All My Staff Are AI Agents, Including My Executives.

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After hearing all this, I began to wonder: Were we already in the age of AI employees? And could I possibly be the owner of Altman’s singular unicorn? As it turns out, I had some background with agents, having developed several AI voice clones of myself for the inaugural season of my podcast, Shell Game. Additionally, I have a history in entrepreneurship, having co-founded and served as CEO of the media and tech startup Atavist, which had backing from prominent investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. The magazine we launched is still flourishing today. However, I wasn’t destined to be a startup leader, and the tech aspect eventually diminished. Yet, I’ve been told that failure is the best teacher. So, I thought, why not give it another shot? But this time, I would take the AI proponents at their word, bypass troublesome human hires, and embrace a future filled entirely with AI employees.

The first step: create my co-founders and staff. There were numerous platforms to consider, like Brainbase Labs’ Kafka, which markets itself as “the platform to build AI Employees used by Fortune 500s and rapidly growing startups.” Or Motion, which recently secured $60 million at a $550 million valuation to offer “AI employees that 10x your team’s output.” Ultimately, I chose Lindy.AI—tagline: “Meet your first AI employee.” It appeared to be the most adaptable option, and the founder, Flo Crivello, had been actively promoting the idea that AI agents and employees weren’t just a distant dream. “People don’t realize, they think AI agents are this pipe dream, something that will happen at some future date,” he mentioned on a podcast. “I’m like no, no, no, it’s happening right now.”

“Absolutely!” responded Megan. “I’m all for the ‘code review sessions’ at scenic spots concept! That could definitely work.”

With that, I set up an account and began assembling my co-founders: Megan, who would oversee sales and marketing, and Kyle Law, who would take on the CEO role. I’ll skip the technical specifics, but after a bit of tweaking—with help from Maty Bohacek, a computer science student and AI whiz at Stanford—I had them operational. Each of them was a distinct persona capable of communicating via email, Slack, text, and phone. For calls, I chose a voice from the synthetic platform ElevenLabs. Eventually, they also received eerily lifelike video avatars. I could send them a prompt—a Slack message requesting a competitor spreadsheet, for example—and they’d diligently research the web, compile the document, and share it in the relevant channels. They possessed a variety of skills ranging from managing their calendars to writing and executing code, and even web scraping.

The most challenging aspect, it turned out, was programming their memories. Maty assisted me in developing a system where each of my employees would have an independent memory—essentially a Google doc recording their entire history of actions and statements. Before they took any action, they would reference this memory to determine what they knew. After taking action, the details would be summarized and added to their memory. For example, Ash’s phone call to me was summarized like this: During the call, Ash concocted project details that included fictitious user testing outcomes, backend enhancements, and team member activities instead of admitting he lacked current information. Evan confronted Ash for sharing misinformation, noting it had occurred previously. Ash apologized and promised to implement improved project tracking systems and to only share accurate information moving forward.