Fractional Chief AI Officer for a mid-market fuel carrier
After three production systems together, the same mid-market fuel carrier handed Riyex the AI leadership seat. As fractional Chief AI Officer we own the vision, the roadmap, and the governance for becoming the AI leader in fuel logistics. Early days, and we say so. The plan ships first; the wins get measured after.
The client's name has been anonymized at the customer's request. The market, technologies, and solution are presented as delivered.
The problem
Most fuel carriers are still deciding whether AI is real. This one already moved its routing and dispatch to Gravitate, put AI tooling into its workforce, and decided the answer is yes. The ambition is bigger than adoption: the carrier wants to be the AI leader in its market.
What it didn’t have was an owner for that ambition. Initiatives were scattered across the business, vendors were pitching point solutions, and no one was accountable for a unified vision: where AI moves the P&L next, in what order, and under what guardrails. Hiring a full-time Chief AI Officer is a 9-to-12-month search and a high six-figure base, a hard sell for a mid-market carrier that needs direction now.
After three production systems together (the TMS integration, the data platform, and the TMW invoice automation), the carrier handed us the seat.
What we’re building
A fractional Chief AI Officer function: embedded with the carrier’s leadership, accountable for the AI vision, the investment roadmap, and the governance that keeps what ships trustworthy.
The work right now is the unglamorous part done properly. Mapping what Gravitate and the existing AI tooling already cover. Separating where AI genuinely moves a fuel business (dispatch, pricing, asset utilization, back office) from where it’s a demo. Sequencing candidates into a roadmap with decision points leadership can act on. And putting governance in place (evals, monitoring, escalation paths) so every future system ships with the same rigor as the three already in production.
The data platform we built is the substrate: six unified source systems and the dashboards on top are the foundation the next generation of AI systems gets measured against.
Where the engagement stands
Early, and we say so. The vision and roadmap are in development, nothing has shipped under this engagement yet, and there is no ROI number to report. We will not publish one until there is one.
What exists today: the mandate, the three production systems that earned it, a 5,000+ site network generating the operational data an AI program runs on, and a carrier that intends to lead its market. This page gets updated as the program ships.
Most carriers are buying AI tools. This one is building an AI capability, with an owner, a roadmap, and governance in place before the first big check gets written. That order of operations is the whole point.