The Case for Fractional AI Leadership

The Gap Most Boards Are Not Talking About

Most SMEs know they need to do something with AI. The harder question is who should lead it.

The instinct in some quarters is to create a dedicated role: a Chief AI Officer, a Head of AI, a function with its own budget and its own seat at the table. 72 Degrees Consulting believes that instinct is wrong, and that acting on it tends to make the problem worse.

AI is not a department. It is not a specialism to be corralled into a single function while everyone else watches from a distance. Done properly, it belongs to every part of the business: owned collectively, applied practically, and governed through the structures that already exist. In an SME, the CIO or CDO is the natural custodian of AI, responsible for the platforms, infrastructure, and governance, exactly as they are for every other system and data domain. Lifting AI out of that structure and handing it to a separate executive does not accelerate adoption. It creates a bottleneck, a boundary, and a convenient place for the rest of the leadership team to disengage.

The problem, then, is not structural. It is a capability gap. Most SMEs do not have a CIO or CDO with the bandwidth or the specific AI transformation experience to move at the pace the moment requires. That is a solvable problem.

What Fractional AI Leadership is

72 Degrees Consulting has formalised a service that addresses it directly: Fractional AI Leadership.

The model gives an organisation access to experienced, board-level AI and transformation expertise without the commitment or cost of a full-time hire. 72 Degrees embeds into the client organisation on a part-time, defined basis, sitting alongside the existing CIO, CDO, or technology leadership, not replacing them, but providing the strategic experience, the external challenge, and the programme oversight that an AI transformation actually requires.

This is not consultancy in the traditional sense. There is no kick-off workshop, no report handed over, no exit at the end of phase one. It is an ongoing leadership function, operating at executive level, accountable for real progress and grounded in the organisation's context.

The engagement covers what a senior AI-capable leader would own: strategy and prioritisation, vendor and technology decisions, team capability building, governance, risk, and the day-to-day discipline of making sure AI initiatives deliver business value rather than becoming expensive experiments that stall after the pilot.

Why the timing matters

The British Chambers of Commerce finds that 35% of SMEs are now actively using AI, up from 25% in 2024, with a widening divide emerging between AI-ready firms and those struggling to keep pace. The firms on the wrong side of that divide are not generally lacking ambition or resource. They are lacking experienced leadership to channel both usefully.

McKinsey's research tells the same story from a different angle: 62% of organisations are experimenting with AI agents, but fewer than 10% have scaled them in any function. The gap between experimentation and real delivery is not a technology problem. It is a leadership and governance problem.

As 72 Degrees has written previously on AI governance, the risks compound quickly when organisations adopt AI without the operational frameworks to run it safely. Non-human identities already outnumber human identities 50 to 1 in many enterprise environments, and most organisations have barely begun to address the governance implications. The leadership gap is not academic. It has a cost.

What the engagement looks like

Engagements begin with 72 Degrees' AI Opportunity Assessment, a structured diagnostic that maps the business across people, process, data, and technology. That baseline informs the leadership mandate from day one, and ensures the fractional engagement is grounded in the organisation's actual starting point rather than a generic framework.

From there, the fractional leader works alongside the client's existing technology and executive team, providing the AI-specific experience and challenge they need to move faster and with more confidence. The model is additive: bringing in the capability that is currently missing without displacing the leadership that is already there.

Engagements are available to organisations across the UK, Europe, and the Middle East, markets where the demand for structured AI leadership is outpacing the supply of experienced people to provide it.

What a good engagement leaves behind

The measure of success is not a strategy document. It is an organisation that has made real progress: initiatives live, governance in place, the CIO or CDO better equipped to carry AI forward, and a leadership team that treats AI as a collective accountability rather than someone else's problem.

72 Degrees does not measure success by dependency. The goal is an organisation that no longer needs the fractional arrangement, because it has built what it needs internally.

Getting started

The first conversation costs nothing. If your organisation is trying to work out how to lead AI seriously, without a poorly structured full-time hire and without handing the question to a generalist, 72 Degrees is worth talking to.

Connect with Chay Blyth on LinkedIn or reach 72 Degrees Consulting directly at www.72degrees.co.uk.

---