Fractional CIO
Fractional CIO services, for companies deciding what to do about AI
Somebody asked you to find out what the company should be doing about AI, and you have a short window to come back with an answer. This page is written to be read quickly and forwarded without editing.
A fractional CIO is a senior technology executive who works with your company part-time — owning technology strategy, the roadmap, and the buy-versus-build decisions, without a full-time salary. Leverage Automated runs fractional CIO engagements for mid-market companies, month to month, focused on where AI and automation genuinely fit and where they do not. If what you need is somebody to run a helpdesk or manage day-to-day IT operations, that is a managed service provider, not a fractional CIO.
Reviewed by Mat Wolfley, founder, Leverage Automated.
What the engagement is
Somebody senior owns the technology decision, without the full-time hire
The problem with AI right now is not that there are no options. It is that there are too many, most of them are three months old, and the people selling them are the only ones offering to explain them. A fractional CIO is how a mid-market company gets an experienced opinion on that without adding an executive salary to the payroll.
Every engagement is scoped to the company. There are no tiers and no published hour bands, because a 60-person firm with one legacy ERP and a 900-person firm with four business units are not the same problem and pretending otherwise would misprice both.
What is in scope
- Technology strategy and the roadmap that follows from it
- Where AI and automation fit — and where they are a bad idea
- Vendor selection, and the honest case against the ones we rule out
- Data readiness, because most AI work fails here first
- Working with the teams a change actually lands on
Common triggers
- The board asked what the AI plan is and nobody owns the answer
- A pilot worked in a demo and has not moved in six months
- A competitor announced something and the pressure landed on you
- The IT lead is strong operationally but has never set strategy
- Three vendors quoted three different things and none of them match
What you get
- A written assessment you can hand to your CFO or board
- A sequenced plan, not a list of aspirations
- A named senior engineer when work starts, who does not rotate off
- A direct line to the people doing the work, not a coordinator
- A straight answer when the answer is “do not do this yet”
How a month actually runs
Month one is an assessment. After that it is the work the assessment found
The first month, and sometimes longer, is the assessment. How long depends entirely on how hard the information is to gather — some companies can hand over a systems inventory in a week, others have to go and find it. We do not put a fixed clock on it here, because that clock would be a guess about your company.
Then comes the work the assessment implies: scheduling and planning the changes it found. Things to remove, things to change, things to build. Then reviews with the teams those changes affect. This is the part most engagements skip — a roadmap gets delivered and the consultant leaves. Here the roadmap turns into a sequence with the affected people in the room.
And then it keeps going, which is the actual argument for a retainer. This field is not Cisco or Microsoft. It changes fast enough that we will sometimes arrive in a new month with options nobody could have predicted six months earlier. That is the real problem with AI right now: you have to stay fluid and still implement carefully, and those two things fight each other. The monthly fee buys somebody who keeps the plan current, rather than somebody who wrote it once.
What recurs depends on what we sign up for, but an engagement typically includes a standing call, written updates, and being reachable in between.
Ownership
What we build stays yours, and we do not resell anything
We build and operate inside your environment. Client data does not rest on Leverage systems. You hold the vendor accounts — model providers, telephony, automation platforms — in your name, billed to you, so you can see exactly what the models cost.
We do not mark those costs up and we do not want to. That is not modesty; it is what makes the advice worth having. A firm that resells the platform it recommends is not in a position to tell you the recommendation is wrong, and you have no way to check.
The practical version: if you end the engagement, the systems keep running and the accounts are already yours. We would rather you stay because the work is good than because leaving is expensive.
Further reading
What we have written about this
If you are still deciding what kind of help this is: interim CIO or fractional CIO? sets out the difference plainly, including the cases where the honest answer is that you want an interim and we are the wrong call.
The first month is an assessment, and what a useful IT assessment contains is the long version of what that means — the sections it needs, and the four verdicts it should be able to reach, one of which is that you should spend nothing yet.
If there is a transaction involved rather than a budget cycle, the same estate gets read differently: technology due diligence — what actually moves the number covers the checklist and the three findings that most often change a valuation.
