Because of the appearance of cloud computing and distributed digital infrastructure, the one-person micro-enterprise is much from a novel idea. Low-cost on-demand compute, distant collaboration, cost processing APIs, social media, and e-commerce marketplaces have all made it simpler to “go it alone” as an entrepreneur.
However what about scaling that one-person enterprise into one thing meatier — an enterprise of unicorn proportions?
Traditionally, this might have been an unfathomably powerful activity, as a result of abilities and assets required, not solely to scale a product but in addition to develop and keep a sufficiently bountiful buyer base. However AI brokers might unshackle the would-be solo-preneurs of the world.
AI brokers are all about embedding human workflows into software program, liberating the human to do extra in much less time. Brokers could be assigned duties, they usually could make choices with various levels of autonomy. A number of AI brokers might even collaborate on complementary duties, paving the best way for getting some actual work completed totally autonomously.
In an interview final yr with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, OpenAI’s Sam Altman predicted this actual situation.
“In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company,” Altman stated. “Which would have been unimaginable without AI — and now [it] will happen.”
In a dialogue on the World Financial Discussion board’s annual assembly in Davos final week, a panel of entrepreneurs and traders additionally mentioned the prospect of the single-person billion-dollar enterprise — and, extra importantly, what this may imply for the way forward for employment.
In people we belief
Current historical past reveals a slew of svelte billion-dollar corporations. Microsoft doled out $2.5 billion for Minecraft maker Mojang, which had a reported 40 staff. Fb acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion when the messaging app maker had simply 55 staff. Two years earlier than that, Fb purchased Instagram for $1 billion with simply 13 staff in its ranks.
This proves that web know-how has already generated big corporations with minimal headcount. However this isn’t the identical as a one-person unicorn.
Kanjun Qiu, CEO of AI analysis lab Imbue, which is constructing brokers succesful of reasoning and coding, reckons that the type of one-person companies that AI will most definitely assist hit the large time are these the place the product is basically self-serve.
“I think the places where it’ll be easiest, and first, are ‘bottoms up’ — either consumer or prosumer — products that don’t require large go-to-market teams,” Qiu defined throughout the panel dialogue. “I think go to market is actually one of the places where it’s going to be difficult to automate all of these relationships with other people.”
On the subject of producing gross sales, it’s not all the time the higher product that wins out; it’s the folks behind the product which have completed a greater job of constructing belief with prospects. So if you must proactively promote your product, you continue to may have to workers up.
“That human-to-human trust, I think, is still very necessary and very important,” Qiu added.
Benjamine Liu, CEO of AI drug growth firm Formation Bio, is bullish on the rising function that AI is having in his firm and past.
“I think we’re living in one of the most exciting areas to be building companies,” Liu stated at Davos. “We have PhD-level intelligence in our pockets, and we’re beginning to see AI systems do the work of entire teams. I think in that world, AI-native companies have a pretty significant advantage.”
Nonetheless, Liu echoed Qiu’s sentiments: Although the potential for one-person mega-businesses is actual, it won’t truly make sense from a enterprise or entrepreneurial perspective — and all of it comes right down to the human situation that values relationships.
“The potential to get there is earlier than people think,” Liu stated. “My view is that it’s gonna take a long time, because being an entrepreneur is kind of a lonely journey, and you want a co-founder. Companies are still started by humans. I think you will want some people to share the journey with.”
So the truth is, we’d truly find yourself in a spot the place corporations have all the time began out: a founding group with complementary ability units. However somewhat than scaling via incremental hiring, they keep that preliminary slenderness with AI brokers plugging the hole.
However even when the fabled one-person unicorn by no means occurs, there’s little query that the oncoming agentic AI freight practice will disrupt the workforce in an enormous method.
“The era of AI employees”
If this nonetheless all appears hypothetical, assume once more. Agentic AI is already coming into the workforce within the type of attorneys like Harvey or software program engineers comparable to Cognition’s Devin.
