Frequently Asked Questions

A Fractional Chief AI Officer is an embedded senior AI leader on a monthly retainer — typically 2 days per week — who owns your AI strategy AND ships the first production systems. It’s the right fit for mid-market companies that need executive-level AI leadership but don’t have the budget or workload for a full-time $400k+ hire. Unlike a consultant, the Fractional CAIO is accountable for shipping working systems, not delivering slide decks.

Big consultancies sell strategy decks. We sell working systems. Their typical AI engagement is a 12-week deliverable that ends with a beautiful roadmap and a separate, much larger statement of work for implementation — usually subcontracted to a body shop. Our engagements end with code running in your production environment. We don’t subcontract the build. The same senior team that writes the roadmap writes the commits.

We ship code. Every engagement — including Fractional CAIO and AI Readiness Audits — ends with at least one working AI system deployed in your environment. Our team is senior engineers and operators, not slide-deck consultants. We use our own platform (Ottolax, Claude Gateway, emails4agents) to run our own businesses, which is the strongest proof we can offer that the systems work in production.

Frontier models first: Claude (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku), GPT-4o/5, Qwen, Llama — selected per use case. Orchestration with LangGraph or our own Ottolax multi-agent platform. Backend in FastAPI or Node, data in Postgres/Supabase (pgvector for retrieval), frontends in Next.js/Astro/React. We have no vendor loyalty — we pick the best tool for the job and document why in the architecture spec.

AI Readiness Audits are fixed scope at 2–4 weeks. Fractional CAIO engagements are monthly retainers — most run 6–18 months, and we explicitly aim to make ourselves replaceable inside 18 months by training your internal team. Custom AI Builds run 6–16 weeks per project. Infrastructure Access (Ottolax, Claude Gateway, emails4agents) is annual licensing.

• Fractional CAIO: monthly retainer, scaled to days/week of access
• AI Readiness Audit: fixed fee per engagement, scoped to company size
• Custom AI Builds: fixed fee per milestone, paid as we ship
• AI Infrastructure Access: annual license, per-tenant or per-seat

No hourly billing. No surprise change orders. Pricing is shared on the strategy call once we understand scope.

Yes — and we explicitly design engagements to make your internal team better. We pair with your engineers on architecture reviews, code reviews, and handoff documentation. Every build comes with runbooks and test coverage so your team can own it after we leave. The goal is leverage for your existing team, not displacement.

Five things: (1) a written AI roadmap aligned to your business OKRs, (2) an AI Opportunity Map scoring every candidate use case on value/feasibility/data/risk, (3) a capability gap analysis with build-vs-buy recommendations, (4) a governance + risk framework covering security, compliance, and data residency, and (5) a working prototype of your top-ranked AI opportunity — running in your environment, not on a slide. Plus an executive readout deck and 30 days of follow-up access.

Yes. AI Infrastructure Access is a standalone offering. You can license Ottolax (multi-agent OS), Claude Gateway (credential infrastructure), and emails4agents (email API) directly — either as hosted SaaS, deployed into your private cloud, or as a source license for regulated workloads. Pricing is per-tenant or per-seat with volume discounts. We provide migration assistance, documentation, and a Slack-based support channel.

We work with SOC 2 and HIPAA-aware workloads. For regulated environments, we deploy the platform into your AWS/GCP/Azure account so your data never leaves your control plane. We use Anthropic’s zero-data-retention APIs where available, support BYO-key for OpenAI and Anthropic, and design every system to log model interactions for audit. We’re not a HITRUST-certified hospital vendor — if you have that level of requirement, we’ll be honest about it on the call.