The fractional Head of AI market has split into two models:
brokers (firms that deploy generalists from a roster)
practitioners (specific people who have built and shipped AI systems in production).
Both have their place:
Brokers work for companies starting their AI journey. Practitioners are what you need when the architectural decisions have real consequences.
How to tell which you are getting
Six questions:
Have they personally built and shipped AI features in production? Not managed a team that did. Not advised. Personally built. If no, everything else is secondary.
Can they make architectural decisions, not just recommend them? "Implement RAG for customer support" is a roadmap. Choosing the embedding model, the chunking strategy, the retrieval evaluation framework; that is an architectural decision. A strategist writes the roadmap. A practitioner makes the decisions that determine whether the feature works.
Can they tell you what is wrong with your current architecture? Not "you should consider a vector database." Specifically: "your chunking strategy is producing poor retrieval because your documents have inconsistent heading structures, and your embedding model is not optimised for your domain vocabulary."
Can they evaluate vendors at the architectural level? Opening the technical documentation, assessing the API design and data residency implications, determining compatibility with your infrastructure. Not comparing feature matrices.
Do they know the difference between a demo and a production system? The gap between a POC and a system that handles edge cases, scales under load, and degrades gracefully is where most AI initiatives die.
If you are in a regulated industry, do they understand the regulatory landscape? For companies with EU AI Act exposure, architectural decisions now carry regulatory weight. For legal, fintech, or medtech, sector-specific regulators add further obligations.
The diagnostic questions to ask
Before you engage anyone:
- Will I work directly with the decision-maker, or is there an intermediary layer?
- Has this person shipped AI systems, or is their experience advisory?
- Is the first deliverable an assessment of where I am, or a forward-looking strategy deck?
- Can they evaluate my existing architecture, or only recommend new initiatives?
If the answers point to a broker, that is fine for early-stage AI guidance. If the decisions matter, you need the practitioner.
Full post here: https://systima.ai/blog/what-to-look-for-fractional-head-of-ai
Top comments (0)