AI gross sales brokers are additionally booming, with VC-backed corporations comparable to Artisan boasting that it desires to interchange the human workforce — as its dystopian billboard advert in San Francisco demonstrates.
Loads of different corporations are additionally laying the muse for agentic AI to flourish.
Lattice, an HR and “people management” platform final valued at $3 billion, goes additional by giving “digital workers” official worker data, which means that its prospects’ AI brokers truly present up within the organizational chart, replete with profile picture and a supervisor assigned to them.
Sarah Franklin, who joined Lattice as CEO final yr, known as this transition a “great new age of collaboration,” the place people and AI brokers work aspect by aspect. And what this implies is managing these brokers in a similar way to people, to foster transparency and accountability.
“We want to prioritize the success of people as the primary, and when you’re working with AI agents, it’s important to understand what they are assigned to be doing,” Franklin defined at Davos. “It’s not saying that AI is human; it’s more that we need to clearly identify where AI is. As AI speaks on behalf of brands and people, makes decisions on behalf of brands and people, and integrates with other systems, we need to be able to track that.”
But when corporations can function at scale with none important human workforce, what does this imply for society? Folks have to earn cash; they want objective — wouldn’t society simply implode on itself if folks aren’t in a position to work?
As with earlier industrial revolutions, a frequent chorus across the AI revolution is that new jobs will crop up in the long term — we simply don’t know what they’re but.
“There’s going to be a lot of job creation, too,” Mitchell Inexperienced, founding father of funding agency Lead Edge Capital, stated at Davos. “If you think about when the iPhone came out in 2007 — Uber and Airbnb are now $100 billion companies. [They] could not have existed before this. Where the opportunities can be are the companies that we’re not even thinking about yet — they are going to be these next giant businesses.”
That doesn’t imply there received’t be a complete heap of ache within the brief time period, although. And as we’re already seeing with Chinese language AI sensation DeepSeek, the speed of AI’s advance is important by way of cost-to-performance ratio of AI fashions. And this may very well be a key differentiator versus earlier industrial and technological revolutions: We’d not be capable of adapt rapidly sufficient.
“I do think there’s a lot of talk about in terms of retraining and upskilling,” Liu stated. “But there’s something quite unique about the pace of developments and how quickly these models are getting better, specifically where we’re seeing these AI systems do the work of entire teams.”
“Manager of AIs”
There was a common consensus among the many panel that whatever the price of change, everybody should study not solely to stay with AI, but in addition discover ways to use it to thrive within the office.
With You.com, for instance, corporations can entry its API to convey real-time net search to any massive language mannequin (LLM). Whereas it gives its personal suite of brokers for particular duties, corporations can even create their very own customized brokers, selecting their most well-liked AI mannequin and giving it directions based mostly on no matter sources of information they should join.
“We, as CEOs, are going to be the first generation that manages people and AI,” You.com CEO Richard Socher stated at Davos. “But I think the most interesting change here is actually that every individual contributor, every employee, is going to become a manager of AIs. And in that sense, everyone is going to become kind of an entrepreneur.”
So the jury remains to be very a lot out on whether or not we’ll ever see a real one-person unicorn firm. Nonetheless, the precept behind the sentiment has already type of been confirmed, as we’ve seen with the insanely excessive value-to-headcount ratio of WhatsApp, which labored out at $345 million for every worker on the time Fb purchased it.
Even Nvidia, with a market cap of greater than $3 trillion, has a comparatively slender workforce of fewer than 30,000 staff — that’s the equal of round $100 million in worth per worker.
With the suitable sort of firm, and the suitable execution, it’s troublesome to see how AI received’t nudge these greenback figures north because the headcount heads south. However in all probability, it can simply come down as to whether there’s a want for one particular person to construct alone, with sufficient entrepreneurial data to embed a robust, defensible enterprise mannequin that another person can’t simply replicate on the drop of a hat.
However whether or not society shall be able to deal with that is a wholly totally different query.
