Fractional AI builder · owner-led companies of 5 to 100 people
A fractional AI builder inside your company. I find the problem, design the fix, build it, and keep it running.
You run a company. You don't have a technical team, you don't have spare afternoons, and everyone selling AI wants you to learn something first. I'm the other option: a builder who joins your team two days a week, finds the manual work worth removing, builds the systems that remove it, and stays to keep them running. I think, I plan deeply, I execute, and I put AI coding agents to work so a build that used to take a quarter takes days: a pilot running in your first week, production in your second.
Most of the owners I talk to are the same person: years into a business they built by hand, busy from seven to seven, and tired of being told AI will change everything by people who have never made payroll. I'm not here to tell you that. I'm here to sit next to you and do it. Here is what I hear most often, and what I'd say back.
You shouldn't need it. My first two weeks cost you about an hour: a walk through how work flows, and a decision on the first fix. After that you approve things in chat, in the minutes between real work. I'm the one who spends the time. That's the whole point of having me.
You don't have to learn it. You have to use it, and using it looks like sending a message to an assistant. Everything I build runs by chat, in plain language, with a person to call when it's confusing. I've taught this to thousands of people who said exactly that sentence. The ones with thirty years in business were my best students: they knew their company cold and stopped me when I was wrong.
Nobody can, from the outside. Most owners who haven't started say the same. So I start inside: I shadow the people doing the work and find the ten hours a week hiding in quotes, follow-ups, invoices and replies. You don't need to think outside the box. You need someone to look inside yours, carefully, and come back with a short list.
You're right, and your caution has protected you. So nothing gets sold to you here: no platform, no licence, no course. I'm paid by you, I pick tools that are boring and proven, and I'll tell you plainly when something is hype. The first workflow is free, and month one is a trial at half rate. Before you spend anything, ask me for the demo and for references.
That day doesn't come; the business won't let it. Meanwhile a company your size, somewhere in your market, is quoting within the hour and answering at midnight. The way out isn't finding time. It's giving the job to someone whose job it is, two days a week, while you keep running the company.
Start with a conversation, twenty minutes, about what eats your team's week. I'll come back with the first three things worth doing, in order, and what each one saves. You'll know where to start before you've spent anything. And if the honest answer is "AI won't help you yet", I'll say that too.
The dream, in one line: a ten-person company that runs like a fifty-person one, without ever having to become one.
Owner-led companies of 5 to 100 people: services firms, agencies, trades, professional services, recruitment, e-commerce, early software. Hands-on owner, no technical team, a lot still done by hand.
Not a tool. A person you can trust, who explains without jargon and without making you feel behind, who will tell you no when something isn't worth it, and who does the work rather than sending you a plan for it.
Another subscription, another dashboard, another course, another consultant with a deck.
Support response time after one customer-support agent
Freelance project · bio-informatics company, Finland · 2025–26Lead generation running without added headcount
Freelance project · digital agency · 2025–26Qualified leads after building VEIL.AI's marketing function from zero
Deep-tech AI company, Finland · 2023–26Daniel didn't just set up the technology and leave. He trained our people, kept improving it month after month, and became the person we turn to whenever we have a new idea.CTO, recruitment technology company
He can work independently, takes full ownership, and delivers consistently without the need for follow-ups. A deep understanding from high-level strategy down to the smallest technical detail.Former manager, Finland
Not long ago AI could write a paragraph. Today an agent reads the inbox, drafts the proposal, updates the CRM and books the follow-up while you sleep. Next quarter it will do more, for less. Nobody in your market is waiting for you to be ready.
A new generation of models arrives every few months, each one more capable and cheaper to run than the last. What needed a development team in 2024 is a workflow one builder ships in a week in 2026. Whatever you decide is "too hard for us" this year will be a template next year, and your competitor will have it.
Capability up, cost per task down, every quarterSomewhere in your industry a company your size now sends the quote within the hour, answers customers at midnight, and closes the month's books in an afternoon. Once your customers have felt that, your three-day turnaround stops being normal and becomes a reason to leave.
Customer expectations reset by the fastest, not the averageEvery process you automate frees the hours that build the next one, and the knowledge base you start today is worth more every month it learns. A company two years ahead isn't two years ahead. It runs on half the overhead and keeps pulling away. Waiting isn't neutral; it's falling behind at an accelerating rate.
Delay is a cost that grows, not a savingSmall companies won't be killed by AI. They'll be out-competed by the small company next door that put AI at the core of how it quotes, sells, delivers and supports, two years earlier.
In the UK only 16% of businesses have put AI to work with measurable results; in the EU, 17% of small companies use it at all. Most owners your size haven't started, because the barriers were never about access: they are time, skills, and not knowing where to start. The field is still open. It won't stay open long.
