You probably don't need a Head of AI. Here is what a 15 to 50 person agency needs instead.
At a network, a Head of AI makes sense. At 25 staff the maths does not work: £130k to £280k a year all-in, six months to hire, and one person's taste deciding everything. The job still needs doing. The question is what shape it should take.
The options, side by side
Each of these is the right answer for somebody. The table is what we tell MDs when they ask, including the cases where the answer is not us.
| Option | What it costs | What you get | Where it falls down |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full-time Head of AI | £130k to £280k a year all-in, plus a six-month search | Someone in the building whose whole job is this, with authority to change how the team works | At 15 to 50 staff the role is not full-time, so a good hire gets bored and a cheap hire cannot do the build. Single-hire risk: if they leave, so does everything they knew |
| Fractional CAIO | £2,500 to £7,500 a month | Senior strategy, board-level language, a roadmap, vendor selection | Strategy only. The implementation goes back to your team, where client work wins, or to a developer who does not know agencies. The roadmap is where most of these engagements end |
| Big 4 or large consultancy | £15k to £25k a month retainers | Process, governance frameworks, credibility with a nervous client | Analyst-led delivery and enterprise assumptions. Built for companies with an IT function to hand things to. You do not have one |
| Someone keen on the team | Their time, unbudgeted | Enthusiasm, a few prompts that work, early wins nobody measures | No authority and no budget. Client work always comes first, the initiative stalls, and leadership stays sceptical because nobody outside the agency has looked at it |
| A junior with ChatGPT | A licence and a salary you were paying anyway | Faster first drafts | Polished output that needs rework, a diluted house voice, and no policy or audit trail when a client asks what was AI-assisted |
| Specialist build partner (Daio) | £499 audit, builds from £4,500, retainer from £3,500 a month | The audit names the work. We build the systems inside your accounts, write the policy and the client transparency statement, and keep it running with a monthly hour with the MD | We are one person, deliberately, and take on few clients at a time. If you need a team on site every day, we are the wrong shape |
What the job actually is at this size
Strip the title away and the Head of AI job at a 30-person agency is four things. Decide what the team may use and write it down. Find the two or three recurring tasks where the hours go and build something that takes them on. Keep those systems working as the models, the tools and the clients change. And sit with the MD once a month so the team sees leadership taking it seriously.
None of that is a full-time role and all of it needs someone with authority and the ability to build. That is a retainer, not a hire. It is also why we structure ours the way we do: rollout, upkeep, governance and a monthly MD hour at the base tier, ongoing development of what we've built at the middle one, and new builds with a leadership strategy day at the top. The tiers and prices are on the homepage.
When a hire is the right call
Be honest about the cases where it is. If you are past 60 or 70 staff, or AI is becoming a product you sell rather than a way you work, the role justifies itself and you should recruit. Even then, the retainer is a reasonable way to spend the six months the search takes: the policy exists, the first systems are running, and the person you hire inherits documentation rather than a blank page.
Questions MDs ask about this
Isn't a fractional CAIO the same thing as this?
The strategy half, yes. The difference is who builds. Most fractional AI officers advise and leave the implementation to your team or a separate developer, which is where agency projects stall. We scope, build and run the systems ourselves, inside your accounts, and the retainer covers keeping them working.
What if we do want to hire eventually?
Then the retainer is how you find out what the job is before you write the job description. By the time you hire, the policy exists, two or three systems are running, and the person you bring in inherits documentation instead of a blank page. Everything we build is yours and documented for exactly that handover.
How do we know what it will cost month to month?
The retainer is a fixed monthly fee, from £3,500, in three tiers. Every system we build carries a projected monthly run-cost for the AI usage itself (model choice, usage caps, caching), agreed before it goes live. There is no variable bill you did not approve.
Find out what the job is before you decide who should do it. The audit takes ten days.
Five to ten rated opportunities, a 90-day roadmap, your AI usage policy and a client-facing AI transparency statement, for £499. If the right answer is a hire, the report will say so.
daniel@daio.uk. Prices exclude VAT.