Fractional AI Officer
Fractional AI officer: one owner for the AI roadmap
A fractional AI officer is one senior person who owns your AI roadmap and the calls on it, part time, so you do not hire a full-time C-suite role. This fractional AI leader steers the builds as well as the strategy: what to build, what to buy, what to leave alone, and whether the team actually uses it. It is one of two ways into Advisory, one of four things we do, next to the Fractional CTO.
- Owns
- The AI roadmap and the calls on it
- Delivered as
- Advisory
- Starts with
- Scope and design
When a fractional AI officer fits
You need this when AI work is happening and no one owns it.
- Several people are trying AI tools and nobody decides which ones stay.
- Someone pitched you a build and you cannot tell whether it is worth doing.
- A pilot works and no one owns what happens next.
- Staff are unsure whether the AI replaces them, and no one has told them.
- A client, lender or insurer asked about your AI policy and you do not have one.
- You are weighing a fractional chief AI officer against a hire, and the work does not yet fill a job.
What the fractional AI officer owns
The officer owns five things.
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The AI roadmap
One ranked list of what to automate, build or leave alone, tied to what each job costs you today. Each item gets a build-or-buy call, with the reasoning written down. The AI roadmap changes when the business does.
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What gets built and what does not
Every proposal, ours or anyone's, goes past one person who can say no. The officer steers the builds as well as the strategy. Where the answer is a custom AI build, the officer writes the brief and signs off acceptance, and we stay accountable for the build through warranty and support.
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Where a person decides
Where the system acts and where a person decides is set before anything is built. The officer sets those lines and moves them as your team's corrections come in.
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Adoption
A system that works technically can still fail if people resist the new process. Our own write-up of six months running on agents lists what broke: decisions with no owner, and a service team never told what its job had become. Adoption belongs to the officer, from the first week: work with the office team, make the handoffs clear, and use their feedback to change the workflow.
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Risk and policy
AI governance here is three things you can hold: a written AI policy, a list of what data goes into which system, and a named person for incidents. We work from the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, which organizes the work as Govern, Map, Measure and Manage.
How the engagement runs
It runs the same four stages as every Zen Aegis engagement, in order.
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1. Scope and design
We map the real work: the jobs that cost the most, the people in them and the systems they touch. We agree a defined mandate and a working cadence, sized to your business. The first outputs are the roadmap and the first list of decision boundaries. Nothing is built yet.
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2. Build
The items the officer approves get built, by us or by your own people. Each one is shown working against acceptance criteria named with you before it counts as accepted.
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3. Warranty
Each build carries a warranty, with the terms set out in the proposal. The officer is the person you call when something misbehaves.
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4. Support and continuous improvement
The officer stays on a standing cadence. Each round is a working session. It covers what the team corrected, what changed in the underlying models, and what belongs on the list next.
Full-time Chief AI Officer, consultancy or fractional
If AI work does fill most of a week, hire the full-time role. The fractional seat does not argue against it.
Who holds the seat, and what the work looks like
Robby Prochnow brings 12.5 years across Fortune 500 technology businesses and hands-on experience designing, building and supporting AI systems for businesses.
His experience runs about 20 years in total. The corporate years were at Insight, GoDaddy, TD SYNNEX and Avnet. The rest is the systems he has built through Zen Aegis. The same intake, document, approval and reporting problems show up across industries, so the problems you describe are rarely new to him.
Here is comparable work. For a multi-entity holding group, we combined AI leadership with agent deployment, meeting capture, infrastructure consolidation and ongoing support. The person deciding what to build was the person connecting that decision to delivery. In your business the pieces will differ, and the role is the same: one owner between the strategy and the thing the team uses on Monday.
What a fractional AI officer will not do
- Pick tools before the work is understood.
- Say yes to every idea. The roadmap has a not-now column.
- Approve a build that has no named owner on your side.
- Quote a savings figure before scoping is done.
- Own your servers, vendors or code. That is the Fractional CTO's job; the AI officer owns what AI is for and who decides. Some businesses need both.
Questions
What is a fractional AI officer?
A part-time senior person who holds the AI leadership seat for your business. Fractional chief AI officer, fractional CAIO and fractional head of AI describe the same seat.
What does a fractional AI officer cost?
Two shapes: a fixed-scope engagement for a defined problem, or a retainer for ongoing AI leadership. Either is priced separately from the cost of a build. Rates and time commitments go in the proposal.
How is this different from a Fractional CTO?
The Fractional CTO owns the technical stack and the vendors. The AI officer owns the roadmap, the build and do-not-build calls, and the human decision lines.
How much time does it take?
There is no standard number of days. We agree a working cadence sized to the decisions and delivery work in front of your business, and change it as the work changes.
How do we know it worked?
Each build has acceptance criteria named with you before work starts. It counts as accepted when it works in actual use, not when the code passes.
Talk through the workflow
We'll tell you what we'd build, what we'd buy, and what we'd leave alone. Tell us what the AI work looks like today and who owns it. We will say whether a fractional AI officer is the right seat or whether something smaller fits, then you can contact Zen Aegis to start.
- What we’d design The process, the people in it, and where a person decides.
- What we’d build The system, and how we would prove it in actual use.
- What we wouldn’t Said plainly on the call, including when the answer is no.