Sources: Office for National Statistics, Artificial intelligence in UK businesses, 2023 to 2026; UK small-business AI surveys, 2026; Eurostat enterprise survey 2025, as reported by the OECD.
A fractional AI talent is an experienced builder who works inside your company for a fraction of a full-time week, or for a defined stretch, and stays as long as there is work worth doing. Not a freelancer taking tickets. Not an agency handing over a scoped deliverable. Someone in your team channel who owns an outcome and is still there next quarter. Demand for fractional hires grew 149% last year, led by small and bootstrapped companies.
| Full-time AI employee | Freelancer or agency | Fractional AI talent | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | A senior AI engineer in the US or UK: $10–16k a month before benefits. | Per ticket, or per scoped project. Agency builds commonly land at $20–80k each. | A fraction of that, sized to the hours you actually have AI work for: typically 8–20 a week. |
| Time to start | Four to eight months to recruit, then onboarding. | Fast to start, fast to leave. | Days. Access on day one, a first version building by day 2, a pilot running by day 7, in production by day 14. |
| What you get | Forty hours a week, deep continuity, full ownership of knowledge and IP. | A deliverable, then a handover document. | A builder inside your team: thinks through the problem, plans the order, builds the systems, owns the outcome and the maintenance. One name to ask about anything AI. |
| Commitment | Permanent payroll. Slow to unwind if the workload turns out smaller than expected. | None beyond the scope. Changes cost extra. | Month to month, or per project. Scale the hours up or down as the work changes. |
| Best when | AI is the core of your product and there are 25+ hours of AI work every week. | One well-defined build, with someone in-house to maintain it afterwards. | You have real work to automate but under 20 hours a week of it, no AI specialist in-house, and you want proof before you hire full-time. |
| Watch out for | With only a few workflows to automate, a full-time hire sits idle much of the week. Hard to find, harder to keep. | Nobody owns it after handover. No memory of how your business works. | You need one person on your side for access and priorities. Not for 24/7 on-call infrastructure. When AI becomes your core product, hire full-time, and I'll help you do it. |
Figures from the Fractional Work Report 2026 (Fractional Jobs), the Rafiki Works guide to fractional AI talent, and AY Automate's 2026 fractional AI engineer guide. Your numbers will depend on market and hours.
This is not a fractional Chief AI Officer seat. A CAIO writes AI strategy and governance for a board. I'm the person who works out what to automate, builds it, and makes sure your team uses it. If you ever need the board-level layer, I'll say so rather than pretend to be it.
I don't wait for a brief. I sit with the people doing the work, watch where the hours go, and come back with the three things worth fixing, ranked by payback. You don't have to know what to ask for.
Which fix first, which tool, what stays manual on purpose, what has to be true for it to still work in six months. That's strategy done by the person who will also have to live with the result.
A pilot running in your tools by day 7, not a roadmap slide. I write the workflows and the code, train the people who use them, and stay accountable for the outcome after launch.
Two things I'm not: an employee who needs a ticket to move, and an advisor who leaves you a deck and an invoice.
Two days a week, ongoing. I'm in your team channel and your weekly meeting.
One build from first day to handover: documented, your team trained, and I stay reachable for 30 days after.
A block of hours each month, drawn down as work comes up. Good when the AI work arrives in bursts.
These are systems I've already designed, built and run, for myself and for other companies. I plan the system, then put AI coding agents to work on the parts, so what used to take a quarter ships in weeks. Each one starts from your own documents, tools and tone of voice, so the output sounds like your company, not like a chatbot. The free first workflow starts with whichever of these eats the most hours.
Send the job in chat, or forward the email, recording or brief.
Research, draft, format, schedule, one step to the next, using your knowledge base.
Nothing reaches a customer, a platform or your books without a human click.
Same job, same standard, without anyone prompting anything.
A builder's proof is what is running. Everything below I planned, built and shipped, with real users on the other end.
A morning brief of priorities and stuck deals, a company knowledge base every agent reads, department agents you run by chat, an advisory board of AI mentors, and a memory that doesn't reset. It installs on the owner's own server. This is the pattern I install for you, with no licence fee.
FlagshipFifteen-plus published workflows used by teams worldwide: content research with a human approval step, a chatbot that answers from company documents and hands off to a person, invoices read from photos into a spreadsheet.
15+ templatesSixteen reusable skills I use every week: meeting recordings to summaries with actions, research to a script, publishing to a store, poster and slide design, and a check that stops copy sounding like a machine wrote it.
16 skillsSeven small products, each removing one recurring chore: a video from a script, posts published on schedule, an ebook laid out from a document, blog drafts inside WordPress, a simple way to sell a digital file.
