Fractional AI CTO for Startups

    I'm Deep Parmar — an AI engineer in Ahmedabad who has been shipping AI products since 2019. I give startups part-time, senior AI technical leadership: the architecture decisions, vendor scrutiny, and shipping discipline of a CTO, without the full-time cost.

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    What a fractional AI CTO actually does

    A fractional AI CTO is a senior engineering leader who owns your AI technical strategy part-time — typically a few days a month — instead of joining as a full-time executive. You get the judgment and accountability of a CTO for a fraction of the salary-plus-equity cost of hiring one.

    In practice, the job looks like this:

    • Architecture decisions — which model, which stack, RAG or fine-tuning, build or buy. I've written about how I think through RAG vs. fine-tuning trade-offs in production.
    • Cost ownership — LLM API bills scale in ways finance teams don't expect. Keeping inference costs sane is an engineering discipline; here's how I cut LLM API costs in production.
    • Vendor scrutiny — reading past the demo when an agency or platform pitches you, and negotiating from a position of technical knowledge.
    • Hiring and team leverage — interviewing AI engineering candidates, and making your existing engineers effective with AI tooling rather than replacing them.
    • Shipping cadence — evals, monitoring, release discipline. AI features that demo well and fail quietly in production are the default outcome; preventing that is most of the job.

    If you want the longer version, I wrote a full breakdown of what an AI CTO actually does.

    Why me: I build, I don't just advise

    There are plenty of AI advisors whose main output is slide decks. My credentials are shipped products with real users:

    • SmartON — AI smart glasses and app for blind and visually-impaired users, with 17,000+ users. It reads printed text aloud, identifies currency, describes scenes, and answers by voice in 50+ languages. Its MIRA assistant routes every spoken request across object detection, OCR, document search, and scene understanding — I've written about building SmartON and the MIRA router architecture.
    • XwFin — GST invoicing and tax intelligence used by 2,000+ Indian businesses, with ₹50Cr+ invoiced through it. Lessons from that build are in AI GST invoicing in India.
    • dhiya-npm — an open-source client-side RAG library on npm that runs entirely in the browser with WebGPU/WASM embeddings, no server required.

    I'm CTO & co-founder of Sunbots Innovations and founder of Xwits Developers, both in Ahmedabad — which means every recommendation I make to you is one I've had to live with myself as the person accountable for uptime, cost, and users. More background on the about page and the projects page.

    How we can work together

    Advisory sessions

    One-off or short-series working sessions focused on a specific decision: choosing a stack, pressure-testing an architecture, reviewing a vendor proposal, or sanity-checking an AI roadmap before you commit budget to it. You leave with a decision and the reasoning behind it, not a generic recommendation.

    Fractional retainer

    A recurring commitment — typically one to two days a week — where I own your AI technical roadmap. That means a weekly cadence with your team, architecture and code review, hiring-loop participation, cost monitoring, and being the technical voice in the room when vendors, investors, or customers ask hard questions.

    AI project rescue & audit

    A fixed-scope engagement for AI projects that are stalled, over budget, or quietly failing in production. I audit the code, architecture, data pipeline, and costs; tell you plainly what's salvageable and what isn't; and hand you a concrete fix plan — which I can then help execute or hand to your team.

    On pricing: I scope each engagement individually rather than publishing a rate card. As market context, fractional CTO retainers in India typically run ₹1.5–4L/month depending on scope and days committed — talk to me and I'll tell you honestly what your situation needs, including when it doesn't need me.

    Who this is for

    • Funded startups adding AI to their product. You've raised, investors expect an AI story, and you need it to be real — architected for production from day one, not a demo that collapses under load or cost.
    • SMEs with an AI project that isn't working. An agency built something, the invoices kept coming, and the results didn't. You need someone technical on your side of the table to diagnose it and either fix it or shut it down before it burns more money. If you're an Indian business figuring out where AI actually pays off, start with AI for small business in India.
    • Founders who need a technical counterweight to vendors. Every platform pitch sounds convincing when nobody in the room can interrogate it. I sit on your side, ask the questions vendors don't want asked, and translate the answers into plain language you can decide on.

    Who it's not for: teams looking for someone to rubber-stamp a decision already made, or projects where "AI" is a label rather than a genuine product need. I'll tell you that in the first conversation — it's cheaper for both of us.

    How an engagement starts

    1. Audit. I look at what you actually have — code, architecture, data, costs, team, and vendor contracts. No engagement starts with a strategy deck; it starts with the ground truth.
    2. Roadmap. From the audit, we agree on a prioritized technical roadmap: what to build, what to buy, what to kill, and in what order — with the cost and risk of each call stated plainly.
    3. Cadence. Then we settle into a working rhythm — weekly or fortnightly sessions, async review in between, and clear ownership so your team ships between our conversations rather than waiting on them.

    The first conversation is free and specific: bring your actual problem, and I'll tell you what I'd do about it. Reach out here.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is a fractional AI CTO?

    A fractional AI CTO is a senior engineering leader who owns a company's AI technical strategy part-time — typically a few days a month — instead of joining as a full-time executive. You get architecture decisions, build-vs-buy calls, vendor evaluation, hiring input, and a shipping cadence, without a full-time CTO's salary and equity. It works best for startups and SMEs that need serious AI leadership but not forty hours a week of it.

    How much does a fractional CTO cost in India?

    As market context: fractional CTO retainers in India typically run ₹1.5–4L per month depending on scope, seniority, and days committed, with one-off advisory sessions and fixed-scope audits priced separately. That is market data, not a quote — actual cost depends entirely on what the engagement covers. Get in touch via the contact page and I'll scope it honestly with you.

    What is the difference between a fractional AI CTO and an AI consultant?

    A consultant advises and leaves; a fractional CTO owns outcomes. Consultants typically deliver a report or a recommendation. A fractional AI CTO sits on your side of the table over months — making architecture decisions, reviewing pull requests and vendor contracts, sitting in hiring loops, and being accountable for whether the thing actually ships and keeps working in production.

    How many hours per week does a fractional CTO work?

    It varies with the engagement shape. A typical fractional retainer runs one to two days a week — enough to own the roadmap, run a weekly technical cadence, and stay ahead of decisions. Advisory-only arrangements can be as light as a few hours a month. The honest answer is that the hours should follow the decisions you need made, not the other way around.

    Do you work with startups outside India?

    Yes. I work remotely with startups worldwide from Ahmedabad, India (IST, UTC+5:30), which overlaps well with European mornings and US evenings. India-specific depth — GST, DPDP Act, building for Indian users — is a bonus for Indian companies, but the core work of AI architecture, cost control, and shipping discipline is the same everywhere.

    Need AI leadership without the full-time hire?

    Tell me where your AI effort stands — even if the honest answer is "stuck". I'll give you a straight read on what it needs, whether or not that includes me.

    Get in touch