A Chief AI Officer.
Without the full-time hire.
Aashish joins your leadership team as a Fractional Chief AI Officer. He owns the AI strategy, the roadmap, the tooling decisions and the outcomes, working alongside your existing team for a fraction of the cost of a full-time CAIO.
Track record
AI strategy and delivery shipped across 20+ companies.
Consumer brands, B2B SaaS, fintech, commerce, media and PE-backed portfolios. Logos shared privately on the first call.
Your fractional CAIO
Aashish Pahwa
Aashish is the founder of Koso and has spent the last six years building AI systems, advising leadership teams and shipping products that actually get used. He has been the AI strategy and execution lead for more than 20 companies across consumer, B2B SaaS, fintech, commerce and media.
As your Fractional CAIO, he sits in your leadership channels, attends your standups and owns the outcomes — not just the slides. When he is not embedded with clients, he is training teams, building agents or writing about what actually works in AI adoption.
What the role covers
One owner.
Every AI decision.
Most companies have AI scattered across a marketing pilot, an engineering side project and three rogue ChatGPT subscriptions. The Fractional CAIO consolidates all of that under one accountable owner, and turns it into a real program with budgets, metrics and ship dates.
Identify where AI can actually help
We audit your workflows, data and team to find the handful of places where AI moves a real number, and the many places it shouldn't be anywhere near.
Create your AI roadmap
A sequenced, dated plan tied to business outcomes. Quick wins in weeks, platform bets over quarters. Defensible against board questions.
Recommend tools, automations and workflows
Opinionated picks across the stack: copilots, automation, agents, data and infra. No vendor kickbacks, no shiny-object trap.
Help teams adopt AI safely
Policies, guardrails and approval flows that protect customer data and IP, without turning AI into a HR memo nobody reads.
Build systems or supervise vendors
Either Koso's team ships it for you, or your existing agencies and engineers ship it under our technical supervision. Same bar either way.
Train your employees
Role-based AI training so the people doing the work can actually use the tools. Leadership, operators, engineers, all on the same page.
Reduce wasted AI spend
Consolidate overlapping subscriptions, kill stalled pilots, renegotiate seat counts and right-size model usage. Most companies recover the fee here alone.
Align AI projects with business goals
Every initiative tied to a metric the CEO or CFO already tracks. If a project can't be tied to one, we don't start it.
How the engagement runs.
Three phases. Diagnose, plan, then execute. Most clients are in execution mode by the start of month two.
Week 1–2 · Diagnose
Interviews with leadership and ops. Audit of current tools, spend, pilots and data. Map of where AI fits and where it doesn't.
Week 3–4 · Roadmap
A 90-day and 12-month AI plan with named owners, budgets, risks and the metric each initiative moves.
Month 2+ · Execute
Ongoing leadership: standups with builders, vendor reviews, hiring input, board updates, and hands-on supervision of the work shipping.
Who it's for
If any of these sound familiar, we should talk.
- Leadership knows AI matters, but no one owns it end-to-end
- You have pilots that started with excitement and quietly stalled
- AI spend is creeping up with nothing to show on a P&L
- You are about to hire a full-time CAIO and want to de-risk the spec
- PE-backed portfolios standardising AI across operating companies
Questions
Before you ask.
Who is the Fractional CAIO?+
Aashish Pahwa, founder of Koso. He has led AI strategy and execution for 20+ companies across consumer, B2B SaaS, fintech, commerce and media. He plugs into your leadership team as a part-time C-level operator, not an outside consultant writing decks.
How is this different from hiring a full-time CAIO?+
Full-time CAIOs are scarce, expensive and usually overkill for the first 12–18 months of an AI program. A fractional engagement gives you the same seniority and decision-making, at a fraction of the cost, with a clear graduation path once you genuinely need someone in-house.
How is this different from a consulting firm?+
Consultants leave you a slide deck. We leave you with shipped systems, trained people and a roadmap your team can keep executing. Koso's build and training teams are behind the same engagement, so strategy and delivery don't get handed off.
What does the time commitment look like?+
Typically 4 to 8 days per month, depending on company size and pace. Mix of remote and on-site. Always reachable for urgent decisions in between.
What kind of companies is this for?+
Series A to mid-market companies, 30 to 1,000 people, where leadership knows AI matters but doesn't yet have the right person to own it. Also useful for PE-backed portfolios standardising AI across multiple operating companies.
What does it cost?+
Engagements are scoped to scope and time commitment. Most clients land between a senior director salary and a VP salary, all-in, with a 6-month minimum to actually see outcomes. We send a clear proposal within 48 hours of the first call.
Get a real AI owner on your team this month.
Tell us where you are and where you want to be in 12 months. We'll send a scoped Fractional CAIO proposal within 48 hours.