AI Production Readiness and Fractional AI Leadership

From AI pilot to production. The bridge most teams miss

Most enterprise AI pilots never reach production. The reason is not the model, the framework, or the data. It is the missing layer between a working demo and a system that runs 24/7 with proper monitoring, evals, on-call response, and an audit trail. This service builds that layer.

We handle two related but distinct engagements: production-readiness engineering (we build the infrastructure) and Fractional Chief AI Officer leadership (we sit in your team, own the AI roadmap, and drive cross-team execution). Most teams need both.

When to talk to us

You have an AI pilot that demos beautifully but cannot ship to production because operations, compliance, or security keeps blocking it.
Your team built an agent or RAG system that runs in dev, but nobody knows what to do when it breaks at 3 AM.
You have multiple AI initiatives across teams and no senior person owning the strategy or roadmap.
Your CEO or board is asking for an "AI strategy" and your CTO does not have the bandwidth to drive it.
You have an in-house team doing solid AI work but lack the senior judgment to evaluate vendor proposals or set the production bar.

What you get

Four engagement options. Pick one or combine.

Production Readiness Assessment ($15,000 to $30,000, 3 to 4 weeks)

For teams with an AI pilot that needs a path to production. We audit the current state and write the playbook.

What's included:

Discovery sessions with engineering, ops, security, and product (4 to 6 hours total).
Architecture review of your current pilot. Where is it brittle, what breaks first, what is missing.
Production readiness checklist scored against your system. Evals, observability, fallback paths, audit logs, on-call, SLAs, security review, compliance gates.
Gap report (12 to 20 pages). Every gap, what needs to change, effort estimate, ROI of fixing each.
Prioritized remediation plan (30-day, 90-day, 6-month phases).
One follow-up review session (1 hour) after delivery.

Pilot-to-Production Build ($75,000 to $200,000, 12 to 16 weeks)

For teams that want us to actually build the production infrastructure, not just write the playbook.

Everything in Assessment, plus:

Eval suite (golden test set, regression checks, A/B framework).
Observability stack (Langsmith / Langfuse / Helicone integration, custom dashboards, alerting).
Guardrails and safety layer (NeMo Guardrails, red-team prompt injection defense, output validation).
Audit trail infrastructure (signed event logs, explainability traces, distributed request tracing).
Failover, fallback, and rollback architecture (deterministic backup paths, retry logic, version rollback when a new model regresses on evals).
SLA definition + monitoring (uptime, latency, accuracy SLOs).
Incident response runbook + on-call training for your team.
6 weeks of post-launch tuning included.

Fractional Chief AI Officer ($10,000 to $25,000 per month)

For teams that need senior AI leadership but not a full-time hire. We sit in your team 1 to 2 days per week and own the AI roadmap.

What's included:

Weekly executive presence (board, CEO, CTO, leadership team as needed).
AI roadmap ownership and quarterly planning.
Vendor and tool evaluation (you do not buy without us reviewing).
Hiring support (interview senior AI/ML candidates, advise on org design).
Cross-team coordination on AI initiatives.
Direct slack/email access for the team.
Monthly board-ready report on AI program status.

Managed Production Ops ($15,000 to $50,000 per month)

For production AI systems that need real SRE-level operations. We operate them.

24/7 monitoring with on-call rotation.
Incident response within agreed SLA (15-minute to 2-hour response depending on tier).
Monthly performance reporting (uptime, latency, accuracy, drift, cost).
Continuous tuning (prompts, evals, model upgrades, vendor changes).
Quarterly architecture review.
Same-team capacity for emergency rebuilds.

Guarantee

For the Pilot-to-Production Build tier: every production readiness criterion in the SOW has to pass before final invoice. If we miss any, we rebuild on our dime.

Payment terms

Project tiers: 50% on contract signing, 25% at midpoint, 25% on acceptance. Retainers: monthly in advance. INR pricing on request for India-based clients.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do so many AI pilots never reach production?+

Three patterns account for most failures. (1) No eval suite. Teams ship pilots that look right in cherry-picked demos but fail on real production inputs. (2) No observability. When something breaks at 3 AM, nobody knows what the agent did or why. (3) No failover. The pilot assumes the model is always available; production has to handle vendor outages, rate limits, and bad outputs. This service builds the production layer that bridges pilot to production.

What's the difference between this service and AI Agents and Workflow Automation?+

AI Agents and Workflow Automation builds the agent itself. Production Readiness builds the infrastructure around the agent that lets it run safely at scale. Many engagements include both. Start with Agents if you need to build a new system. Start with Production Readiness if you already have a working pilot and need to ship it.

Is Fractional Chief AI Officer different from AI strategy consulting?+

Strategy consulting writes a deck and leaves. Fractional CAIO sits in your team. We attend the board meeting, run the AI roadmap, evaluate vendors, interview hires, and own outcomes. Closer to a part-time executive than a consultant. The retainer model means we have skin in the game and a long-term incentive to make your AI program succeed.

How long do Fractional CAIO engagements typically run?+

Most run 6 to 18 months. We start with a 3-month minimum to establish the cadence (board reporting, roadmap, vendor reviews). After that, the engagement extends quarter by quarter until you have internal AI leadership capacity to take over. We design every engagement with a clear exit plan: when the team is ready, we hand off.

What does Managed Production Ops actually do?+

Three things, mostly. (1) Monitor your production AI systems 24/7 with on-call rotation. When something breaks, we respond within the agreed SLA (15 minutes for highest tier, 2 hours for standard). (2) Continuous tuning. Models drift, vendors change APIs, prompts need adjustments. We run the maintenance work that keeps the system performant. (3) Monthly reporting on uptime, latency, accuracy, drift, and cost. You get a board-ready status update every month.

Do you replace our existing AI engineers?+

No. We work alongside them. The typical model: lead architect (us) plus 2 to 4 of your engineers, with us providing senior judgment, production patterns, and accountability for the outcome. Your team owns the system after handoff. We are not building a long-term dependency. If you want to fully outsource AI operations, the Managed Production Ops tier covers that, but most teams prefer the hybrid model.

Can we just do the Production Readiness Assessment and stop there?+

Yes, many teams do. The Assessment is a complete deliverable: written gap report, prioritized remediation plan, and one follow-up review. If your team has the capacity to execute the remediation plan, you have everything you need. If you want us to execute, the Pilot-to-Production Build tier picks up where the Assessment leaves off. We apply 50% of the Assessment fee as a credit toward the Build.