Services · Embedded Partnership

Most engagements end when the project ends. Ours are designed to compound.

The Fractional AI Officer seat: Krastor embedded in your operating cadence, owning the architecture long-term, running the systems closest to your revenue, and evolving them as your business and the technology change. Not a maintenance contract. An operating partner. For the business ready to treat AI as a standing capability, not a one-time project, at any scale.

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What's included

The seat that runs the roadmap.

Every other service builds the architecture. The embedded partnership runs it, and keeps it running as the technology and the business change. The compounding effect is real: Month 12 reflects 12 months of context that cannot be rebuilt from scratch.

The engagement model

One-time

Per-phase build fee, scoped and fixed before work begins

Recurring: flat

Architect retainer: oversight, monitoring, reporting, vendor management

Recurring: variable

Agent retainer: scales with revenue systems running, one fee per active agent

Steady state

FrAO seat: retainer sized to active systems and agents under management

Before any engagement closes, we name the revenue system that justifies the seat. A retainer without proximity to revenue gets cut.

Fractional AI Officer (FrAO) Seat

A named AI lead embedded in your operating cadence. Owns the AI roadmap, manages the full architecture, resolves issues before they reach you, and attends the biweekly calls as a participant, not a vendor. The seat is the mechanism that makes every phase of the roadmap actually happen. Without it, roadmaps sit in documents.

Biweekly Strategy + Operations Reviews

Structured calls on a fixed cadence, not ad hoc check-ins. The agenda covers what the systems drove since the last call, what changed in the technology landscape that affects the architecture, what the next phase of the roadmap requires, and what decisions need to be made. Every call produces a written summary.

Monthly Proof Report

One page, in your currency. What the systems drove or saved this month, measured in dollars. Not deliverables completed, not features shipped, not uptime percentages. The monthly report is the renewal mechanism: if it doesn't show dollar value, the engagement gets restructured until it does.

Ongoing Architecture Evolution

Open models improve. MCP tools release. New inference hardware drops. The architecture evolves in-place: no new contract, no new sales cycle, no new deployment from scratch. Phase 2 deploys onto what Phase 1 built. Your AI gets better every month because the foundation was designed to compound.

Agent Retainer Model

The retainer scales as agents come online. Each agent running a live revenue system adds to the monthly fee, so the bill is a direct proxy for the value running, not the cost of maintaining code.

AI Training + Staff Enablement

Your team learns to act as systemic supervisors, not passive users. The training is specific to the agents and workflows they oversee: the escalation paths, the approval interfaces, the failure indicators. Not generic AI literacy. Operational fluency in the systems they touch.

Technology Evolution Management

We track what's changing in the model landscape, the MCP ecosystem, and the open-weights frontier. When something changes that affects your architecture, you hear about it from us, with a recommendation and a plan, not from a news article. The FrAO seat is the mechanism that prevents technological drift.

Phase-by-Phase Roadmap Execution

The roadmap is designed in full at the strategy phase and executed one phase at a time. Each phase deploys onto infrastructure the previous phase built. No new sales cycle between phases. The embedded seat is the continuity mechanism. Phase 3 is possible because Phase 1 was designed with Phase 3 in mind.

Multi-Business / Portfolio Management

One embedded seat managing the architecture across multiple business units under one owner. One reporting layer. One operating cadence. The portfolio is managed as a system, not as a collection of separate vendor relationships.

Escalation + Incident Response

We catch failures before they surface to you. The monitoring layer is part of every embedded engagement. When something breaks, it gets resolved before it becomes a business problem. The biweekly call covers the resolution, not the fire.

Vendor Coordination

We manage the tool vendors: the orchestration layer, the data layer, communications, document generation, payments, the governance proxy, the observability layer. Renewals, upgrades, support escalations, and deprecation management are handled by us. Every subscription remains on your card, direct to the vendor. We manage the relationships; you keep the accounts.

Quarterly Architecture Reviews

A structured review of the full stack every quarter: what's performing, what's drifted, what new capabilities belong in the next phase, and what should be retired. Delivered as a written report with recommendations.

Roadmap & Prioritization

The roadmap is a living document managed by the embedded seat, not a slide deck produced once and forgotten. Each quarter's review updates the sequence based on what the systems have proven and what the business needs next.

Architecture Stewardship

As your business and the models change, the architecture has to keep up. The embedded seat owns that: what to upgrade, what to retire, what to build next. Your team runs the day to day; we keep the system ahead of it. Every build ships with the documentation and runbooks to make that possible.

Vendor & Cost Management

We track every subscription in the stack, flag renewal dates, and manage contract conversations. You keep the accounts and the pricing; we manage the relationships and the renewal decisions.

Hiring & Team-Scaling Support

When the architecture requires a capability that should be in-house, we scope the hire, help draft the job description, and advise on the interview process.

Board & Leadership Reporting

When the AI program needs to be reported upward to a board, an investor, or an executive team, we produce the reporting layer: what was built, what it drove, what the next phase requires.

How it works

One build fee. One recurring fee. One compounding system.

