FRACTIONAL LEADERSHIP
Some organisations need a management system built. Others need someone accountable for running it. Fractional leadership puts a credentialled senior practitioner in the role, at the fraction of time the role actually takes.
THE ROLES
Each is a named accountable person, not an advisory retainer.
AI GOVERNANCE LEADERSHIP
The accountable owner of an AI Management System. AI inventory, risk classification, impact assessment, human oversight design, and the person who answers when an investor or regulator asks who owns AI governance.
From £4,250 per month
Explore the AI Governance Lead roleWHY THIS ROLE EXISTS
ISO 42001 requires an AI system impact assessment. UK GDPR requires a Data Protection Impact Assessment. Article 22 governs automated decision-making, and the EU AI Act adds a Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment for certain high-risk deployments. These are four obligations pointing at overlapping sets of systems, and in most organisations they land on one desk.
That desk usually belongs to the Data Protection Officer, because they are the nearest available function with a governance remit and an independence requirement. It is a reasonable default and it is increasingly not working. A DPO is a privacy professional. Model risk, training data lineage, bias testing methodology, and human oversight design are not privacy questions, and asking a privacy function to answer them is asking for an answer that will not survive scrutiny.
The Fractional AI Governance Lead takes that layer. Your DPO keeps their statutory role and the privacy programme. Goldline owns the AI Management System, the AI inventory, the risk classification, and the impact assessments that sit on the AI side of the line. Where a DPIA and an AI impact assessment cover the same system, we run them as one exercise with your DPO rather than duplicating the work.
Goldline does not provide a Data Protection Officer service. Where the privacy function needs strengthening, that is a conversation about your DPO, not a service we sell.
THE COMPARISON
£180,000 to £270,000 fully loaded
Salary, bonus, benefits, recruitment, and three to six months to hire
£90,000 to £150,000 fully loaded
A role most organisations cannot yet define or recruit for
£60,000 to £140,000 fully loaded
Plus the independence requirement Article 38 imposes
From £36,000 per year
A credentialled senior practitioner, named and accountable, from month one
UK market figures, indicative. The comparison is cost, not scope. A fractional role is part time by design, and the question is whether the function needs a full-time owner or a senior one.
THE ENGAGEMENT
A 45 minute call establishes what the role actually needs to own, what your internal team already covers, and how many days a month that implies.
You get one named practitioner, not a team and not a rota, accountable for what the role owns.
Agreed at engagement: board reporting, risk review, escalation route, and availability between scheduled days.
Quarterly, against what the role was engaged to own. Scope moves up or down as the organisation changes.
A 45 minute scoping call establishes whether the function needs a full-time owner, a fractional one, or a defined project. No sales pitch, and if a fractional engagement is not the right answer we will say so.
Prefer email? Write to info@goldlineconsultancy.co.uk.
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