Fractional AI Team
AI strategist, engineer, and operator embedded in your team for a monthly retainer. Three months minimum, 30-day exit. The capability of an AI department without the cost of a hire.
The Problem
Mid-market companies need AI capability now, but a Head of AI hire takes 6 months to find, costs USD 350K+ all-in, and requires recruiters who don't understand the role. Meanwhile your competitors are shipping. The other option — one-off projects with agencies — leaves you with code you can't operate. Neither option fits the actual problem.
The Outcome
An embedded pod inside your Slack, your repo, your standups. AI strategy, engineering, and operations under one retainer. They build AI into your product, train your team on the way through, and move on when you're ready to take ownership in-house.
Packages
Starter
AED 38,000 / month
1 AI engineer + 1 AI strategist. Best for one-product teams shipping their first AI feature.
- 1 senior AI engineer (half-time)
- 1 AI strategist (quarter-time)
- 1 weekly sync, async Slack/Notion
- Up to 1 production AI feature per quarter
- Pause anytime with 30 days' notice
Pod
AED 85,000 / month
3 specialists — engineer + strategist + operator. Best for scaling teams running multiple AI initiatives.
- 1 senior AI engineer (full-time)
- 1 AI strategist (half-time)
- 1 AI operator (half-time)
- Daily standups, async first
- Up to 3 production AI features per quarter
- Quarterly business review
Squad
AED 145,000 / month
5 specialists including a dedicated ML engineer. Best for product-led companies treating AI as a core capability.
- 1 ML engineer (full-time)
- 1 senior AI engineer (full-time)
- 1 LLMOps / evals engineer (half-time)
- 1 AI strategist (full-time)
- 1 AI operator (half-time)
- Embedded in your engineering org
- Quarterly roadmap and capacity planning
In Scope
Onboarding
Weeks 1–2- Access provisioning — Slack, repo, observability, ticketing
- Roadmap alignment with your product team
- Shadowing on existing workflows
- First week ship: one observable improvement
Build & Ship
Ongoing- Sprint cadence aligned to your team
- AI features shipped to production behind feature flags
- Eval harness and observability for everything that ships
- Weekly demos, monthly business review
Knowledge Transfer
Ongoing- Pair-programming and code review with your engineers
- Documentation written for in-house ownership
- Quarterly capability assessment of your team
- Optional handover sprint when you're ready to take ownership
How We Engage
01
Discovery call — we review your current AI work, team composition, and roadmap. 60 minutes.
02
Tier proposal — we recommend Starter, Pod, or Squad based on the actual scope, with named team members.
03
Kickoff in ≤14 days — onboarding sprint begins within two weeks of contract signing.
Why Codenovai
The same engineers who built Hisabi.ai, OpenClaw, and Private AI in production are the ones embedded in your team. Not a consulting firm renting offshore developers under a senior brand. The retainer model is designed for operator-quality work — not staff augmentation.
Build vs Buy · ROI Calculator
What does it save? Run the numbers.
Move the sliders. Numbers update live. We benchmark against AED 18,000/month — our Martech Stack retainer floor — and a conservative 60% manual-reporting recovery rate.
Your Inputs
Estimated Result · 6 Months
Monthly Savings
AED 24,233
~130 hours / mo recovered
Net Monthly (After Retainer)
+AED 6,233
After AED 18,000 retainer
6-Month Net Savings
+AED 37,395
Break-Even Month
Month 1
0.7 mo payback
Estimate. Real engagements deliver wider variance — we tighten the model in the first 30 days.
Get a Real QuoteFAQ
- What's the difference between this and just hiring an AI engineer?
- A senior AI engineer in Dubai costs AED 35,000–55,000 per month all-in (salary + benefits + equipment + training budget) and takes 4–8 months to find. The Starter retainer at AED 38,000/month gives you a senior engineer plus a strategist immediately, with no recruiting risk and no severance exposure. The trade-off: you don't own the IP of the team, only the IP of the work product. Most clients view that as a feature — they want capability without the management overhead.
- Can we hire someone from the pod after the engagement?
- Yes, with a transition fee equivalent to two months of the engaged tier. We've placed engineers with three clients this way over the last two years. The transition fee replaces our recruiting cost and the time we spend backfilling the role.
- How do you handle on-call and incident response?
- Pod and Squad tiers include on-call coverage during your business hours plus best-effort outside. For 24/7 coverage we layer a separate operations retainer. Most production AI failures are non-paging anyway — eval drift, cost spikes, retrieval quality regression — those are detected by the observability we ship.
- What if we need to pause for a quarter?
- 30-day exit notice on any tier, no penalty. About 15% of clients pause once during a 12-month engagement (budget cycle, product pivot, internal restructure) and resume later. We don't charge restart fees and we try to bring back the same team members where possible.
- Is this remote, on-site in Dubai, or hybrid?
- Default is remote-first with a monthly on-site if your office is in Dubai. For Squad-tier engagements with sensitive work (regulated industries, on-prem AI deployments) we operate hybrid — 2 days/week on-site for the first month, then weekly. The retainer rate is the same; on-site travel for non-Dubai clients is billed separately.