Every company is being asked to "do AI." Few have someone on the leadership team who can separate real capabilities from vendor theater, spot the security and compliance risks, and translate technical tradeoffs into board-level decisions. That is the gap a fractional Chief of AI fills. We offer that role to companies that are not ready for a full-time hire but cannot afford to wing it.
What the role covers
A Chief of AI is not just a prompt engineer with a better title. The job is to build an AI strategy that survives contact with your customers, your regulators, and your own data. That means deciding which workflows should become agentic, which should stay deterministic, and where the risks outweigh the reward.
- Opportunity mapping. We audit your products, operations, and data to find the highest-ROI AI bets.
- Vendor and model selection. We help you evaluate LLMs, inference providers, safety tools, and agent frameworks without falling for marketing.
- Risk and governance. We build review boards, data policies, red-teaming cadences, and incident response playbooks.
- Hiring and team design. We define the roles you actually need and interview alongside you.
- Board and executive communication. We translate engineering status into business outcomes.
How we engage
We start with a two-week diagnostic. We interview your leadership, review your architecture and roadmap, and deliver a prioritized AI roadmap with risk ratings and quick wins. After that we can move into a monthly advisory retainer or a deeper implementation engagement where we also act as your forward deployed engineering team.
Why us
We have shipped production AI systems, built safety tooling, advised boards, and run red teams. We are not a research lab selling you a future. We are a small senior shop that can both write the strategy and write the code. That combination is what makes the advice actionable.
When to bring us in
The right time is before you make expensive commitments: signing a big vendor contract, launching a customer-facing AI feature, or restructuring your team around tools you have not validated. A few weeks of focused advisory can save quarters of rework.
If you need a Chief of AI who can also build, book a strategy call or email hello@vibecodingagency.com.