In Humans We Trust
Thanks to the advent of cloud computing and distributed digital infrastructure, the one-person micro-enterprise is far from a novel concept. Cheap on-demand compute, remote collaboration, payment processing APIs, social media, and e-commerce marketplaces have all made it easier to “go it alone” as an entrepreneur.
Historically, scaling that one-person business into something meatier — an enterprise of unicorn proportions — would have been an unfathomably tough task, due to the skills and resources required, not only to scale a product but also to grow and maintain a sufficiently bountiful customer base. But AI agents could unshackle the would-be solo-preneurs of the world.
The Era of AI Employees
AI agents are all about embedding human workflows into software, freeing the human to do more in less time. Agents can be assigned tasks, and they can make decisions with varying degrees of autonomy. Multiple AI agents could even collaborate on complementary tasks, paving the way for getting some real work done entirely autonomously.
In an interview last year with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, OpenAI’s Sam Altman predicted this exact scenario.
Manager of AIs
There was a general consensus among the panel that regardless of the rate of change, everyone will have to learn not only to live with AI, but also learn how to use it to thrive in the workplace.
With You.com, for example, companies can access its API to bring real-time web search to any large language model (LLM). While it offers its own suite of agents for specific tasks, companies can also create their own custom agents, choosing their preferred AI model and giving it instructions based on whatever sources of data they need to connect.
Conclusion
The reality is, we might actually end up in a place where companies have always started out: a founding team with complementary skill sets. But rather than scaling through incremental hiring, they maintain that initial slenderness with AI agents plugging the gap.