7 productsNothing to pay upfront: the first workflow is built free, and you decide with it running. After that it's two days a week, sixteen hours, inside your team. The standard rate for the seat is €2,000 a month. Month one is half that and month two three quarters: the rate climbs as the results do. You can stop at the end of the trial with no notice; from month two it's thirty days' notice either way.
Give me the chore that eats the most hours in your week. Inside the first two weeks I build the workflow that removes it and get it running in your tools, with the person who does the job. No contract, and no invoice until it runs and you want more. You decide with something working in front of you, not a CV. I'd rather earn the seat than pitch for it.
Day 1: access, your Monday meeting, and the people doing the manual work. Day 2: I'm already building a first working version of the biggest chore. Day 7: that pilot is running with the person who does the job, and you have a ranked list of what comes next. Day 14: the first workflow in real production. Day 30: the first AI agent live and a second workflow running, hours saved written down.
The first workflow is free: no invoice unless it's running by day 14 and you keep going.Day 45: the second AI agent goes live, whether support, sales follow-up or content in your voice. Day 60: your team is trained on everything running, and the numbers from both months are in front of you.
By day 60: two workflows and two AI agents, built and working.Month to month from here. I keep the four systems running, add the next workflow or agent from the ranked list, and stay in your team channel and your weekly meeting. Questions answered the same day; new ideas get a yes, a no, or a number within the week.
Every month after: one new workflow or agent live, on top of keeping the rest running. Rate reviewed at month six against what's been saved.More days a week, a single project, a different ramp, or a salary on your payroll. Tell me the number and the problem, and I'll tell you what I can build for it.
Finnish for the stubborn kind of determination. It's how I work inside a team: I plan deeply before I build, then I build fast. I write down what “done” means before I start, I show working software rather than progress reports, and I don't call something finished until your people use it without me in the room. And I stay: automations need someone who keeps them running and keeps finding the next one.
| What this seat costs elsewhere | Per month |
|---|---|
| A fractional CTO or CMO in the UK or Europe, two days a week | €4,000–6,000 |
| A fractional AI engineer in the US, one day a week | $5,000–8,000 |
| A full-time AI engineer in the US or UK, five days, before benefits | €10,000–16,000 |
| This seat, two days a week: trial month · standard rate | €1,000 · €2,000 |
Benchmarks: 941 Consulting and Leadership Services (fractional CTO, UK and Europe, 2026); Primewise and Fractional Quest (fractional CMO, UK, 2026); AY Automate (fractional AI engineer, US, 2026); Rafiki Works (full-time AI engineer cost).
Sixteen hours a week in your business hours, whichever time zone you're in, in your team channel, with a weekly 30-minute check-in. Hours are logged; you see them.
On your payroll or invoiced monthly, whichever your finance person prefers. Nothing is invoiced before the first workflow runs. Model and server costs are yours and stay small; I'll tell you what they are before anything is switched on.
One day a week, a single project, more days, or full-time: describe it and you have a number within two days.
If any of these is you, I'll say so on the first call and point you somewhere better.
Before I build anything we baseline the task: hours a week it takes, turnaround time, error rate, response time. After go-live we measure the same four numbers and I report them monthly on one page: hours saved, priced at what those hours cost you, plus what got faster. My own target: by the end of month two the running systems save more than the fee. If they don't, we stop.
You're not buying hours, you're buying dated deliverables: a pilot running by day 7, the first workflow in production by day 14, the first agent by day 30, the second by day 45. If they land, hours are the wrong worry. If the first workflow isn't running by day 14, you owe nothing and we stop there. Hours are logged anyway, in a sheet you can open any time, with a Friday note on what shipped, what's next and what's blocked.
The systems run every day; I don't have to. Approvals go to your people in chat. Every system ships with a plain-language guide, an alert to a named person, and nothing exotic underneath: documented workflows and standard connections any competent freelancer could pick up. If something breaks on a day I'm not in, message me and I'll look the same day or first thing next morning. The monthly rate includes keeping the old systems healthy while adding the next one.
A small number of companies at a time, each with fixed days, so nobody competes for the same Tuesday. Urgent breaks get attention whichever day it is.
Nothing leaves with me. It's built on your accounts, documented as it's built, and you own 100% of the code, workflows, prompts and knowledge base. Handover is part of every build, not an exit event. Thirty days' notice either way. I'd rather you never need to replace me, but you'll be able to.
Nothing reaches a customer, a platform or your books without a person's click, until the logs prove the error rate is lower than the human's. Every action is logged; anything uncertain escalates to a person. We start with internal-facing work, recaps, drafts and reports, before anything customer-facing.
