Because of the arrival 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 could have been an unfathomably robust activity, because of the abilities and sources required, not solely to scale a product but in addition to develop and preserve a sufficiently bountiful buyer base. However AI brokers may 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 will be assigned duties, they usually could make choices with various levels of autonomy. A number of AI brokers may even collaborate on complementary duties, paving the way in which for getting some actual work achieved fully 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 buddies, there’s this betting pool for the primary yr that there’s a one-person billion-dollar firm,” Altman stated. “Which might have been unimaginable with out AI — and now [it] will occur.”
In a dialogue on the World Financial Discussion board’s annual assembly in Davos final week, a panel of entrepreneurs and buyers additionally mentioned the prospect of the single-person billion-dollar enterprise — and, extra importantly, what this would possibly imply for the way forward for employment.
In people we belief
Latest 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 employees. Fb acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion when the messaging app maker had simply 55 employees. Two years earlier than that, Fb purchased Instagram for $1 billion with simply 13 employees in its ranks.
This proves that web know-how has already generated large 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 able to reasoning and coding, reckons that the sort of one-person companies that AI will most certainly assist hit the large time are these the place the product is basically self-serve.
“I believe the locations the place it’ll be best, and first, are ‘bottoms up’ — both client or prosumer — merchandise that don’t require massive go-to-market groups,” Qiu defined in the course of the panel dialogue. “I believe go to market is definitely one of many locations the place it’s going to be tough to automate all of those relationships with different folks.”
Relating to producing gross sales, it’s not at all times the higher product that wins out; it’s the folks behind the product which have achieved a greater job of constructing belief with prospects. So if it’s worthwhile to proactively promote your product, you continue to would possibly must workers up.
“That human-to-human belief, I believe, remains to be very needed and crucial,” Qiu added.
Benjamine Liu, CEO of AI drug growth firm Formation Bio, is bullish on the rising position that AI is having in his firm and past.
“I believe we’re residing in one of the crucial thrilling areas to be constructing corporations,” Liu stated at Davos. “Now we have PhD-level intelligence in our pockets, and we’re starting to see AI programs do the work of complete groups. I believe in that world, AI-native corporations have a fairly important benefit.”
Nonetheless, Liu echoed Qiu’s sentiments: Although the potential for one-person mega-businesses is actual, it may not 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 may be sooner than folks suppose,” Liu stated. “My view is that it’s gonna take a very long time, as a result of being an entrepreneur is sort of a lonely journey, and also you desire a co-founder. Firms are nonetheless began by people. I believe you want some folks to share the journey with.”
So the fact is, we would truly find yourself in a spot the place corporations have at all times began out: a founding crew with complementary talent units. However relatively than scaling via incremental hiring, they preserve 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 a giant means.
“The period of AI staff”
If this nonetheless all appears hypothetical, suppose once more. Agentic AI is already coming into the workforce within the type of legal professionals like Harvey or software program engineers akin to Cognition’s Devin.
AI gross sales brokers are also booming, with VC-backed corporations akin to Artisan boasting that it wants to replace 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 “folks administration” platform final valued at $3 billion, goes additional by giving “digital staff” official employee records, which means that its prospects’ AI brokers truly present up within the organizational chart, replete with profile photograph and a supervisor assigned to them.
Sarah Franklin, who joined Lattice as CEO last year, referred to as this transition a “nice new age of collaboration,” the place people and AI brokers work aspect by aspect. And what this implies is managing these brokers similarly to people, to foster transparency and accountability.
“We need to prioritize the success of individuals as the first, and if you’re working with AI brokers, it’s vital to grasp what they’re assigned to be doing,” Franklin defined at Davos. “It’s not saying that AI is human; it’s extra that we have to clearly establish the place AI is. As AI speaks on behalf of manufacturers and other people, makes choices on behalf of manufacturers and other people, and integrates with different programs, we want to have the ability to monitor that.”
But when corporations can function at scale with none important human workforce, what does this imply for society? Folks must earn cash; they want goal — wouldn’t society simply implode on itself if folks aren’t in a position to work?
As with earlier industrial revolutions, a common refrain around the AI revolution is that new jobs will crop up in the long run — we simply don’t know what they’re but.
“There’s going to be plenty of job creation, too,” Mitchell Green, founding father of funding agency Lead Edge Capital, stated at Davos. “If you concentrate on when the iPhone got here out in 2007 — Uber and Airbnb are actually $100 billion corporations. [They] couldn’t have existed earlier than this. The place the alternatives will be are the businesses that we’re not even fascinated about but — they’ll be these subsequent large companies.”
That doesn’t imply there gained’t be an entire heap of ache within the quick time period, although. And as we’re already seeing with Chinese language AI sensation DeepSeek, the speed of AI’s advance is critical by way of cost-to-performance ratio of AI fashions. And this could possibly be a key differentiator versus earlier industrial and technological revolutions: We would not be capable to adapt shortly sufficient.
“I do suppose there’s plenty of discuss by way of retraining and upskilling,” Liu stated. “However there’s one thing fairly distinctive in regards to the tempo of developments and the way shortly these fashions are getting higher, particularly the place we’re seeing these AI programs do the work of complete groups.”
“Supervisor of AIs”
There was a basic consensus among the many panel that whatever the charge of change, everybody should be taught not solely to reside 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 deliver real-time internet search to any massive language mannequin (LLM). Whereas it gives its personal suite of brokers for particular duties, corporations can also create their very own custom agents, selecting their most popular 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 primary era that manages folks and AI,” You.com CEO Richard Socher stated at Davos. “However I believe probably the most attention-grabbing change right here is definitely that each particular person contributor, each worker, goes to turn into a supervisor of AIs. And in that sense, everybody goes to turn into sort 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 sort 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 employees — that’s the equal of round $100 million in worth per worker.
With the suitable kind of firm, and the suitable execution, it’s tough to see how AI gained’t nudge these greenback figures north because the headcount heads south. However in all probability, it can simply come down as to if there’s a want for one individual to construct alone, with sufficient entrepreneurial information to embed a powerful, defensible enterprise mannequin that another person can’t simply replicate on the drop of a hat.
However whether or not society can be able to deal with that is a completely completely different query.