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A Practitioner's Playbook for AI Leadership You Can Actually Sell
Every company needs an AI strategy. Almost none of them needs a full-time executive to write it.
Most writing about the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO) role describes a job at a Fortune 500 company with a budget and a staff. That is not the shape of the market. The companies that most need AI leadership are the ones that cannot justify a seven-figure executive hire — multi-location service businesses, mid-market manufacturers, professional firms with real operational complexity and nobody whose job it is to think about this.
That gap is a practice. This book is the operating manual for running it: how to scope an engagement a chief financial officer will approve, what to do in the first ninety days, how to price the work so it is profitable at the hours you will actually spend, what governance you are obligated to put in place, and how to hand off a system that keeps running after your engagement ends.
It is written from inside the practice rather than above it. Every framework in it has been used on a paying engagement, and the parts that failed are described as failures.
Why the fractional role exists — the structural gap between the companies that need AI leadership and the ones that can employ it.
The engagement model: scope, cadence, deliverables, and the contract shape that survives a procurement review.
Assessment. What to audit in the first two weeks, and the governance and data-handling questions you are obligated to raise before anything gets built.
Strategy to roadmap. Turning an audit into a sequenced plan with named owners and a defensible order of operations.
Build versus buy versus wait, and the compliance posture that decision implies.
Running the implementation without becoming the implementation team.
Engagement economics — pricing, utilization, and what the work actually costs to deliver.
Measurement. What to report monthly, and how to show value when the honest answer is "too early to tell."
Exit and handoff. Leaving behind a system with an owner rather than a dependency on you.
The engagement toolkit — assessment checklists, scoping worksheets, and reporting templates.
Tim de Vallée
Tim de Vallée built the US operation for IMDb in the mid-1990s — from a hard disk shipped to a volunteer in Wisconsin to the first internet ad campaign a Hollywood studio ever bought. He now builds intelligence tools at INTLO Labs, the product house of Digital Boutique AI, drawing on thirty years of shipping things.
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