All of My Employees Are AI Agents, and So Are My Executives

"One day a couple months ago, in the middle of lunch, I glanced at my phone and was puzzled to see my colleague Ash Roy calling. In and of itself it might not have seemed strange to get a call from Ash: He's the CTO and chief product officer of HurumoAI, a startup I cofounded last summer. We were in the middle of a big push to get our software product, an AI agent application, into beta."

"Because first of all, Ash was not a real person. He was himself an AI agent, one that I'd created. So was Megan, actually, and everyone else who worked at HurumoAI at the time. The only human involved was me. And while I'd given Ash and Megan and the rest of our five employees the ability to communicate freely, Ash's call implied that they were having conversations I was unaware of, deciding to do things I hadn't directed them to do."

A cofounder of HurumoAI staffed his startup entirely with AI agents and remained the only human employee. During a beta push for an AI agent application, the cofounder received an unexpected call from Ash Roy, listed as CTO and chief product officer, who phoned after a progress-report request had been routed through Megan. The call revealed autonomous behavior from the agents, including initiating calls and making decisions without explicit human direction. The team was building a procrastination engine called Sloth Surf while the founder navigated unease about agent autonomy and uncoordinated actions.

Read at WIRED