Fractional AI CTO Consulting

A fractional AI CTO sets model and perimeter policy, names a process owner, runs a weekly 45-minute review, kills unbounded pilots, and — when you want software — ships a bounded workflow. At ReinforcedX that build is four weeks in your cloud, with you owning weights, datasets, eval suites, and runbooks. It is not a keynote retainer. Scope it at /demo.

The function can stay after the first system. A standard implementation still has a four-week shape, a fixed-scope fee quoted before week one, and 30 days on-call. The fractional layer is the cadence: one owner, one engineer, weekly review, policy. Advisory-only shops stop at the memo. We will not sell hours that cannot end in a runbook.

Hire full-time when the fleet, the eval burden, and the vendor map already justify a standing executive. Until then, a fractional function plus a four-week first system is how you learn whether the role is real. We staff one process owner plus one engineer — not a disguised recruiting pipeline. If you already have the executive, skip to implementation.

It is strategy with an operating cadence and an optional build. Work runs in the client’s cloud. Data is not used to train shared models; zero-retention is the default. Model-agnostic: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral, client fine-tunes. You pay the provider; no token markup. Commercial terms match /faq: subscription plus fixed-scope fee when we implement.

We do not sell a vague hour block. The standing artifact is the weekly 45-minute review plus the named owner and engineer. Implementation, when in scope, is the four-week calendar, not “hours.” If a vendor quotes 8 hours a month of advice and no system, that is a newsletter. Ask what artifacts you keep when the month ends.

Yes: intended use, limitations, eval evidence, where inference runs, and who owns keys. That package is the same shape we use on regulated builds — financial-services governed pilots typically 8–12 weeks, healthcare 10–14 — because the questions are the same. We will not write theater policy that engineering cannot run. See /ai-systems for the evaluation layer those reviews ask about.

No. You own the weights, datasets, eval suites, and runbooks. The cadence is yours. Thirty days on-call follow a build. If your team wants to execute the next workflow themselves, /how-to documents the same patterns. A function that only works while we are on the call is not a CTO function; we refuse that design.

When you already know the workflow, have an owner, and just need the four-week implementation. Also when nobody will attend a 45-minute weekly review — cadence without attendance is theater. We will decline a fractional title that is really “please bless our existing 12 pilots.” Week one is a kill-or-bound decision, the same honesty as the rest of /faq.