It stays on your accounts and, if you want, your own server. Models are called through business APIs that don't train on your data. Access is on your logins, the minimum needed, revocable in a minute. EU and UK companies get a data-processing agreement before any access, and a written list of what data goes where before anything is switched on.
The first workflow is free because it's the fastest way to show you what I do, and a trial month at half rate costs both of us less than a long sales process. The standard rate for the seat is €2,000 a month; month one is half and month two three quarters, the rate climbing as the results do. The rate is reviewed at month six against what's been saved. The catch: I take a small number of companies at a time, and I pick the ones where the manual work actually exists.
Tools aren't systems. What went nowhere was the absence of someone whose job it was: no knowledge base, no approvals, no owner. This time there's a builder on the team, a shared memory every agent reads, and a pilot running by day 7 that people actually use.
I take the chores, not the people, and I tell your team that on day one. The people doing the work choose what gets automated first, and approvals stay with them. The aim is a company that grows without hiring in proportion, and people doing the work only people can do.
Thirteen years ago I landed in Helsinki with one suitcase, a mechatronics transcript nobody asked about, and a few words of Finnish. Every reinvention since, from engineer to marketer to builder, came from the same itch: I can't stand watching people do by hand what a machine could do for them. I think in systems, and I'd rather build one than describe it. Today first, then how I got here.
Outside work, the three things I keep coming back to are nature, hiking and travelling. These are the parts of my life that do not fit neatly in a CV.
In August 2026 I closed three and a half years at VEIL.AI. Everything on this page that runs, I built on the side of that job: CEO AI OS, an AI operating system for companies from one person to fifty; a store of small products and workflows; and AI Native Lab, a community of owners and operators I teach, grown out of my YouTube channel, with twenty workshops, webinars and meetups since 2025. On every freelance project I was the one on the call with the customer and the one who made sure it still ran at 3 a.m.
Now I'm ready for the next chapter: fully immersed in AI, inside a company that wants it to work. That's what the fractional shape is for.
In late 2024 I started filming what I was building, in my mother tongue, for people with no technical background. The rule was simple: if I can't explain it to a business owner in twenty minutes, I don't understand it yet. Fifty tutorials later the channel has 25,000 subscribers and over half a million views, with another 35,000 people following along on LinkedIn, Facebook and a newsletter, and it grew into AI Native Lab, where owners and operators learn to build together.
It is still where I test whether I really know something. The best way to learn is to teach it, and the best way to keep learning is to share it with people who ask the question you didn't think of.
From January 2023 to August 2026 my day job was Growth & Marketing Automation Manager at VEIL.AI, a Finnish deep-tech AI company, where I built the marketing function from nothing and qualified leads went up 200%. Evenings and weekends went to building: I stopped buying automations and started making them, n8n named me a featured creator, and I learned to ship with Claude Code, wire up agents and run models on my own servers. In 2025 I added an MSc in Business Analytics at Aalto. The engineer I'd trained as and the marketer I'd become finally worked on the same problem.
At Sisu Digital, a Helsinki web and marketing agency, I replaced fragmented processes with automated workflows for B2B tech companies and designed AI-supported content, lead-qualification and conversion systems. It's where I first got tired of doing the same work by hand every week.
I moved to Helsinki with one suitcase and a place at Aalto University, Finland's leading university for business, technology and design, to study International Business. Finland taught me two things I still run on: sisu, the stubborn kind of determination Finns are proud of, and the habit of saying exactly what you mean in a meeting. Outside class I helped build VietES, which grew into the largest Vietnamese startup community in Europe, 800 members strong, and led a team of ten volunteers at Entrepreneurs of Finland.
Mechatronics at Hanoi University of Science and Technology. I liked building things that moved. What I didn't like was how far the engineers sat from the people who would use what they built. That gap has bothered me ever since, and closing it is still the job.
| Base | Helsinki, Finland |
|---|---|
| Hours | Yours. My two days run inside your business hours, whether you're in London, Zurich, Toronto, New York, San Francisco or Sydney. |
| Meetings | The weekly check-in and approvals happen in your working day, at a time that suits your team. |
| Between my days | Messages answered within your next working day; anything broken gets looked at the same day. |
Claude Code, GPT Codex, Google Antigravity, LangChain, RAG, Mem0, APIs
n8n, Make, Zapier, Apify, Phantombuster
Python, TypeScript/Node, SQL, Docker, VPS, Git/GitHub
HubSpot, Pipedrive, ActiveCampaign, Google Workspace, Airtable, WordPress, Google and Meta Ads, Google Analytics, Looker Studio
Tell me what your company does and what eats your team's week. I'll come back with a plan, not a pitch: where AI helps, what I'd build in my first two weeks, and in what order. The first workflow is free, and month one is a trial at half rate. No deck.
Book a 20-minute call