Thanks to the appearance of cloud processing and widespread digital infrastructure, one -man micro -entrepreneurship It is far from an progressive concept. Cheap calculation on demand, distant cooperation, payment processing APi interfaces, social media and e-commerce markets made it easier to “go alone” as an entrepreneur.
But what about the scaling of this one-day in something more fleshy-a enterprise of a unicorn?
Historically, it could be an unfathomable difficult task, due to the required skills and resources, not only for the purpose of scaling the product, but also to develop and maintain a sufficiently abundant customer base. But AI agents could settle the would-be solo-profiters of the world.
AI agents relate to embedding human flows in software, releasing a man to do more in a shorter time. Agents can assign tasks and can make decisions about various degrees of autonomy. Many AI agents could even cooperate with complementary tasks, paving the way to perform a real job.
IN interview Last 12 months, with Reddit co -founder Alexis Ohanian, Altman and OpenAI predicted this exact scenario.
“On my little group chat with my friends of the general directors is this pool of plants for the first year in which a company worth a billion dollars is located,” said Altman. “What would be unimaginable without artificial intelligence – and now [it] It will happen. “
In the discussion at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, the panel of entrepreneurs and investors also discussed the perspective of a single-level enterprise value a billion dollars-more importantly, which could mean for the way forward for employment.
We trust in people
The latest story reveals a lot of slender corporations value a billion dollars. Microsoft spent $ 2.5 billion for Minecraft Maker Mojang, who reported 40 employees. Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $ 19 billion, when the manufacturer of the application for sending messages just had 55 employees. Two years earlier, Facebook bought Instagram for $ 1 billion with a fair 13 employees in their ranks.
This proves that web technology has already generated huge corporations with a minimum variety of employment. But it isn’t the same as one -way unicorn.
CampaeaUN QIUCEO AI Research Lab Imbuewho builds agents able to reasoning and coding, believes that the kind of sole proprietorship that AI will most probably help to achieve a lot of time are those in which the product is largely self -service.
“I think that the places where they will be the easiest, and first of all, there are” DNA “-consumer or prosumer-productions that do not require large teams on the market,” Qiu explained during the panel discussion. “I think that go to the market is actually one of the places where it will be difficult to automate all these relationships with other people.”
When it comes to generating sales, it is not at all times a higher product that wins; They are people behind the product that higher built trust with clients. So if you would like to sell your product proactively, it’s possible you’ll still need to fill the staff.
“I think that man’s trust in human is still very necessary and very important,” Qiu added.
Benjamin areatAI CEO Drug Development Company Formation Bio is stubborn about the growing role that AI plays in its company and more.
“I think we live in one of the most exciting areas of company building,” said Liu in Davos. “We have intelligence at a doctoral level in our pockets and we begin to see that AI systems do the work of entire teams. I think that in this world AI family companies have a fairly significant advantage. “
However, Liu repeated Qiu’s mood: although the one-mega-business potential is true, it might not make sense from a business perspective or entrepreneurship-and the whole lot boils down to the human condition that values relationships.
“Potential to get there earlier than people think,” Liu said. “In my opinion, it will take a long time because being an entrepreneur is a kind of lonely journey and you want a co -founder. Companies are still establishing people. I think you will want some people to share their journey. “
So in fact we will find yourself in a place where corporations at all times began: a founding team with complementary skill sets. But as an alternative of scaling through incremental employment, they maintain initial slender when AI agents connect the gap.
But even if the legendary unicorn of a unicorn never happens, there is absolute confidence that the upcoming agent freight train AI will disturb the working force.
“Era of AI employees”
If all this seems hypothetical, think again. Agentic AI is already entering the workforce in the type of lawyers similar to Harvey or software engineers similar to Devin Cognition.
AI sales agents They are also floweringWith Supported by VC Companies similar to a craftsman He boasts that he wants to replace the human working force – As the dystopian Billboard commercial shows in San Francisco.
Many other corporations also involve the flourishing of Agentic AI.
Lattice, HR platform and “human management” recently value $ 3 billion, goes on, giving “digital employees” Official worker recordsWhich implies that AI’s agents actually appear on the organizational chart, filled with profile photos and the manager assigned to them.
Sarah Franklinwho joined Lattice as CEO last 12 monthsHe called this transition “a great new era of cooperation” in which individuals and agents AI work side by side. And this implies managing these agents in a similar way to people to support transparency and responsibility.
“We want to determine the priority of people’s success as basic, and when you work with AI agents, it is important to understand what they are assigned,” explained Franklin in Davos. “This does not mean that AI is human; It is more that we must clearly determine where artificial intelligence is. When AI speaks on behalf of brands and people, he makes decisions on behalf of Marek and people and integrates with other systems, we must be able to follow it. “
But if corporations can operate on a large scale without a significant labor force, what does this mean for society? People must earn money; They need a goal – did the society not live if people are unable to work?
As in the case of previous industrial revolutions, a widespread refrain from the AI revolution Whether these latest jobs will appear in the long term – we just don’t know what they are yet.
“There will also be a lot of job creation” Mitchell GreenThe founding father of the Lead Edge Capital investment company said in Davos. “If you think about it when the iPhone appeared in 2007 – Uber and Airbnb is now $ 100 billion. [They] It could not exist earlier. Where there may be possibilities, they are companies we are not thinking about yet – they will be another gigantic companies. “
This does not mean, nevertheless, that there might be no whole variety of pain in the short period. And as we will already see in Chinese sensation AI Deepseek, the pace of progress AI is significant in terms of cost ratio for the performance of AI models. This might be a key distinctive factor compared to previous industrial and technological revolutions: we may not give you the chance to adapt quickly enough.
“I think there is a lot to talk about retraining and practicing,” Liu said. “But there is something special at a pace of development and how quickly these models become better and better, especially where we see these AI systems do the work of entire teams.”
“AIS manager”
The panel was a general consensus that, no matter the rate of changes, everyone will have to learn not only to live with AI, but also find out how to use it to prosper at the workplace.
For example, with you.com, corporations can access the API interface to introduce network search in real time to any large language model (LLM). Although it offers its own set of agents for specific tasks, corporations It may create their very own Non -standard agentsChoosing the preferred AI model and giving it instructions based on all data sources they need to connect.
“We, as a director Richard Socher he said in Davos. “However, I think that the most interesting change is that every individual colleague, every worker, will grow to be a AIS manager. And in this sense everyone will grow to be a type of entrepreneur. “
So the jury is still very available, or will we ever see a real one -man company. However, the principle of sentiment has already been proved in a sense, as we saw with an incredibly high ratio of value to Headcount WhatsApp, which amounted to $ 345 million for each worker when Facebook bought it.
Even NVIDIA, with a market capitalization of over $ 3 trillion, has a relatively slender working force lower than 30,000 employees – This is an equivalent of about $ 100 million per worker.
Thanks to the appropriate kind of company and proper implementation, it is difficult to see how AI is not going to poke these dollar data north when you use south. But most probably it boils down to whether there is a desire for one person to build alone, with sufficient knowledge of entrepreneurship, to set a strong, defended business model, which another person can simply not repeat for the fall of the hat.
But whether society might be ready to deal with it is a completely different query.