An interim Chief AI Officer, in the seat this month.
Full-time ownership of AI, for a defined stretch. I take the seat when the program has stalled, the CAIO has left, or an exposure has surfaced that needs a senior name against it. One operator with 25 years behind him, working with the team you already have, then a clean handover.
What is an interim Chief AI Officer?
An interim Chief AI Officer is an experienced executive who holds the CAIO role full-time for a limited period. Same authority as the permanent officer, same accountability to the board, with a defined end date and a handover written into the engagement from the start.
Companies reach for it in four situations: the CAIO resigned and the program is drifting, an AI initiative is running badly enough that the board wants senior hands on it now, a regulator or a large customer has asked who owns AI and the honest answer is nobody, or a permanent search is underway and eight months of vacancy is not acceptable.
A vacancy is the worst possible moment to introduce a consulting team to your company. What the situation needs is one experienced operator who can hold the seat from the first week and work with the people already there. That is what you get here: me, alone, and the team you already employ.
Seniority is identical whichever shape you pick; the calendar is what changes. Fractional is ongoing and part-time, a day or two a week alongside your existing leadership. Interim is full-time and temporary. Both are hands-on, and in both I build rather than supervise.
Also known as: temporary Chief AI Officer, acting CAIO, AI executive on secondment, interim head of AI.
The seat is empty and the clock isn't.
Interim work starts under pressure. That's fine. Pressure clarifies what actually matters.
The CAIO left
Initiatives are half-built, vendor contracts are mid-negotiation, and the team is guessing at priorities. Every week without a decision-maker compounds.
The program stalled
Budget was approved, pilots were run, and production never happened. Someone senior has to decide what lives, what dies, and what ships next quarter.
An exposure surfaced
An audit, a customer questionnaire, or a discovery about what employees have been feeding into unapproved tools. It needs a credible owner and a written answer.
The search is running
You're hiring a permanent CAIO and it will take months. The role can't sit empty while the market moves and the board asks for updates.
Stabilize. Decide. Hand over.
An interim engagement has a different shape from a fractional one. The first job is to stop the bleeding; the last job is to make myself unnecessary.
Take the seat
- Full inventory of AI systems, vendors, contracts and in-flight commitments
- Shadow-AI audit and immediate containment of anything genuinely dangerous
- Triage: what continues, what pauses, what stops today
- Direct line to the CEO and the board, with a written read inside three weeks
Decide and ship
- Governance stood up: policy, review board, and risk classification against ISO/IEC 42001, the NIST AI RMF and the EU AI Act, mapped into whatever SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA or GDPR program already exists
- The highest-value automation driven into a live function, built alongside the people who run it, whether that is purchasing, service, marketing, sales, production or logistics
- Vendor and build-vs-buy calls made and closed, not deferred to the successor
- Evaluation, observability and cost controls in place before anything scales
Leave it better than a vacancy
- The role scoped honestly for the permanent hire, including what the last version got wrong
- The team recruited where you need one, with every candidate interviewed by me, or your existing staff trained to run it
- Documented decisions, open risks and the reasoning behind each call
- Overlap with whoever takes over, then a standing line to me for the hard questions rather than a cliff
Interim vs leaving it open.
A vacant AI seat is rarely neutral. It's a decision to let the program drift while the calendar moves.
The cost nobody books
- , Priorities set by whoever is loudest that week
- , Vendor renewals signed because nobody had authority to challenge them
- , Governance work postponed until an auditor forces it
- , The team's strongest AI people start taking recruiter calls
- , Six to nine months of momentum, gone
Owned from week one
- →Decisions made in days, by someone with the mandate to make them
- →Contracts renegotiated or exited on their merits
- →Governance built while the program runs, rather than after the finding
- →A senior operator the team can escalate to and learn from
- →A permanent hire who inherits a working program instead of a mess
A track record, not a pitch.
