60 authority pages carry their voice across LLM queries, their marketing agency has a coordinated AI strategy instead of competing initiatives, and proposals that took a full day to draft come together in under an hour. The retainer keeps the system expanding, new content, new capabilities, new competitive advantages every month.
Why it works: They needed someone who understood both the technology and the business language to coordinate across 5 stakeholders and a marketing agency. A team-based firm would have added layers. They needed one person who owns the whole picture.
Read the full case study →For a construction company with 650 employees
They went from a 15-tab Excel spreadsheet with 30-day-late project overrun discovery to real-time visibility across every project, costs, certifications, schedules, documents, worker assignments. Processes that took 60 minutes now take 30 seconds. The retainer keeps pace with the business: new project types, new compliance requirements, inflation adjustments, new workflows as the company grows.
Why it works: The system keeps evolving because the business keeps changing. Without ongoing leadership, the AI decays within 90 days. They need someone who understands both the construction operation and the AI systems to keep them in sync.
Read the full case study →For a $14B wealth advisory firm
A 6-week AI visibility project became a 9-month Fractional Head of AI engagement spanning six operational areas. Voice DNA Profile from more than a decade of published materials. 60 authority pages. Proposal automation, knowledge base, intelligence briefing, team training, Operational Blueprint. The retainer model means the firm gets ongoing optimization without permanent headcount.
For a legal services firm
They deployed a WhatsApp AI agent that qualifies prospects and books meetings automatically, something they'd been trying to hire for. Ad spend stayed the same, but the meeting booking rate jumped from 0% to 42%. The retainer keeps Victoria (the AI agent) running, prompts staying sharp, CRM synced, and new capabilities rolling out as practice needs evolve.
After 6 months on a retainer, here's what changes
For the construction company
Went from a 15-tab Excel with 30-day-late overrun discovery to a full AI system (Capataz) tracking costs, certifications, schedules, and documents across every project in real time. Processes that took 60 minutes now take 30 seconds.
For the wealth advisory firm
Went from 90% of data trapped in Outlook and a visibility gap of roughly two orders of magnitude between branded and non-branded search to a full AI visibility framework. 60 content pages, authority distribution across leadership, proposal automation, and an intelligence briefing system.
For the legal firm
Went from $1M in ad spend with zero meetings booked to a WhatsApp AI agent that books a meeting on 42% of inbound conversations, on the same spend. Monthly maintenance keeps Victoria running, prompts optimized, CRM synced.
The retainer isn't about billing hours. It's about whether your AI infrastructure keeps evolving or starts decaying the day I stop.
How the retainer works
Monthly retainer
Senior AI leadership embedded in your operation. One person. Strategy, building, governance, and team enablement, without the overhead of a full-time hire.
- •6-month minimum recommended, then month-to-month
- •Scope: committed to output, not a timesheet
- •Quarterly recalibration: every 90 days we reassess priorities and adjust scope
- •Location: hybrid, on-site for people work, remote for building
- •Response time: 24 hours async (Slack, Teams, or WhatsApp). Urgent issues same-day.
- •30-day termination clause after initial term. You own everything built, no lock-in.
What's not included:
- Major new system builds (quoted separately)
- Full-time availability
- Hardware/infrastructure costs
- Third-party software licenses
Your monthly retainer qualifies for ongoing tax credits
Monthly retainer fees qualify as contract research expenses under the IRC §41 R&D Tax Credit, the same program that covers builds and diagnostics. 65% of each monthly payment counts as a Qualified Research Expense.
65% of your retainer counts toward QREs each month, generating an annual credit equal to roughly 6-14% of qualifying retainer fees depending on your structure and credit year.
The credit compounds over time. By year three, the ASC rate reaches 14%, that's an effective reduction on your retainer cost, every year, as long as the engagement qualifies.
See all tax credits, grants, and deductions →Frequently Asked Questions
A fractional head of AI is a part-time AI executive who leads your company's AI strategy, implementation, and governance. Instead of hiring a full-time Chief AI Officer, you get the same strategic direction and hands-on execution at a fraction of the cost. The difference from a consultant: a fractional AI leader builds and stays, not advises and leaves.
An AI consultant typically delivers a strategy deck or assessment and moves on. A fractional head of AI implements the strategy, builds the data layer, deploys automations, trains the team, enforces governance, and stays monthly to evolve the system. Most mid-market companies need someone who builds, not someone who advises. The full side-by-side comparison lives at /resources/fractional-head-of-ai-vs-consultant.
Companies with 20-200 employees that have real AI infrastructure (data layer, dashboards, automations) and need someone to govern it, optimize it, and expand it. If you've done the build and your AI needs ongoing leadership, this is the role. If you haven't built anything yet, start with the AI Ops Audit.
A full-time Chief AI Officer is expensive once you factor in salary, benefits, and recruiting, and mid-market companies are competing against Fortune 500s for the same candidates. For a company with 50-200 employees, that's often more AI leadership than you need. A fractional engagement gives you senior AI leadership 2-3 days per month at a fraction of the cost, and you work directly with the person doing the work, not a team.
Governance review (shadow AI monitoring, policy updates). System optimization (dashboard health, automation performance). 1-2 new capabilities deployed. Monthly AI Office Hours with your team. Executive report: what's working, what's at risk, what's next. Quarterly strategic review with leadership.
Most clients start with the AI Ops Audit (a 2-4 week diagnostic), then move to the AI Foundation Build (a 4-16 week implementation). The retainer question usually answers itself from there, if your AI infrastructure needs ongoing leadership, this is the natural next step.
Usually, yes. Your CTO owns technology architecture and delivery, the full stack, the infrastructure, the engineering team. A fractional head of AI owns the AI-specific layer: data consolidation, automation deployment, governance policy, team training, and vendor evaluation. They're complementary. In practice, I design the AI systems; your CTO's team implements what touches core infrastructure. Neither role replaces the other.
Especially for you. AI creates the most impact in businesses that haven't built internal AI capability, construction, legal, financial services, professional services. Your competitors in these industries are adopting AI now. The question isn't whether AI applies to your operation. It's whether you'll have governance around it or let your team figure it out on their own with personal ChatGPT accounts.
Yes. This works for solo business owners and small teams scaling operations. The entry-tier engagement covers AI infrastructure, governance, and ongoing optimization for 1-10 people. You get the same strategic direction and hands-on execution as larger companies, scaled to your headcount and budget.
Everything operates under NDA and data handling agreements from day one. More importantly, building your AI governance framework is part of the engagement, approved tool lists, data classification policies, access controls. Your data stays in infrastructure you own. I don't store client data on personal systems or use it for anything outside your engagement. When the retainer ends, you keep everything.
Most companies start with the diagnostic. The retainer question answers itself from there.
The diagnostic gives you visibility. The build gives you infrastructure. The retainer gives you ongoing leadership. Start where it makes sense. I'll be honest about what you need.