Every Indian SME has a CA.
Not full-time. Not on payroll. No corner office. But present at every decision that matters — tax season, audits, regulatory filings, a big acquisition, a bank loan. You share the CA with twenty other businesses. The CA stays sharp precisely because of that. And you get senior financial judgment for a fraction of what a full-time CFO would cost.
India solved the problem of expert financial leadership for mid-market companies decades ago. The fractional model — formalized through the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India — is so embedded in how Indian business works that we no longer even call it fractional. We just call it having a CA.
In 2025, AI leadership is the same problem. And most Indian companies don’t realise it yet.
The Companies That Need AI the Most Are the Ones With No AI Leadership
Here is the irony at the centre of India’s AI moment.
Large enterprises — the Reliances, the TCS-es, the HCL Techs — have entire AI departments. They have Chief AI Officers, data science teams, AI governance committees, and dedicated budgets. They are not the ones struggling.
The companies genuinely at risk are the ones in the middle. The garment manufacturer in Surat competing with automation. The real estate developer in Pune watching PropTech platforms take his market. The logistics company in Chennai being undercut by algorithmic route optimisation. The hospital group in Hyderabad that has no idea how to use AI for diagnosis, billing, or patient retention — but knows that the hospitals that figure it out first will be impossible to compete with.
These companies are being disrupted by AI faster than any tech company. And they have zero AI leadership.
Not because they don’t care. Because the talent doesn’t exist for them at a price they can afford — or in a form that makes sense for their business.
Why Hiring a Full-Time Chief AI Officer Doesn’t Work
Let’s say a mid-market manufacturer decides to hire a Chief AI Officer. What does that look like?
A genuinely senior AI executive — someone with real enterprise experience, strategic thinking, and the ability to translate AI into business outcomes — commands between ₹60 lakh and ₹1.5 crore per year in India today. That’s before ESOP expectations, before the team they’ll want to build, before the infrastructure budget.
Most Indian SMEs cannot absorb that cost. Those that stretch to afford it face two further problems.
The motivation problem. A senior AI professional at the top of their game wants to work on novel problems. They want variety, challenge, and the kind of learning that comes from operating across industries. A single company — especially a non-tech one — cannot give them that. Within 12 to 18 months, the exciting problems are solved, the roadmap is set, and the role becomes operational maintenance. They start looking for the next challenge.
The retention problem. The average tenure of a Chief AI Officer globally is under two years. You hire them, invest six months helping them understand your business, watch them build something useful — and then they leave for a role that’s bigger, more complex, or better compensated. You’re back to zero.
The full-time model, for most Indian companies, is a trap. Expensive to enter, and expensive to exit.
The CA Parallel — And Why It Works
India’s chartered accountancy profession took decades to build. But the model it created is elegant.
One CA. Multiple clients. Each client gets senior judgment applied to their specific situation — not a junior generalist learning on the job. The CA stays sharp because the variety of clients keeps their knowledge current. The client gets expertise they couldn’t afford full-time. The engagement scales up during intense periods (an audit, a restructuring) and scales back during quieter ones.
The fractional AI Officer model works on identical logic.
One certified AI Officer. Three to five company engagements simultaneously. Each company gets their AI readiness assessment, a 90-day strategic roadmap, vendor evaluation, team training, and board-level reporting. The officer stays sharp because they’re seeing AI adoption challenges across sectors — finance, manufacturing, retail, healthcare — simultaneously. The cross-pollination of ideas is itself a source of value.
The company pays for what it needs. Not for a full-time executive sitting in an office on days when there’s nothing strategic to decide.
What Keeps a Fractional AI Officer Motivated — The Question Nobody Asks
This is the insight that the talent conversation almost always misses.
The question companies ask is: “How do we attract a good AI Officer?” The right question is: “What kind of engagement model keeps a good AI Officer engaged?”
The answer is not money. Beyond a certain threshold, the senior AI professionals who actually move the needle are motivated by learning velocity, problem variety, and the sense that their work is consequential. A full-time role at a single non-tech company — no matter how well it pays — cannot compete with the intellectual richness of a fractional engagement across five different industries.
The fractional model, paradoxically, is better for the officer than the company-employed model. They learn faster. They build a professional reputation that extends across industries rather than being confined to a single employer’s ecosystem. They develop the kind of cross-sector pattern recognition that makes them genuinely exceptional.
This is why the best AI talent — in the long run — will gravitate toward fractional platforms rather than single-employer roles. And it is why the companies that engage them fractionally will receive disproportionately high-quality judgment.
India’s Window — And Why It Is Narrow
India has the talent for this. In abundance.
Thousands of professionals across BPO operations, IT services, management consulting, and senior business roles have the combination of business understanding and technological fluency that AI leadership requires. They have spent careers translating complex systems into business outcomes. Learning to do that with AI is a credential and a mindset shift — not a career reinvention.
What has been missing is the credentialing framework, the platform infrastructure, and the professional community that turns individual capable people into a recognised profession.
The CA profession took 70 years to formalise. We do not have 70 years. AI is moving at a pace where the companies that establish AI leadership in 2025 and 2026 will have structural advantages that late movers will find very difficult to close. The window for India’s mid-market to get ahead of this is measured in months, not years.
The fractional AI Officer infrastructure — the equivalent of what the ICAI built for finance — needs to exist now.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A fractional AI Officer engagement typically runs in 90-day cycles:
Month 1 — Assessment and Direction. The officer audits the company’s existing data, processes, and technology. They identify the three to five areas where AI can deliver measurable business outcomes within 90 days. They produce a prioritised roadmap — not a theoretical strategy document, but an actionable plan with vendors named, timelines set, and success metrics defined.
Month 2 — Implementation and Training. The officer oversees the deployment of the first AI initiative. They train the internal team — not on AI theory, but on how to work with AI tools specific to their function. They establish the reporting framework the board will use to track AI performance.
Month 3 — Review and Roadmap Extension. The officer presents outcomes to leadership, recalibrates the roadmap based on what worked, and defines the next 90-day cycle. By this point, the company has a functioning AI initiative, a trained internal team, and a board that can speak intelligently about AI strategy.
Then the engagement continues — or pauses — based on what the company needs next.
The Profession India Needs
A Chartered Accountant is not just a person who files taxes. They are a licensed, regulated, continuously trained professional whose credential is universally recognised and whose judgment is trusted because the system around them — the ICAI, the examinations, the continuing education requirements — makes it trustworthy.
India needs the same infrastructure for AI leadership.
Certified. Sector-trained. Continuously updated. Connected to a platform that matches them to companies at the right level of AI maturity. Accountable to outcomes, not just deliverables.
That is what The AI Officers is building — India’s first fractional AI Officer platform. The assessment framework, the training programme, the credentialing system, and the marketplace that connects certified AI Officers to the companies that need them most.
The CA took 70 years. We are starting with that destination already in mind.
Riz Thakur is the founder of The AI Officers — India’s first fractional AI Officer platform — and the author of The AI Tsunami, a book about artificial intelligence and the future of work in India. He writes about AI leadership, career transitions, and the future of Indian business.
If you are a company exploring AI leadership, or a professional considering an AI Officer career, start with the 4D Framework Assessment.