An interim engagement is judged on what happens after you leave. If the successor inherits open decisions and undocumented risk, the interim failed, however good the quarter looked.
What CEOs & boards ask.
What is an interim Chief AI Officer?
An interim Chief AI Officer holds the CAIO role full-time for a limited period, with the same authority and board accountability as the permanent officer and a defined end date. Companies use one to cover a departure, restart a stalled AI program, close a governance gap, or hold the seat while a permanent search runs.
How is interim different from fractional?
Time commitment and duration. Fractional is ongoing and part-time, typically a day or two a week alongside your existing leadership. Interim is full-time and temporary, in the seat every day until the situation is resolved or the permanent hire lands. Both are hands-on and both carry real decision authority.
Do you bring a team with you?
No. I come in alone and work with the people you already employ. An interim engagement is short by definition, and dropping an external team into a company mid-crisis adds onboarding cost exactly when there's no time for it. Where a genuine capability gap exists, I hire into your org rather than staffing it from outside.
How quickly can you start?
Days, not quarters, subject to current commitments. That speed is the main reason interim exists: an executive search for a Chief AI Officer commonly runs four to eight months, and an AI program left unowned for that long usually needs rebuilding rather than resuming.
How long does an interim engagement last?
Typically three to nine months. Long enough to stabilize the program, make the deferred decisions and get something into production; short enough that it never becomes a permanent dependency. The end date and the handover are agreed at the start.
Will you help hire the permanent CAIO?
Yes, and I'd encourage it. I scope the role honestly against what the company actually needs, screen and technically interview candidates, and overlap with whoever you hire before tapering to an advisory cadence. Building the team has been part of the CTO job at most of the 30+ companies I've served, so hiring is not a side activity.
How is an interim CAIO priced?
Interim sits at the top of my published ladder: $30,000 a month for three or more days a week. Full-time coverage beyond that is quoted to scope. For context, a full-time Chief AI Officer in the US commands $280K–$650K in base salary before bonus and equity, plus the months of vacancy the search creates.
What do you leave behind when the interim ends?
A program someone can actually run. Whoever holds the seat after me inherits a documented program and people who know how to run it. Where that means hiring, I do the hiring and interview every candidate. Where the people are already here, I work with them until the routine questions stop coming to me. My line stays open for the ones that are genuinely hard. The point of an interim is to end, and to end without the company quietly needing me again in six months.
Can you also cover the CTO role while you're in the seat?
Often, yes. I've held CTO and CPTO seats and work as a fractional and interim CTO, so at companies where AI and technology leadership are the same problem I can carry both rather than forcing an artificial split. We'd scope that explicitly rather than letting it happen by drift.
Related reading & paths.
Fractional Chief AI Officer
The ongoing, part-time version of the seat: strategy, governance and build, two days a week.
Fractional vs interim vs full-time
Which shape of AI leadership your company actually needs right now, decided honestly.
AI Governance & Risk
The inventory, the policy and the control set, usually the first thing an interim has to build.
Four ways out,
all of them yours.
An interim seat ends by definition. What varies is what it ends into, and that is your call rather than mine. You are never stuck with me: the work is documented from the first week, and the handover starts the day we set the end date.
Hand it to your team
Because the end date exists from day one, the program is packaged for your team as it is built: roadmap, governance register, runbooks, running systems.
I recruit your full-time CAIO
The commonest ending for an interim seat. I scope the role against what the program actually turned out to need, interview every candidate myself, and overlap with your hire until they are running it without me.
I train the person you already have
Often your COO, your director of IT or your CTO. The last months become a structured handover: they run the portfolio and the review board, and I stand behind them until the routine questions stop.
I stay, on new terms
Sometimes the bridge shows the seat should stay filled. Then the interim mandate converts to a fractional one, renegotiated in the open rather than extended by drift.
Seat empty, and
the board asking?
Tell me what's stalled and when it has to be resolved. If I'm the right person, I can be in the seat quickly.