A Fractional Head of AI Governance

Middlebrook Data & AI Governance · Regulated finance

When a regulator, auditor, or board member asks "who owns AI governance here?" — and the room goes quiet — you need an answer. A Fractional Head of AI Governance is that answer: the named, accountable owner of your AI governance, on a part-time, retained basis, at a fraction of the cost of a permanent hire.

What is a Fractional Head of AI Governance?

It is a part-time, outsourced executive who owns your AI and data governance — the policies, the oversight, the model-risk extension, and the board reporting — without the cost and the six-month search of a full-time hire. You get the senior, accountable person on every call and in every deliverable. For governance work, continuity and accountability matter more than headcount.

You are buying continued ownership of a problem — not a stack of documents.

What we do each month

• Governance check-in — keep policy, the AI inventory, and your control environment current.
• New-use-case reviews — risk-tier and sign off on the AI your teams want to deploy, before it ships.
• Monitoring & output assurance — watch for data and model drift; keep humans on the high-stakes outputs.
• Regulatory radar — track SR 11-7, the EU AI Act, DORA, and CFPB movement, and translate it into a one-line decision for you.
• Board-ready reporting — a standing one-pager that proves the program is real, built continuously rather than reconstructed in a pre-exam fire drill.

Why fractional, not a full-time hire

A full-time Head of AI Governance is $300,000-plus fully loaded, and you'd wait six months to hire one — for a role you may not yet be able to justify. The fractional model gives you the same senior accountability for a fraction of the cost, light enough to run a couple of days a month. It buys down a tail risk that's existential — one bad GenAI output that reaches a regulator or a customer — without the permanent commitment.

Who needs one

Any regulated institution deploying AI in or near its reporting, credit, or customer decisions without a dedicated governance owner — which is most of them. If your model-risk team has quietly decided GenAI is "not in scope," that gap is exactly what this role exists to close.