AI leadership for your business. Without the $200K salary.
A dedicated Chief AI Officer who knows your business, optimizes your automations, trains your team, and continuously identifies new opportunities — at a fraction of what a full-time hire would cost.
$2,000–$3,000/month · Ongoing monthly retainer
The Risk
Building automations without ongoing strategy is like buying a car and never changing the oil.
AI tools release major updates monthly. Your competitors are continuously optimizing. Without dedicated AI leadership, your initial investment slowly depreciates — and the gap between you and AI-powered competitors widens every month.
Your automations go stale
AI tools release major updates monthly. Without someone tracking these changes and applying them to your systems, your automations gradually become less effective — and eventually break.
You miss competitive windows
While you're running your business, your AI-powered competitors are continuously optimizing. Every month without strategic AI leadership is a month they pull further ahead. 80% of businesses accelerated their AI plans after seeing competitors adopt.
Automation ROI plateaus
Your initial build saves 10-20 hours/week. Without ongoing strategy, it stays at 10-20 hours. With a CAIO, that number grows to 30, 40, 50+ hours across your organization as new workflows get automated and existing ones get optimized.
What's Included
Everything a full-time CAIO delivers — at 12–18% of the cost.
Monthly Strategic Review
A deep-dive session reviewing automation performance, identifying new opportunities, and adjusting strategy based on your business goals. Not a check-in — a strategic planning session with someone who knows your operation inside out.
Ongoing Automation Optimization
AI tools change monthly. Your automations need to evolve with them. We continuously optimize your existing systems — faster, smarter, more efficient as new capabilities emerge.
New Automation Roadmap
A prioritized pipeline of automation opportunities for your business, updated quarterly. Every workflow that can be automated gets identified, evaluated, and queued — so you never wonder 'what should we automate next?'
Team Training as AI Evolves
Your team stays current without spending their own time researching. When new capabilities launch that affect your workflows, we train your team before they even know to ask.
Executive ROI Reporting
Monthly reports showing hours saved, tasks eliminated, cost reduction, and competitive advantage gained. Numbers your leadership team can see, understand, and present to stakeholders.
Priority Access for Urgent Needs
When something breaks or a new opportunity appears, you don't wait in a queue. Priority response times and direct access to your dedicated AI strategist.
The Math
Three options. One clear winner.
Full-Time CAIO Hire
$200,000–$350,000/yr
Salary, benefits, equity — for a role that most SMBs don't need 40 hours a week. Plus the hiring pain: AI job postings surged 61% but 1 in 2 could be unfilled by 2027. You'd spend months searching, interviewing, and onboarding while your competitors keep automating. That's a quarter-million dollar bet on finding a unicorn.
Fractional CAIO (Us)
$24,000–$36,000/yr
Same strategic leadership at 12–18% of the cost. Already trained. Already experienced across your industry. No recruiting, no onboarding, no benefits overhead. Starts delivering value in week one — and that $24K investment typically generates 3–5x its cost in recovered capacity within the first six months.
No AI Leadership
$62,400+/yr in lost time
Your team keeps doing 16 hours/week of manual work. Your automations slowly degrade as AI tools update. New opportunities pass you by because nobody's watching. Your competitors — who ARE investing in AI leadership — compound their advantage every single month. The most expensive option looks free until you count what it costs.
What's really at stake without AI leadership?
Think about the last year. How many times did you see an AI headline and wonder “Should I care about this?” How many tools did you sign up for but never implement? How many hours did your team spend on the same manual tasks they were doing twelve months ago? Without someone whose job it is to translate AI evolution into business action, those questions just pile up — and so does the gap between you and your competitors.
Without a CAIO
- Automations slowly degrade as AI tools update monthly
- New opportunities slip by because nobody's watching for them
- Your team falls behind on AI capabilities and loses confidence
- Competitors who invest continuously pull further ahead each quarter
- You're the one researching AI at midnight instead of sleeping
With a Fractional CAIO
- Automation savings compound: 10 hrs/wk becomes 30, then 50+
- New revenue opportunities identified and captured proactively
- Your team stays sharp and confident as AI evolves
- Executive reports prove ROI to stakeholders and partners
- You stop worrying about AI entirely — it's handled
Companies using AI strategically see nearly 5x productivity increases. At $2,000–$3,000/month, that's less than the cost of a part-time assistant — but the impact compounds across your entire organization, not just one person's task list. Every month without AI leadership is a month your competitors compound their advantage while yours stays flat.
The Compounding Advantage
Each automation compounds. After the first saves 3 hours/week, we identify five more workflows that each save 2–4 hours. Month over month, your total hours reclaimed grows:
Month 1
10–20 hrs/wk
Initial system
Month 3
20–30 hrs/wk
Optimized + new builds
Month 6
30–40 hrs/wk
Full team automation
Month 12
40–50+ hrs/wk
Organizational transformation
This is the value ladder in action: each tier multiplies the ROI of the previous one. The Fractional CAIO tier is where the investment truly compounds.
This is for you if...
- You've already built automations and want to continuously expand and optimize
- You want dedicated AI leadership without the $200K+ cost of a full-time hire
- You want someone proactively identifying new automation opportunities
- Your team needs ongoing training as AI tools evolve monthly
- You want executive-level ROI reporting for your leadership team
- You want priority access when urgent AI needs arise
This is NOT for you if...
- You haven't built any automations yet (start with Done With You or Done For You)
- You only need a one-time build, not ongoing strategy (see Done For You)
- You want to learn to do everything yourself (see Community — $100/month)
FAQ
Common Questions
Monthly strategic review session (60-90 minutes), ongoing system monitoring and optimization, one new automation build or major optimization, team training as needed, executive ROI report, and priority access for any urgent needs. Think of it as having a CAIO on your team who shows up with a plan every month.
We recommend starting with either a Done With You or Done For You engagement to build your foundation. Most Fractional CAIO clients start after a Done For You build — they've seen the ROI and want to compound it with ongoing strategy. If you're starting from zero, we'll recommend the right entry point on your discovery call.
Done For You is project-based: we build a system and hand it over. Fractional CAIO is strategic and continuous: we optimize existing systems, identify new opportunities, train your team, track ROI, and proactively adapt your automation stack as AI evolves. It's the difference between building a house and having an architect on retainer.
Your Fractional CAIO engagement includes one new automation build or major optimization per month. For larger projects (5-10 workflow systems), we can scope a parallel Done For You project at a discounted rate for existing CAIO clients.
Yes. We operate on a monthly retainer basis. You can adjust scope, pause for a month, or transition to a different tier at any time. No long-term contracts. We keep clients because we deliver results, not because they're locked in.
This is literally what we do full-time. When Claude releases a new feature, we've tested it before the announcement email hits your inbox. When a new automation pattern emerges, we've already evaluated it for our clients' use cases. You get the benefit of a team that lives and breathes AI evolution — without paying for that research yourself.
The question isn't whether you need AI leadership. It's how much longer you can afford to go without it.
Book a strategy call. We'll review your current automation stack, identify the biggest opportunities you're missing, and show you exactly what a Fractional CAIO engagement would look like for your business.