The model is designed to be simple to understand and aligned to the value the architecture actually delivers. The bill grows when the revenue systems grow. The seat is justified by the dollar value it drives every month, not by the number of deliverables produced.

Layer 1

Build fee: one time per phase

Each phase of the roadmap has a fixed build fee, scoped explicitly before work begins. The fee covers the architecture, the build, and the go-live. Phases are independently committable: you buy Phase 1, see the results, then decide on Phase 2. Nothing in a Krastor SOW locks you past the phase you've signed.

Layer 2

Architect retainer: flat recurring

Oversight, vendor coordination, monitoring, monthly reporting, and roadmap management. This is the base of the embedded engagement: the flat fee that keeps the systems running and the roadmap moving. Scales up as the architecture grows; priced on the number of systems under management.

Layer 3

Agent retainer: scales with agents

Each agent running a revenue system adds to the monthly retainer. The bill is a direct proxy for the value running: if an agent stops driving value, it comes offline and the fee drops.

In practice

A retainer that grows as the agents come online, one revenue system at a time.

A building-products manufacturer signed a Phase 1 build: the foundation layer: website, data model, CRM architecture, and the first automation workflow. At go-live, the retainer started at the base architect fee with zero agents running. No agents, no agent fees.

The roadmap sequences five agents across phases: dead-list reactivation runs first, then sample follow-up, then stalled-quote recovery, then booking qualification, then review management. Each agent comes online in a defined phase, adds its fee to the retainer, and runs a specific revenue system. By the time all five are live, the bill reflects five active revenue systems running simultaneously.

The context that accumulates over that build timeline: the edge cases, the customer patterns, the business logic encoded in the agents, the integration architecture, cannot be handed to a new firm and rebuilt in less than six to twelve months. That context is the structural moat. It is what the embedded model is designed to build.

See the case studies

Scales with agents

Retainer grows as each revenue system comes online, billed per active agent

Month 3

A competitor starting fresh would take 6 to 12 months to rebuild the architecture context

Monthly

Proof report in dollars: what the systems drove or saved, not what was delivered

Per agent

Agent retainer: the fee tied directly to each revenue system running

Pricing logic

Simple structure. Aligned incentives.

The retainer grows when revenue systems grow. The bill is a proxy for the value running, not for hours worked, deliverables completed, or features shipped.

Architect Retainer

Oversight, vendor coordination, monthly reporting, roadmap management, and monitoring. The base of every embedded engagement. Sized to the number of active systems under management.

Recurring for the run

Embedded Seat

The full fractional operating partner model: biweekly cadence, named AI lead, revenue system ownership, agent retainers included. Sized to active systems and agents under management.

Recurring for the run

Fractional AI Officer

Biweekly strategy and operations reviews, named FrAO, roadmap ownership, full observability. Agent retainers scale with active revenue systems. The bill reflects exactly what is running.

Recurring for the run

Questions

Straight answers.

What's the difference between the embedded seat and a maintenance retainer?

A maintenance retainer keeps builds alive. An embedded seat runs revenue systems. The distinction is in what we're accountable for: a retainer is accountable for uptime; a seat is accountable for dollar outcomes. We report monthly on what the systems drove: revenue generated, costs eliminated, time recovered. If the report doesn't show value, the engagement gets restructured until it does. That accountability is what separates a seat from a retainer.

How does the engagement deepen over time?

The roadmap is designed in full at the strategy phase and executed phase by phase. By Phase 3, the architecture reflects 12 to 18 months of context about your operation, your edge cases, your customers, and your technology. A competitor starting fresh would take 6 to 12 months to rebuild that context, and they would rebuild it by making the mistakes we already made and corrected. Depth compounds. That is the structural moat.

What does 'biweekly cadence' mean operationally?

We are in your operating rhythm, not on-call for tickets. The biweekly call is structured: what the systems drove, what changed, what the next phase requires. Between calls we watch the architecture, not your inbox: observability dashboards, cost, drift. Day-to-day operation belongs to your team, and we make sure they can carry it.

Do you become our IT support team?

No, and that is deliberate. Every build ships with documentation, runbooks, and training so your team, or your in-house IT, knows exactly how to run it. Architecture stewardship is our job: what to upgrade, what to retire, what to build next. If you would rather not carry day-to-day operations at all, a structured managed-service plan is available as a separate, scoped engagement, with defined coverage and response terms instead of an open-ended help desk.

Continue

Strategy

The diagnostic and roadmap that defines what the embedded seat will run.

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Operations

The workflow systems the embedded seat keeps running and expanding.

Explore

AI Architecture

The intelligence layer the FrAO seat evolves as the technology changes.

Explore

Engagement starts here

Start with the diagnostic.

Thirty minutes. We map your operation, name what's actually slowing it down, and tell you what we'd do if we were running it. You get a written stack assessment after the call, whether you hire us or not.

Book a Diagnostic Take the AI Readiness Assessment

Not limited to what's listed. Every engagement starts by assessing what your business actually needs, and we build whatever it requires.