Fractional or interim
Fractional CTO. A technology executive who holds the full CTO role — decisions, team, budget, AI transformation — only a few days a week. The need is ongoing, but it doesn’t fill a full week. What is a fractional CTO?
Interim CTO. Also called a transitional CTO. A technology executive who fills an empty seat for a set period, with a clear mandate: steady the team, make the calls that can’t wait, and prepare the successor. More hours, shorter engagement. What is an interim CTO?
For a one-off, well-defined need — an assessment, an AI exploration, a POC, an MVP — a fixed-price project is enough.
AI across the whole company
AI is changing how every team works: engineering, customer support, sales, finance, operations. Demos are easy; successful deployments are rare, and no one has a proven playbook to drop onto your company yet.
Monolithic Lab takes its cue from the forward deployed engineer, the model OpenAI and Anthropic use to deploy AI at their customers: work inside the teams, build on real data and real tools, and measure usage after go-live. The adoption plan gets built with your teams, starting from their work.
A CTO who builds, not just manages
Pure-manager profiles are on their way out. With AI, a small team can produce far more than before, provided it’s led by someone who understands the work in detail.
A good CTO today knows the craft hands-on, drives AI agents to get work done, and can judge what they produce. That’s how Monolithic Lab works: a prototype gets tested in days, and decisions rest on results, not opinions.
Read the article: the CTO in the AI era
Why it makes sense for a small or mid-sized company
- A full-time CTO is expensive and slow to hire. Many companies have neither the budget nor enough leadership work to fill five days a week.
- Without a CTO, technical decisions still get made. By default, by a founder with no time, or by the longest-serving developer.
- Those decisions get expensive later. An architecture that can’t handle growth, a vendor no one manages, an AI project that goes nowhere, a painful due diligence.
- A fractional CTO gives you the same level of experience, in the amount your company actually needs.
What the role covers
- Architecture and technical choices: what to build, what to buy, what to stop.
- Team: structure, roles, hiring, coaching team leads.
- AI transformation: agents in the development cycle, use cases in other teams, adoption plan, guardrails.
- Delivery: priorities, pace, how product and engineering work together.
- Reliability and security: technical debt, incidents, backups, access.
- Governance: a technical counterpart for the CEO, the board, and investors, due diligence included.