Plan first. Then we own the plan
A fixed-fee diagnostic shows where AI is used, what it costs, what it returns and what to do next. Then the CAIO Office takes the seat: a named lead CAIO sees the plan through, with specialist architects from the senior bench on call.
Four steps, one owner throughout
Most clients start with the free workshop or go straight to the diagnostic. Nobody is locked in.
“Cut your AI bill” workshop and scorecard
Score your AI estate yourself, in about [placeholder: workshop length].
AI Cost and Architecture Diagnostic
$20,000–$30,000 fixed fee (list $25,000) · 3–4 weeks
The CAIO Office retainer
Core: $10,000–$14,000 per month · about one day a week
Keep the seat, scale it, or hire full-time
If the role should be permanent, we help define it and hand over cleanly.
A costed plan in a few weeks
Fixed fee, $20,000–$30,000 (list price $25,000), over 3–4 weeks. The diagnostic rolls into the retainer: it is fully credited if a retainer starts within 60 days.
- An inventory of AI use and spend
Including tools staff use without approval. - A cost baseline and unit-economics model
Cost per workflow, not just cost per token. - A target reference architecture
For AI on the cloud you already run. - A ranked portfolio of AI initiatives
Build, buy or stop, with the reasoning. - Governance and security controls
A short list, each with an owner. - A board-ready 90-day plan
What happens next, who owns it, what it costs.
Your named lead CAIO, seat filled
Three levels, all from the CAIO Office, with the senior bench behind your named lead CAIO:
Board Advisory: $5,000–$7,500 per month, about 2 days a month.
Core retainer: $10,000–$14,000 per month, about one day a week.
Operator: $18,000–$23,000 per month, about 2 days a week, for example during a platform build-out.
Terms: 3-month minimum, then 30 days’ notice. Travel at cost. Build work goes on a separate SOW.
- Ownership of the AI roadmap and portfolio
The plan from the diagnostic, kept current. - Architecture review before funding
Every new AI initiative, reviewed by an architect from the senior bench. - AI spend reporting tied to outcomes
With cost levers applied as we go. - Vendor and platform decisions
Made on fit, not on partner incentives. - Governance and secure-use policies
Kept current as tools and rules change. - Regular reporting
To your leadership team and board.
Secure AI use, taught live
Live, remote sessions for leadership and staff, on their own or as an add-on to the retainer. [placeholder: session formats, group sizes, and price per session or per cohort]
- Safe use of AI tools with company data
What can go where, and why. - Spotting and handling shadow AI
Without driving it further underground. - Prompt hygiene
Habits that protect data and improve output. - When AI output needs a human check
Judgement, not a checklist. - EU AI Act Article 4 support
For teams with EU exposure: one practical, documented part of AI literacy measures. Not a certificate.
Published cost levers, and their limits
Real savings depend on your workloads. We decide which levers fit, design them in, and measure against your baseline.
input price for cache reads at Anthropic. Cache writes cost 1.25×, so it pays only when prompts repeat.
cheaper than synchronous calls on OpenAI’s Batch API, for jobs that can wait up to 24 hours.
lower cost at 95% of GPT-4 quality in RouteLLM research, on one benchmark (MT-Bench). 45% on MMLU, 35% on GSM8K.
Source: LMSYS, RouteLLM, Jul 2024 (one benchmark: MT-Bench).
Levers, not guarantees
Anyone who quotes a fixed percentage before seeing your workloads is guessing.
Measured against your own baseline
Design options, not default answers
Chosen on security and fit, never sold as a cost saver. Reviewed against published frameworks such as the AWS Well-Architected Generative AI and Agentic AI lenses and Azure’s Well-Architected guidance for AI workloads.
Local or self-hosted models
Make sense when data must stay inside your boundary or residency rules apply. They bring hardware, operations and patching work. Most companies end up hybrid.
Model routers
Send simple tasks to smaller models, wherever those models run. Useful where workloads mix easy and hard requests.
MCP and tool connections
Widely used to connect AI to company systems, and researchers have reported serious security flaws in implementations. If you use it, we design in authentication, least-privilege access and isolation.
How the retainer compares
Our prices are our own plan, not market data. The market figures below are sourced.
Middle 50% of rates on GoFractional’s marketplace ($150–$250/hour at 13 hours a week). The average is $10.7K/month at $207/hour. Small sample: 5 job posts and 302 profiles.
Source: GoFractional, Fractional CAIO rates 2026 (marketplace data, small sample).
A named lead CAIO, about one day a week, with architecture depth from the senior bench behind them.
RedRock Systems planned pricing
Average total cash, plus $498,000 in equity and long-term incentives, in Heidrick & Struggles’ survey of 318 executives.
Source: Heidrick & Struggles, 2025 Data, Analytics & AI Officers Compensation Survey.
You don’t need more AI. You need AI you can explain
What it’s for, what it costs, and who owns it. Start with a diagnostic: in a few weeks you’ll have a costed, business-aligned plan and a clear view of your AI spend and risk.
Not ready to talk?
Start free with the workshop and scorecard →