Making the case for fractional and AI employees

What if your next hire isn’t a full-time employee, but part human and part AI agent?

The question isn’t meant to conjure images of cyborgs and humanoid robots—at an event during New York Tech Week, two founders actually presented it as a viable option. The human worker would be fractional—a part-time, temporary high-level employee who pitches in at a startup for a specific phase of its development. The AI agent side of the equation would work in the same domain as their human counterpart, doing whatever the company deems automatable.

At “Your Next Exec Won’t Be Fully Human,” hosts Michael Meo and Christopher Bunker made the case for employing fractional and agent workers, respectively, in a friendly debate. Founders in the room told Morning Brew that some combination of fractional and agentic employees would help them scale their businesses, even if they have some reservations about autonomous AI.

Meo, the founder of venture studio Build Momentum, has worked as a fractional employee himself. He explained that hiring a fractional employee is an opportunity for founders to “get access to really high-value, impactful talent” while not having to pay a full-time wage and allowing for flexibility in team composition.

“[Now is] a time where we can start to think critically about the team as another product that you’re building,” he said. “You get a rigid team, and then you find yourself sometimes in a position where you’re building out roadmaps or thinking about work in terms of satiating the talent in the company instead of working toward the problem or the mission of the team.”

It’s worth noting that there’s another word that starts with an F—freelancer—that can also satisfy that conundrum. But Meo said that fractionals specifically do high-level work and “[own] outcomes” on a startup’s team, similar to how an executive would.

Bunker, the event’s other host, has experience working with AI as an executive: His agent, Felix, runs an online marketplace through which people can buy agent personas and skills to use on OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent. Bunker describes himself as an “AI agent overlord” and is liable for the company, even though Felix runs it autonomously.

“You have 24/7 work happening,” Bunker said. “You need your agent to do multiple things, so you give them free rein to figure it out, and if it breaks, so be it. That’s kind of how it works with people in startups as well; you give them all the responsibilities that you have to, and then you roll it back from there.”

To be sure, Bunker said, he put a lot of work into building Felix to enable him to be so hands-off. But when asked if agents like Felix would make junior practitioners—and entry-level workers—obsolete, Bunker said he didn’t have a good answer.

“There are companies now bragging about bringing on junior [human employees] to take on the tasks that are too expensive to tokenize, so it’s like, ‘Great, you invented employees again,’” he said. “[It’s a] full circle thing happening that feels more dystopian. I don’t think that’s the answer.”

Making sure that early-career employees aren’t replaced by agents is a priority for Wanjiku Kamau, founder and fractional COO of AI advising firm TealBridge.

“I love the idea on paper, but I don’t want to have a business where it’s only me and my LLMs and my agents,” she told Morning Brew at the event. “I want to build in the rigor of [hiring] someone fresh out of college who has a marketing degree. How do we grow them, but have the agents be that helpful resource to get them to where they need to go, so they could be a CMO one day?”

In that way, Kamau sees a use case for AI to “empower humans to get what they need in ways that we haven’t had before,” not replace them. And when it comes to macro decisions being made about AI policy, she wants to make sure women and people of color get the jobs and capital that agents are making possible.

“I’ve got to be there to help lead the charge, even when I’m the only one that looks like me in these rooms,” she said. “I’m thinking about all these other women and people of color that haven’t had the privilege to be here. How do I make sure I’m setting up success for them when they show up?”