At some point in almost every networking event I’ve attended over the past year, someone asks me what I do. I say consultant. They nod. What kind? AI and tech. The nod gets careful — the kind of careful that means they’re deciding whether to keep asking or change the subject.
Then I say the phrase. Fractional chief AI officer. And the nod stops entirely.
Good. That reaction is exactly the problem I’m here to solve.
What a fractional chief AI officer is not
Let’s start there, because the title sounds more impressive than I usually prefer — and I want to be honest about it before someone else is dishonest on my behalf.
A fractional chief AI officer is not someone you hire to tell you AI will change everything. You already know that. You’ve heard it approximately ten thousand times, from vendors, from LinkedIn, from your nephew at Thanksgiving. It is not a vendor pitching you a product they also happen to install. It is not a consultant from the coasts who flies in, charges you $400 an hour, and hands you a 60-page report your team will never implement.
It is also not a full-time hire. That’s the whole point.
At large companies, the Chief AI Officer — CAIO — is a real, full-time executive role. The CAIO owns AI strategy, governance, adoption, vendor relationships, risk management, and internal literacy across the whole organization. It’s a well-compensated seat at a table that most large organizations now have — and many more are building.
That role was not designed for the businesses most of us actually run.
The problem the fractional model solves
The businesses I know — the ones in Springfield, in the Ozarks, in the Midwest — aren’t publicly traded. They don’t have Board-approved AI governance committees. They have maybe one or two people who understand enough about technology to ask the right questions, and a lot of very real work to do with a small team and a finite budget.
Those businesses still need AI leadership. They just don’t need a full-time executive sitting in a corner office dedicated to it.
Fractional roles are not new. Fractional CFOs have been common in the startup world for over a decade. You hire them for a defined number of hours per month. You get the expertise of a senior finance executive without the $200,000 salary line. When you hit a decision point that requires financial leadership, you’ve got it. When you don’t, you’re not paying for a full-time employee to fill a chair.
A fractional chief AI officer works the same way. You get access to dedicated, senior-level AI strategy, implementation guidance, vendor vetting, risk management, and internal education — without hiring a full-time executive you may not be ready for and may not need yet.
The result is that AI leadership stops being something only well-capitalized companies can afford. It becomes something you can access strategically, for exactly as long as you need it.
What a fractional CAIO actually does
The short answer: whatever the business actually needs at the intersection of AI and operations.
The more honest answer: the job changes depending on where you are.
Some clients are at the beginning. They’ve heard the noise — from vendors, from competitors, from a LinkedIn feed that has apparently decided AI is the only thing worth discussing — and they don’t know what’s real. For them, I’m primarily a translator and a skeptic. My job is to help them figure out what AI actually applies to their business, at this stage, given their team, their systems, and their risk tolerance. And to tell them, clearly and without apology, what to ignore.
Some clients are in the middle. They’ve started experimenting — a chatbot here, an automation there — and now they have a small mess of tools that don’t connect, and a staff that’s either terrified of AI or over-relying on it. For them, I’m more of an architect and a coach. We map what they have, identify the gaps and redundancies, and build a coherent path forward.
Some clients are ready to build. They have a specific problem they want to solve with AI, and they need someone who can scope it honestly, find the right approach, manage the technical execution, and make sure what gets built is secure, defensible, and maintainable. For them, I’m the hands-on partner.
The work isn’t always glamorous. Sometimes it’s reviewing a vendor’s terms of service to find the data-sharing clause buried on page 14. Sometimes it’s training a team on prompt engineering. Sometimes it’s telling a business owner that the thing they want to build is technically possible but probably not worth the investment right now — and here’s what they should do instead.
That last one is the one I think about the most. Because the willingness to say not yet — to tell someone they don’t need to spend money — is what makes a trusted advisor worth having. A vendor can’t say that. A product can’t say that.
That is judgment. That’s what you’re actually buying.
Why Springfield? Why the Midwest?
Because we’ve been lied to enough times by people selling technology solutions to last-mile markets they never planned to stay in.
Here’s the local market reality as I understand it: there’s a substantial gap right now between what Midwest business owners need and what’s available to them. The large AI consultancies have minimum engagements that start at $50,000. The freelancers on every job board range from genuinely skilled to wildly overconfident. The software vendors are biased toward their own products — which is rational for them and potentially disastrous for you.
There’s very little in the middle. Trusted, local, technically literate, relationship-first, priced for the market.
That’s the opening I take seriously.
This isn’t a temporary play while I wait for something better. Springfield is home. 2oddballs Creative, the full-service marketing and PR agency I co-own with my wife Kylie, has been here for years. I know what these businesses deal with. I know the margin pressure. I know that when an owner says they want to “implement AI,” they usually mean they want to stop drowning in manual work — not that they want to deploy a large language model.
And I know the difference between a vendor promising a transformation and a tool that will actually help your operations manager get home before 7pm. That distinction is the whole job.
Who this is actually built for
If your business falls into any of these situations, a fractional CAIO might be worth a conversation:
You’re evaluating AI tools and don’t know who to trust. Vendors are telling you their product will solve everything. You want someone to look at the claims with no financial interest in the outcome.
You’ve started automating things and it’s gotten messy. You’ve got automation tools running, maybe a chatbot on your website, maybe a tool your operations manager adopted six months ago — and none of it connects properly, and you’re not sure it’s secure.
You have a real project in mind. An internal assistant. A customer-facing tool. An automated intake or follow-up system. You want someone who can scope it honestly, build it right, and document it so your team can actually maintain it.
You want someone in your corner on an ongoing basis. Not to answer emails at 11pm, but to be the person you call when a vendor pitches you, when a staff member asks a hard question about AI policy, when you’re making a decision that touches technology and you don’t want to make it alone.
A retainer with me starts at $995 a month. A structured AI Opportunity Audit starts at $3,500. I’ve also taken on larger implementation partnerships where I’m embedded more deeply in a business for a defined period. You can see the full details — clearly, with actual pricing — on my services page.
I won’t bury you in the details here.
What I’ll leave you with
The title “fractional chief AI officer” is more formal than I usually prefer. I’m the kind of person who uses em dashes too liberally and publishes first drafts. But the role is real, and I think the formality is useful — because it tells you something about the level of accountability I’m taking on when we work together.
This isn’t about having an impressive title. It’s about the fact that AI decisions need a person behind them — a person with accountability, judgment, and something at stake. Not a software package. Not a vendor’s rep. Not a thought-leadership post written by a ghost and posted at 7am for algorithmic engagement.
Most Midwest businesses can’t afford to hire that person full-time. But they can afford to rent that judgment. Strategically. For exactly as long as they need it.
That is what fractional AI leadership is.
If that’s interesting to you — or if you’re not sure yet but you know something needs to change — let’s talk.
