United Kingdom
Fractional AI officer for UK companies
Last updated
Justas Butkus is a fractional AI officer based in Vilnius, Lithuania, working with UK mid-market companies and scale-ups at two to four days a month across a fully overlapping working day. He owns AI strategy and governance and builds the production systems that follow.
Short answer
UK companies sit in a different regulatory position from their EU counterparts: there is no UK equivalent of the EU AI Act, and oversight runs through existing regulators and data protection law instead. That makes governance a commercial question driven by customers and insurers rather than a statutory one.
What is different about the UK position
The UK has not adopted an equivalent of the EU AI Act. Oversight is delegated to existing sectoral regulators working within their current remits, alongside UK data protection law.
The practical effect is not less pressure, but differently shaped pressure. There is no single compliance deadline to organise around. Instead the questions arrive commercially: an enterprise customer's procurement pack, an insurer at renewal, an investor during diligence. Companies that treat the absence of a statute as an absence of obligation tend to discover this at the least convenient moment.
Two further cases matter. If you sell into the EU or your systems affect people there, the EU AI Act can apply to you regardless of where you are established. And regulated UK sectors already carry obligations around automated decision-making that predate the current AI conversation entirely.
Working with a UK company from the EU
- Fully overlapping working day. Vilnius runs two hours ahead of London, so the entire UK business day is available rather than a morning window.
- Direct EU AI Act fluency, which matters for any UK company selling into Europe and increasingly appears in enterprise procurement questionnaires regardless of statutory obligation.
- In-person where it earns its place. Board sessions and workshops warrant travel; most of the work does not, and pretending otherwise inflates the engagement.
Where this fits in the UK market
The pattern in UK mid-market companies is consistent: capable engineering, a board that has started asking pointed questions, and no one whose job is to decide what should be built. The gap is rarely technical capability. It is that AI decisions keep landing on people who already have full-time jobs.
Scale-ups sit slightly differently. There the constraint is usually that engineering can build anything asked of it, and the asking is undisciplined, so effort spreads across several half-finished directions at once.
Frequently asked questions
Does the EU AI Act apply to UK companies?
It can. The Act has extraterritorial reach: if your AI system is used in the EU, or its output affects people in the EU, obligations can apply regardless of where the company is established. Many UK companies encounter it first through customer procurement rather than through regulators.
Is there a UK equivalent of the EU AI Act?
No single statute. The UK approach delegates oversight to existing sectoral regulators within their current remits, alongside data protection law. That means no single deadline, but it does not mean no obligations.
Can a fractional AI officer work with a UK company remotely?
Yes, and most of this work is better done remotely. Vilnius runs two hours ahead of London, so the whole UK working day overlaps. Board sessions and workshops justify travel; routine work does not.
What size of UK company does this suit?
Typically fifty to five hundred employees, or a funded scale-up with an engineering team and no one owning AI direction. Below roughly twenty people the role is usually premature.
Working with UK companies
If you are sizing up whether this arrangement fits, the fastest way to find out is a short conversation about the actual problem.