Get AI into production and returning value. In a business that cannot afford to get it wrong.
When AI moves from pilot to production, the first question is yours: when does the investment return value? Your regulators, your auditors, and your board converge on its twin: who owns the risk? Both questions have the same answer, a single named officer accountable for the outcome. I hold that seat on a fractional basis, as your standing Chief AI Officer. You get the officer without the full-time hire.
THE GAP
Most firms have an AI policy and a committee. Almost none have an owner.
You have an acceptable-use policy. You may have a cross-functional AI committee. What you likely do not have is a single named executive accountable for driving AI value, with the authority to accelerate or stop a deployment, and the evidence to defend the decision.
The NIST AI Risk Management Framework, the EU AI Act, and New York City’s Local Law 144 each presume a person in place who is accountable. When a regulator or plaintiff’s counsel asks who owned the decision that AI made, “the committee” is not a defensible answer.
The roadblock is usually cost. In Heidrick & Struggles’ latest compensation survey, a full-time AI officer at a company between $1 billion and $5 billion in revenue earned $250,000 to $460,000 in cash compensation, before equity, long-term incentives, or any support staff.¹ At mid-market scale, with AI just beginning to transition out of pilot and concentrated in a handful of use cases, the full-time package is harder still to justify.
If you are private equity-backed, the pressure is even higher: the sponsor’s AI mandate is board-level, the value-creation window is compressed, and a full-time compensation package is hard to defend mid-hold. So the seat stays empty, and the gap remains.
1. Heidrick & Struggles, 2025 Data, Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence Officers Compensation Survey: US respondents at companies with $1 billion to $4.9 billion in annual revenue, median to 75th percentile total cash compensation.
HOW THE SEAT IS STRUCTURED
An officer seat, not a consulting project.
Some needs are bounded, such as a readiness assessment or a control set design, and a consulting project is the right tool for those. Accountability is different. Someone has to hold it quarter after quarter, answer to the board, and own the decision for shipping a model or stopping it. The seat is built to grow your team’s capability over time rather than dependence on me.
Structure
Ongoing fractional retainer, held as a standing officer seat
Reporting line
To the CEO, with standing reporting to the audit or risk committee
Cadence
Set to your board calendar and regulatory deadlines, scaling up when a deployment or examination demands it
Contracting
Through the Blackbox Zero LLC legal entity
The seat owns the control environment and the evidence, but it does not displace your statutory officers. Ultimate accountability for the firm’s decisions remains with your CEO, CRO, and General Counsel; the seat exists to give them the documented basis to defend those decisions. And one boundary holds throughout: the officer who owns your AI program does not also independently attest to it. When you need an independent assessment, I will point you to qualified providers, and the arm’s length stays real.
WHAT YOU ARE PUTTING IN THE SEAT
Making AI return value
- Use-case portfolio and prioritization. What to build first, decided by value and feasibility, and what to kill before it consumes budget.
- The path from pilot to production. Working pilots moved into production on demonstrated metrics, not a roadmap that generates more pilots that never ship.
- Build, buy, and vendor decisions. What to build, what to buy, which vendors, and on what terms, with the commercial and risk trade-offs made explicit.
- Unsticking stalled deployments. The specific blocker, whether legal, data, or risk, broken so value stops waiting on consensus.
Making it defensible
- Governance and controls framework. Built to the NIST AI RMF and mapped to the laws that apply to you, on a living inventory of where AI runs and which decisions it shapes.
- Board and committee reporting. A standing report to your audit or risk committee, in the language directors act on.
- Regulatory change management. Obligations tracked as they move, so the framework changes before the deadline, not after the finding.
- Incident and escalation ownership. A named owner when a model fails, one control set across the first and second line, and stop authority established in advance.
Two jobs most firms have given to no one.
The seat owns the outcome end to end, from deciding what to build to defending it under scrutiny.
Accountability is not a deliverable. It cannot be packaged and handed over when an engagement ends. It has to be held by a person in a standing seat, and managing the twin demands of AI expansion and defensibility needs a single owner who has done both jobs.
WHO HOLDS THE SEAT
Others can deliver AI, or govern it. This seat needs both.
This is a C-suite seat, and it calls for someone who has owned outcomes on large, complex initiatives, not just observed them. Over 21 years at IBM I ran a multi-billion-dollar P&L as CFO of IBM UK and Ireland, drove synergy work for the Red Hat acquisition, and executed the Kyndryl separation into a new publicly listed company. That finance discipline is why I treat AI as an ROI decision first.
As Deputy Chief Auditor I created IBM’s first AI audit program, and as a voting member of IBM’s AI Ethics Board I evaluated and approved client AI deployments. I’m also an Operating Partner at Altos Equity Partners where I see the AI mandate from the sponsor’s side of the table.
SEC Audit Committee Financial Expert · CFA Charterholder · MBA in Finance, Yale School of Management · MA and BA in Computer Science, Boston University · Operating Partner, Altos Equity Partners · Advisory Board Member, Wayside · Published in Corporate Board Member and AI Journal
WHETHER THIS SEAT IS RIGHT FOR YOU
AI has to return value for you, you cannot yet define everything it will require, and you want a named owner accountable for the outcome.
The fractional CAIO seat. Built for exactly this.
You can define what you need built, and you want it delivered once.
An advisory project. See the AI Governance page
AI is not yet material to your business.
You do not need this seat yet. I will say so in the first conversation.
The seat is right in one situation, and wrong in the other two.
One conversation settles it.
Bring the deployment that is stalled, or the question your board keeps asking. We will trace what is blocking it, and the seat either fits your firm or it does not. Either way, you keep the diagnosis.