Bringing on a full-time senior executive is expensive, slow, and harder to undo than most companies would like to admit. A growing number of employers are asking whether there’s a smarter way to get that level of expertise without the full-time commitment.

“Never before have there been more tools at our disposal to build from leaner teams,” said Michael Meo, founder of Build Momentum, a Los Angeles-based venture studio. “Everything from AI agents to fractional support and the efficiencies built into engineering workflows, you can build very asset-light teams that have tremendous leverage.”

The model Meo is advocating is straightforward in concept but represents a meaningful shift in how companies think about hiring. Rather than bringing on a full-time senior executive, a company hires that person fractionally, typically a few days a week, for a defined period and on specific objectives. AI agents then handle the more repetitive, lower-judgment tasks that would otherwise eat into that person’s time. The fractional hire focuses entirely on strategy and high-level execution.“The worst thing you could do is bring in a seasoned fractional chief marketing officer who’s driving growth strategy, but also executing Facebook campaigns,” Meo said. “There are certain commodity tasks where it doesn’t make sense to have expensive talent on that work. Those are the tasks most appropriate for AI agent implementation.”

Rethinking what senior talent is actually for

For companies with tighter budgets, the appeal is access. A startup or mid-sized company that can’t justify a full-time chief product officer can bring one in fractionally, with AI agents absorbing the administrative and repetitive workload underneath. Meo describes it as a chance to “date before you marry,” a lower-risk way to evaluate whether a senior hire is the right fit before committing to a full-time offer.

But the model isn’t limited to organizations pinching pennies. Alec Levenson, senior research scientist at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business Center for Effective Organizations in Los Angeles, sees a parallel dynamic playing out inside larger companies already, and one that AI is accelerating.

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