Compensation · 2025
What a Chief AI Officer actually costs in 2025
Cash, equity, and the new long-term incentive structures Fortune 500 boards are approving.
Read noteNow retained on 14 enterprise mandates
The leaders who take
AI from research to
enterprise reality.
Zero to One Search is a recruitment partner for start-ups, midcap, and enterprise organizations — hiring across the roles that matter most: from engineers and researchers to sales, product, and C-suite leaders building, deploying, and scaling AI and deep tech.
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Services
Three ways
we partner.
From an embedded recruiter inside your team to category-defining executive search — we shape the engagement around the outcome, not a fixed playbook.
See full service detail01Project-based · Your team
Embedded Recruitment
A senior recruiter joins your team for 3–9 months, operating as your in-house talent partner across a single function.
02Senior IC & manager
Professional Search
Targeted search for principal engineers, staff researchers, and the front-line managers who turn roadmap into shipped product.
03Retained · C-suite & VP
Executive Search
Conviction-led, off-market mandates for the leadership hires that define your next chapter — CTOs, Chief AI Officers, VPs, and Heads of Research.
Approach
A search method built for hires the market hasn't named yet.
01Phase
Calibrate
Two weeks of immersion with founders, board, and incumbents to define the role no job spec captures.
02Phase
Map
We surface the 80–120 humans on earth who could do this. Then we narrow to the eight you should meet.
03Phase
Engage
Conviction-led outreach. We represent your mission as well as you do — because we've lived inside it.
04Phase
Close
Reference rigor, compensation architecture, and onboarding through month three. We finish what we start.
Proof
Outcomes,
not promises.
The numbers that matter to a Chair, a CHRO, and a CEO who has to live with the hire.
Read full success cases- Search completion rate
- 94%
- Median time to signed offer
- 11 wks
- Placements still in seat at 24 months
- 92%
- Combined valuation of client portfolio
- $3.4B
They mapped a market we thought we already knew. The shortlist was tighter, sharper, and more candid than anything we'd seen in a decade of search. The hire is now running a 200-person org.
Chief People Officer
Fortune 50 enterprise · AI transformation
Field notes
What we're seeing in the market.
Org design
Where the AI org should report — and why it's not the CTO
A pattern emerging across financial services, healthcare, and industrial enterprises.
Read noteTalent flow
The frontier-lab to enterprise migration is accelerating
Why principal researchers are leaving labs for enterprise mandates with real deployment surface.
Read noteFor senior leaders & operators
Building in AI or deep tech?
Let's keep in touch.
Most of the people we place never applied to a role — they had a conversation. Confidential by default, long-horizon, and on your side of the table.
Accepting Q3 mandates
Tell us about
the hire.
We respond to every brief within one business day. Confidential by default.