01
- Quarterly marketing plan with quantified targets
- Weekly performance review with leadership team
- Agency and vendor management, including SOW review
- Hiring, onboarding, and team development
The Situation
If your CMO and your AI lead aren't talking, you have a coordination problem, not a tooling problem.
Argument
Four reasons one person beats two retainers.
Each is something a board or leadership team can verify in their own operation right now.
01
No handoff drag.
A CMO and an AI lead working in parallel, each optimising for their own metric, meeting on Fridays to "align". That weekly meeting is where momentum dies. One brain holding both mandates removes the handoff entirely.
02
Faster, smaller decisions.
The call about a new AI tool and the call about pipeline are the same call. The same person frames the trade-off. The decision is made in 20 minutes, in one Slack thread, not in three meetings across two weeks.
03
AI subordinate to strategy.
The marketing strategy is the constant. The AI tooling will churn three times in 18 months. When the same person owns both, the tooling stays subordinate to the strategy. You stop chasing AI features nobody asked for.
04
Lower coordination tax.
Two retainers means two scoping calls, two SOWs, two billing cycles, and two recurring meetings on your leadership calendar. One combined engagement collapses all of that into a single working relationship.
Options
What each option actually covers.
You can hire a CMO, an AI Officer, or one person who is both. The trade-off isn't the workload, it's where the seam between marketing and AI sits.
Option 01 · CMO only
CMO retainer alone
A fractional CMO who owns marketing outcomes. AI shows up reactively, when marketing needs it.
Option 02 · AI only
AI Officer alone
A fractional AI Officer who owns the company-wide AI position. Marketing happens elsewhere.
Option 03 · Combined ★ Most relevant
CMO + AI Officer combined
One person, both mandates. Marketing strategy and AI adoption move together, not in separate workstreams.
Who this fits
If two of these are true, this is the engagement.
The combined retainer isn't for every operation. These are the qualifying signal patterns I see most often.
- You have an existing marketing function that needs senior strategic ownership, not just execution help.
- Your leadership team is being asked, weekly, what your "AI position" is. The current answer is uncomfortable.
- You have paid for one or two AI pilots that produced a deck and not much else.
- Your strategy document from last year and your AI tooling document from last quarter were written by people who don't speak to each other.
- You are 12 to 36 months from needing to hire a full-time CMO or a Chief AI Officer. You would rather make that hire from strength than from panic.
Not sure if you qualify?
Book a 30-min discovery →How it works
The mechanics, before the value.
A single rolling retainer with a weight allocation that shifts as your priorities shift. Same contract, same meeting, same accountability across the whole engagement.
Stage 01 · 2,3 weeks
Discovery + scoping
A short engagement maps your current marketing operation and AI landscape. Output: a written joint diagnosis and a recommended weight split.
Stage 02 · From month 1
Retainer kicks in
One rolling retainer. 6-month minimum commitment. Weekly leadership meeting covers both mandates. Always-on Slack/Teams channel for go/no-go decisions.
Stage 03 · Each quarter
Weight rebalance
Every quarter the split is revisited. If a brand reposition is the priority, weight tilts to CMO. If a major AI rollout is the priority, it tilts to AI Officer. The contract stays the same.
Stage 04 · From month 6
Open-ended, then team-building
After the minimum the engagement runs indefinitely. As the relationship matures the focus shifts to building a strong internal team that can carry both mandates.
The Mandate
Three deliverable areas. One accountable seat.
Each has outputs your CFO can name. The three areas don't sit in silos, they feed each other in a single weekly operating rhythm.
02
- Written AI policy and risk register
- Vendor and tooling diligence with kill criteria
- Three production AI workflows live in the first 90 days
- Quarterly AI board update with cost-vs-value framing
03
- Weekly leadership session, single slot
- Always-on Slack or Teams channel
- Monthly written digest covering both mandates
- Quarterly board update, one document, both topics
The loop: the strategy (01) defines what marketing has to ship, the AI rollout (02) defines how it gets shipped, and the operating rhythm (03) is the cadence in which both get adjusted, every week.
If you're worried
What if it doesn't work?
The three objections I get most often, answered plainly. Nothing here is in fine print.
Objection 01
"What if you're not the right fit?"
The 30-minute discovery call is the test. If the fit is wrong I say so in the first 15 minutes. No invoice for the call, no follow-up sales sequence.
Objection 02
"What if six months feels too long?"
It is. Six months is the floor because anything shorter doesn't survive a full quarterly testing cycle. After the floor the engagement is rolling. Exit any month with 30 days' notice. No exit fee.
Objection 03
"What about IP, data, and your replacement?"
Everything I build is yours: policies, prompts, workflows, dashboards. The engagement is designed to end in an internal hire. I help interview them and hand over a structured operating manual when I leave.
FAQ
CMO + AI Officer questions.
If something else is on your mind, the contact page is the fastest way to get a useful reply.
Send a message →Q01 What is the difference between a marketing audit and a fractional CMO retainer?
The audit is a 2-to-3-week diagnostic. You get a written assessment of what is working, what is failing, and a prioritized roadmap. There is no ongoing commitment.
A fractional CMO retainer is execution. I join your team, own the strategy, and run the marketing function on an ongoing basis with a 6-month minimum commitment. Many retainers run multi-year. Most clients run the audit first and then decide if the retainer makes sense.
Q02 What does the Fractional AI Officer retainer include?
A monthly intelligence digest tailored to your sector, a quarterly board update, and an always-on Slack channel for go / no-go calls on tools, vendors, and adoption decisions. The cadence is by agreement, from 1 day per week up to full engagement, structured around your leadership cadence.
The retainer carries a 6-month minimum commitment and is designed to run continuously, the AI field does not slow down.
Q03 How do you measure success?
For most engagements: pipeline contribution, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value to CAC ratio, and the time it takes to validate or kill a growth hypothesis. I agree on three primary metrics in the first two weeks and report against them weekly.
For brand-led work, I measure unaided recall, share of search, and inbound demand quality. Vanity metrics are explicitly excluded from reporting.
Q04 How does AI integration actually work in your engagements?
I treat AI as augmented intelligence, not as a separate workstream. That means custom GPTs trained on your brand voice, RAG pipelines built from your customer interviews, and automated content supply chains where humans stay in the loop on judgement calls.
For most clients this saves around 30 to 40 percent of production hours within the first quarter, hours that go back into strategy and creative testing.
Q05 Do you do hands-on creative work or just strategy?
Both, but the mix depends on the engagement level. The Strategist tier is pure strategy. The Partner tier includes hands-on direction of agencies and freelancers, and final approval on creative output. The Leader tier includes building and managing a full marketing organization, including direct hiring decisions.
Q06 What does the first 90 days look like?
Days 1 to 30 are diagnostic, isolating the variables that are slowing you down. Days 30 to 60 are calibration, launching low-cost experiments against the highest-priority growth hypotheses. Days 60 to 90 are failure analysis and codification, doubling down on what worked, killing what didn't, and turning the winners into a repeatable engine your team can run after I leave.