Need a technical lead for your AI product without hiring one?

Sounds familiar?

• "I have developers. I don't have anyone who decides."
• "Our OpenAI bill tripled and nobody can explain why."
• "Investors asked about our technical roadmap and I made one up."
• "I need to hire an engineer and I can't tell a good one from a confident one."
• "We built it fast. Now I need someone to tell me if it'll survive."
• "I can't afford a CTO and I can't afford not to have one."

What a fractional AI CTO does

• Architecture — how the product is put together, where data lives, what's built versus bought, and whether it can scale and be maintained.
• Model and vendor decisions — OpenAI, Anthropic, open-weight; hosted or self-run; when to switch; what it costs per user.
• Security and data handling — access control, secrets, what's logged, what's sent to which provider, and what a customer's security questionnaire will ask.
• Cost control — unit economics of every AI call, caching, rate limits, budgets and alerts.
• Roadmap — what to build next, what to stop building, and what to say to investors about it.
• Hiring — writing the role, screening, technical interviews, and onboarding the first engineers.
• Vendor and agency oversight — reviewing what outside developers deliver so you're not the only check.
• Being the technical voice in the room — with customers, investors and partners.

Fractional CTO, full-time CTO, agency, or advisor?

How the engagement works

1. Technical review — first two weeks. We read the codebase, the infrastructure, the costs and the roadmap, and write down where you actually are. Founders usually find this alone worth it.
2. Standing cadence — a weekly working session, a monthly roadmap and cost review, and availability in between for the decisions that can't wait.
3. Decisions, in writing — every significant technical decision recorded with the reasoning, so a future full-time CTO inherits a rationale, not a mystery.
4. Build when needed — where the decision is "build this," our engineers can, under a separate fixed-scope quote, with the fractional CTO accountable for the outcome.

Who this is for — and when to hire full-time instead

Founders whose AI MVP is now real; businesses adding an AI product to an existing operation; teams with developers but no decider. When you're past a seed round and building a team of more than a handful of engineers, you need a full-time CTO — and a good fractional one will say so and help you hire them.

How pricing works

A monthly retainer for a defined number of days, with the two-week technical review priced separately as the starting point. Build work commissioned as a result is quoted as fixed scope. No equity required. Numbers on a short call.