01
Hire full time
Three to six months to find, a senior salary, and rarely enough architecture work to fill the week once the initial design is done.
Fractional AI Architect
Most enterprises do not need a full-time AI architect. They need a senior one for a day a week, working next to the engineer they already have, on the decisions that are expensive to get wrong.
How a month runs
Architecture and design review
14 hrsPairing with your engineer
12 hrsGovernance and release gates
8 hrsDocumentation and handover
6 hrsThe model exists because architecture work is lumpy and expertise is expensive. A platform decision made badly in month one costs a rebuild in month nine, but there is rarely 160 hours a month of genuine architecture work to justify a full-time senior hire, and that hire takes three to six months to find. Forty hours a month buys the judgement without the idle time. The deliberate difference from staff augmentation is the direction of travel: the engagement is designed so your team needs the architect less each month, not more.
The tracks
Each one is the same engagement shape on a different platform. Pick the one where your engineer is carrying the most weight alone.
Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Fabric, SharePoint, Entra and Dynamics. Grounding, identity and evaluation.
ForMicrosoft-committed enterprises
02Lakehouse architecture, Unity Catalog governance, pipelines, model serving and the cost line.
ForData platform teams
03Model selection, context strategy, tool use and MCP, evaluation and guardrails.
ForProduct engineering teams
The problem
Enterprises reaching for senior AI architecture generally have four choices, and three of them are a poor match for the amount of work actually involved.
Three to six months to find, a senior salary, and rarely enough architecture work to fill the week once the initial design is done.
Hours at the level you specify, with nobody accountable for whether the architecture is right and no reason to make your team independent.
A team, a statement of work and a deck. Strong on process, expensive for a decision that needs one senior person for a day a week.
The most common choice. Your best engineer makes architecture decisions alone, at speed, and the cost surfaces six months later.
Side by side
For a team that needs senior architecture judgement on one platform.
| Criteria | Full-time hire | Staffing agency | Fractional architect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to start | 3 to 6 months | 2 to 4 weeks | Days |
| Monthly commitment | 160 hrs, paid regardless | As booked | 40 hrs |
| Accountable for the design | Yes | No | Yes |
| Builds your team's capability | Over time | Rarely | By design |
| Scales down when work drops | No | Yes | Yes |
| Platform depth on day one | Depends on the hire | Depends on the contractor | Specialist by track |
The engagement
The same rhythm on every track. The first month sets direction, and every month after is designed to need the architect a little less.
Week 1
Week 2
Weeks 3 to 4
Every month after
Track record
Gyde has been putting AI and adoption systems into large Indian enterprises for years. These are published outcomes from that work.
Loan files going on hold fell by close to half in three months, across a lending workforce of more than 50,000 people.
Onboarding time on the customer acquisition system fell by 63 percent, with data errors down 78 percent.
A single way of working rolled out across every branch, with new agents productive 57 percent sooner.
Investor onboarding cut by a third, with documents checked on upload rather than days later in manual review.
Working with Indian enterprises
Most of our engagements run with banks, NBFCs, insurers and manufacturers headquartered in India. The architect works IST, joins your existing rituals, and is used to the approval chain an Indian enterprise actually has.
Architecture reviews, vendor selection and security sign-off go faster face to face. The architect travels to your offices across the metros and tier 2 cities as the engagement needs it.
Data residency, consent and purpose limitation under the DPDP Act 2023 shape the architecture from the first session, alongside RBI, IRDAI and SEBI expectations where they apply.
Design decisions, model choices and control gaps are written down as you go, in a form audit and risk can read without a translation layer.
Where a workload cannot leave the country, the architect can design against open-weight models running entirely on Indian infrastructure through Gyde Inference.
Delivered onsite in
Free download
A sample engagement plan for a 40 hour month: what the architect does in week one, what your engineer owns by week four, and the artefacts that exist at the end of it.
Questions
If your question is here in a form we have not covered, ask us directly and we will answer it plainly.
A senior AI architect engaged part time on a standing basis, typically 40 hours a month, who owns the architecture decisions on a platform while your own engineer does the building. It suits organisations that need senior judgement regularly but do not have enough architecture work to justify a full-time hire.
About ten hours a week, usually shaped as a weekly design review, a scheduled pairing block with your engineer, and time for documentation. It is enough to keep pace with a team building actively, and small enough that the architect stays out of delivery.
Yes, and the engagement is built around it. One dedicated internal engineer does the building while the architect sets direction and reviews. Without that person the knowledge has nowhere to land, and you end up buying a dependency instead of a capability.
The POD is a five-person team that builds and ships a workload for you. A fractional architect is one senior person who makes your own engineer capable of building it. The POD is the right answer when you need delivery capacity; this is the right answer when you have capacity and need judgement.
Staff augmentation sells hours at a level you specify and succeeds when you book more of them. This engagement makes one architect accountable for whether the architecture is right, and is explicitly designed so you need fewer hours over time. The measure of success is your team's independence.
Three tracks today: Microsoft AI Foundry and the wider Azure and Microsoft 365 stack, Databricks, and Anthropic and Claude. Each is staffed by someone building on that platform in production now. If your platform is not listed, ask, because the engagement shape is the same.
Yes, and it is where most of our work sits. The architect works IST, travels to your offices across Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai as needed, and designs against DPDP Act 2023 obligations alongside RBI, IRDAI or SEBI expectations where they apply.
Most run six to twelve months and then taper rather than stop. The first three months set the architecture and prove one workload, and the months after are review and unblocking as your team takes more of it on. Ending well is part of the design.
Keep going
Start the conversation
Tell us the platform and the workload that is stuck, and we will propose a scope for the first 40 hour month.