The shift to AI-native operations is not a tool decision. It is an evolution in how the organisation makes its decisions.
We work alongside leadership teams on that work — over six to twelve months, in the room, as part of the running of the business. Practice across Europe and North America.
Across the firms we work with, a pattern is settling into place. The first wave of AI tools — productivity assistants, generative-AI copilots, departmental experiments — has produced usable individual productivity and almost no change at the organisational level. The next wave will be different in kind. It will be the slow, deliberate evolution of the operating model itself: who decides what, with which evidence in the room, at what cadence, against which information the leadership team considers reliable.
The companies that take this work seriously go into the next decade with substantial advantages. Disciplined execution, institutional memory, careful capital allocation, deep customer relationships — these were built over years and are not easy for newer entrants to replicate. The executive teams that begin asking the operating-model question now, and answering it on their own terms, are the ones that will compound those advantages rather than dilute them.
A Fractional Chief AI Officer engagement places a senior AI advisor inside the executive team for six to twelve months. The remit is the operating model: the AI agenda at the board, capital allocation across AI deployments, the structure of the AI function (or its considered absence), the vendor relationships, the language leadership uses with the wider organisation, the cadence of review. The advisor is not a study lead. The advisor is part of the executive team for the duration.
Each engagement begins with a four-week diagnostic. A careful look at the current AI footprint, the strategic posture the company has taken so far, the operating-model questions that are already live and the ones not yet visible. The diagnostic produces a board-grade plan. The decision to continue into the embedded engagement is made afterward, with the diagnostic in hand.
We work with one or two new engagements at a time, by design. The founder, Rohit Chikballapur, sits in every engagement personally.
Mid-cap and large enterprises (roughly $100M to $2B in revenue), in any market where the business is built on institutional knowledge, regulated practice, and long customer relationships — industrial manufacturers, transportation operators, established financial services, professional services firms, mittelstand industrials, family-held businesses, founder-led companies that have crossed into scale. Often the buyer is a CEO or executive chair whose decision horizon is closer to a decade than a quarter.
The conversation tends to begin when the executive team is preparing for a strategy cycle, a generational transition, a post-acquisition integration, or a board agenda that has begun to include AI as a recurring item.
Twenty-five minutes. At your cadence. Not a pitch.
We use the first conversation to find out whether what we do fits the shape of what your executive team is looking at. If it does not, we will say so — and where possible, point you to someone for whom it does.