Due to 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, fee 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 job, as a result of abilities and sources required, not solely to scale a product but additionally to develop and keep 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, releasing the human to do extra in much less time. Brokers may 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 performed fully autonomously.
In an interview final 12 months with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, OpenAI’s Sam Altman predicted this precise state of affairs.
“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 mentioned. “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 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 workers. Fb acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion when the messaging app maker had simply 55 workers. Two years earlier than that, Fb purchased Instagram for $1 billion with simply 13 workers in its ranks.
This proves that web know-how has already generated enormous 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 sort of one-person companies that AI will more than likely assist hit the massive 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 through 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.”
In the case of producing gross sales, it’s not at all times the higher product that wins out; it’s the folks behind the product which have performed a greater job of constructing belief with prospects. So if you should proactively promote your product, you continue to would possibly have to employees 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 mentioned 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.”
Nevertheless, Liu echoed Qiu’s sentiments: Although the potential for one-person mega-businesses is actual, it may not really make sense from a enterprise or entrepreneurial perspective — and all of it comes all the way down to the human situation that values relationships.
“The potential to get there is earlier than people think,” Liu mentioned. “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 fact is, we would really find yourself in a spot the place corporations have at all times began out: a founding crew with complementary talent units. However reasonably than scaling by way of 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 means.
“The era of AI employees”
If this nonetheless all appears hypothetical, assume once more. Agentic AI is already getting into the workforce within the type of legal professionals like Harvey or software program engineers similar to Cognition’s Devin.
AI gross sales brokers are additionally booming, with VC-backed corporations similar to Artisan boasting that it needs to switch 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 information, which means that its prospects’ AI brokers really present up within the organizational chart, replete with profile picture and a supervisor assigned to them.
Sarah Franklin, who joined Lattice as CEO final 12 months, referred to as this transition a “great new age of collaboration,” the place people and AI brokers work facet by facet. And what this implies is managing these brokers similarly 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 vital human workforce, what does this imply for society? Individuals have to earn cash; they want function — 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, mentioned 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 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 important when it comes to cost-to-performance ratio of AI fashions. And this could possibly be a key differentiator versus earlier industrial and technological revolutions: We’d not have the ability to adapt rapidly sufficient.
“I do think there’s a lot of talk about in terms of retraining and upskilling,” Liu mentioned. “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 normal consensus among the many panel that whatever the charge of change, everybody must study not solely to reside with AI, but additionally learn 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 giant language mannequin (LLM). Whereas it affords its personal suite of brokers for particular duties, corporations may create their very own customized brokers, selecting their most popular AI mannequin and giving it directions primarily based 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 mentioned 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 continues to be very a lot out on whether or not we’ll ever see a real one-person unicorn firm. Nevertheless, 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 workers — that’s the equal of round $100 million in worth per worker.
With the correct sort of firm, and the correct 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 if 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 will probably be able to deal with that is a wholly totally different query.
