01 · Strategic Guidance
AI Strategy
Fractional CTO-level guidance for funded teams placing real AI bets.
Overview
What you get
Fractional CTO expertise and roadmaps optimized for ROI and scale. We turn AI ambition into a 12-month plan your CEO, board, and engineering team can all defend.
The problem
Why teams call us
- Board is pushing for an AI story but engineering can't separate signal from hype.
- Build-vs-buy decisions are getting made one feature at a time, with no system view.
- Hiring plan, vendor stack, and product surfaces aren't sequenced against each other.
Approach
How we work
- Interviews with founders, product, engineering, and (where useful) 2–3 customers.
- Audit of the current stack, spend, and any in-flight AI work.
- Opportunity map: surfaces ranked by ROI, technical risk, and time-to-revenue.
- Roadmap and hiring plan written for the CEO, not for the engineers.
Process
Week by week.
- 01 · Week 1
Discover
Stakeholder interviews, stack & spend audit, customer signal review.
- 02 · Week 2
Diagnose
Opportunity map across surfaces; build-vs-buy per workflow.
- 03 · Week 3
Shape
Phased roadmap, budget bands, hiring profile, risk register.
- 04 · Week 4
Defend
Board-ready deck + working session with leadership.
- Founder or CTO building an AI thesis with real budget behind it
- Need an outside read on build-vs-buy and sequencing
- Will translate findings into board-level decisions
- Pre-revenue teams exploring 'maybe AI' ideas
- Orgs without a clear executive decision-maker
- Looking for a 60-slide trend report, not a plan
Deliverables
Everything we ship
- 01AI roadmap with phased delivery and budget bands
- 02Build-vs-buy analysis per surface
- 03Hiring profile for the first 2 AI engineers
- 04Vendor + model shortlist with rationale
- 05Risk register with mitigation plans
- 06Board-ready narrative deck
Outcomes
What you walk away with.
A defensible 12-month AI roadmap your CEO and board can fund — with sequencing that respects what your team can actually ship.
Tooling
Stack we ship against
Model- and infra-agnostic. We adapt to your stack, not the other way around.
FAQ
Real questions, technically answered.
- Do you replace our CTO?
- No. We work alongside your CTO (or stand in for the role temporarily) and leave the decision authority with your leadership.
- Will you write code during this engagement?
- Not as the deliverable. We may prototype to de-risk a decision, but the output is a plan — not a product.
- Can this roll into an implementation engagement?
- Yes. Many strategy engagements convert into RAG, Copilot, or Agents builds afterward, but you're never committed.
Related engagements
Often paired with.
02 · AI Implementation
AI Copilots
In-product assistants grounded in your customers' data — that ship, not demo.
04 · AI Implementation
RAG & Embedding
Production-grade retrieval — measured against your golden set before it ships.
07 · AI Infrastructure
Cloud Migration
Move AI workloads off third-party APIs and into your own cloud — without downtime.
Next step
Ready to scope AI Strategy?
Book a discovery call. We'll confirm fit, sequence the engagement, and have a Statement of Work in your inbox within a week.
Refundable if we're not a fitWritten diagnostic in 48 hoursSession run by a founder, not a sales rep