Who you are actually talking to
The half-life of this expertise is shorter than anyone selling it admits
I spent thirty years in IT and fifteen of them as a vCIO, so I know what the fractional pitch usually sounds like: all the experience of a career executive, none of the cost. That pitch is true about the experience and quiet about the expiry date.
Everybody in this category argues cost, commitment and risk. Nobody says the obvious thing — that a full-time hire knows what they knew on their hire date, and a retired CIO knows what was true when they left. In a field that reorganises itself every quarter, currency matters more than tenure, and it is the one thing a résumé cannot show you.
That is why this is monthly rather than a project. It is the same argument as the one above about roadmaps going stale: the value is not the document, it is somebody staying current on your behalf and telling you when last quarter's plan stopped being right.
— Mat Wolfley, founder, Leverage Automated
This is probably not for you if
- —You want day-to-day IT operations, a helpdesk, or device management — that is an MSP, and we will happily say so.
- —You want somebody to validate a decision that has already been made. We are poor value for that.
- —You are under 50 people. The economics rarely work and we will tell you before you spend anything.
- —You want a fixed menu with fixed prices. Every engagement here is scoped to the company.
We would rather rule ourselves out early than three meetings in.
The questions that actually get asked
I already have an IT team. Do I need a fractional CIO?
Usually those are different jobs. A good IT team keeps the company running — that is operational work and it is genuinely hard. A CIO decides what the company should be running in two years and defends that decision to the board. Plenty of strong IT leads have never been asked to do the second thing, and asking them to do it on top of the first is how both slip. If your IT lead already sets strategy and the board trusts it, you do not need us.
How is this different from just using ChatGPT?
ChatGPT will give you a plausible answer to almost any question about AI strategy, and no way to tell whether it is right for your company. It has not seen your systems, your data, your contracts, or the politics of who has to agree. The work is not producing an opinion — opinions are free now. The work is knowing which of the plausible options survives contact with what you already run, and being accountable when that judgement is wrong.
What does a fractional CIO cost?
We quote per engagement and we do not publish a rate card. What drives the number is how many systems are involved, what condition the data is in, how many people have to agree on a change, and whether anything is load-bearing from day one. A 60-person firm and a 900-person firm are different engagements; publishing one number would be wrong for both. Email or call and we will scope it before quoting anything.
How long are we locked in?
Month to month, no minimum term. That is deliberate and it is the honest incentive: if the work is not worth the fee, you should be able to stop, and we should have to earn the next month. It also matches how this field moves — committing you to a twelve-month plan in a field that reorganises quarterly would be selling you certainty we do not have.
What actually happens in the first month?
An assessment: what you run, what condition it is in, where AI and automation would genuinely help, and what has to be true first. It ends in a written document you can hand to a CFO or a board without translating it. How long it takes depends on how hard the information is to gather, which is a fact about your company rather than about us. We also offer that assessment as a standalone two-week piece of work if you would rather start there than sign a retainer.
Who does the work once we start?
Engagements are led by a principal, not handed to a coordinator after signature. Behind that is a bench of senior specialists in development, data engineering, integration and infrastructure. You meet yours at kickoff, by name, and they do not rotate off. We do not publish a headcount, because in this industry a headcount number is usually a claim about subcontractors rather than a claim about who shows up.
Do you resell the software you recommend?
No. You hold the vendor accounts in your own name and pay the vendors directly at what they actually charge. We take no margin on licences, seats, or model usage. This is the single most important thing to check about anyone advising you on AI right now, including us: ask what they earn if you pick their recommendation. If the answer is a percentage, weigh the advice accordingly.
Can you just answer a question without us hiring anyone?
Yes, and that is a real offer rather than a soft close. If you have been sent to find out what your company should do about AI and you need one thing checked before a meeting, email or call and ask. We would rather be the people you can sanity-check something with than the people who only speak to you once a purchase order exists.
You can ask us before you have to answer
If you were sent to find out what your company should do about AI, ask us the question you were sent with. No form gate, no discovery call required, and no obligation to become a client.
Seattle, WA — working nationwide.