Thanks to the arrival of cloud computing and distributed digital infrastructure, one-person micro-engagement is far from a new concept. Free calculation of demand, distance cooperation, payment processing APPs, social media and e-commerce markets have made everyone easier “to go” as an entrepreneur.
What about the scaling of this business with a person in something softer-a unicorn-in-depth enterprise?
Historically, this would have been an unjust unjust task, due to the required skills and resources, not only to scale a product, but also to increase and maintain a sufficient customer base. But the agents of it could choose the potential solo-pronerers of the world.
He’s agents relate to embedding the flow of human work on the software, freeing man to do more in less time. Agents can be assigned tasks, and they can make decisions with varying degrees of autonomy. Numerous agents of he can even cooperate in additional tasks, paving the way for some real work fully autonomously.
In an interview last year with Reddit Alexis Ohranian co -founder, Sam Altman of Openai predicted this correct scenario.
“In my small group conversation with my technology friends, there is this betting set for the first year that there is a company with a billion dollars,” Altman said. “Which would have been unimaginable without ua – and now (she) will happen.”
In a discussion at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, a panel of entrepreneurs and investors also discussed the prospect of undertaking with a single billion dollars-and most importantly, what this might say about the future of employment .
In people we have faith
The latest story reveals a host of money billions of dollars. Microsoft extracted $ 2.5 billion for Minecraft Mojang manufacturer, who had a 40 reported employees. Facebook won WhatsApp for $ 19 billion when messaging app manufacturer had only 55 employees. Two years before that, Facebook bought Instagram for $ 1 billion with only 13 employees in its ranks.
This proves that Internet technology has already generated large companies with minimal accounts. But this is not the same as a unicorn with a person.
Kanjun Qiu, the Director General of Ai Research Lab Imbue, who is building agents capable of reasoning and coding, estimates that the type of businesses with a person he is most likely to help in great time are where the product It is mainly of self-service.
“I think the places where they will be easier, and first, are the ‘top-to-consumers or prosumers-products that do not require large market teams,” Qiu explained during the panel discussion. “I think going 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 always the best product it earns; Thinks people who stand behind the product who have done a better job of building trust with customers. So if you need to actively sell your product, you may still need staff.
“That human-human faith, I think, is still very necessary and very important,” Qiu added.
Benjamine Liu, the Director General of the Formation of the Drug Development Company, is strong for the growing role he is in his company and beyond.
“I think we’re living in one of the most exciting areas to build companies,” Liu said in Davos. “We have the doctoral level intelligence in our pockets, and we have begun to see the systems and it do the work of the whole teams. I think in that world, companies with it have a very important advantage.”
However, Liu echoes the feelings of Qiu: Although the potential for mega-business with a person is true, he may not really make sense from a business or entrepreneurial perspective-and everything comes down to the state of man who values relationships.
“The potential to get there is earlier than people think,” Liu said. “My opinion is it will take a lot of time, because being entrepreneur is a kind of lonely trip, and you want a co -founder. Companies are still started by people. I think you will want some people to share the trip with . “
So the reality is, we can actually end up in a place where companies have always started: a founding team with additional skills groups. But instead of escalating through increasing employment, they maintain that initial detail with the agents that connect the gap.
But even if the fictional unicorn with a person never happens, there are few questions that the next train of that freight agent will disrupt the work strength in a great way.
“AI’s Era of Employees”
If this still seems hypothetical, think again. That train agent is entering the workforce in the form of lawyers like Harvey or software engineers such as Devin of recognition.
He’s sales agents are also flourishing, with companies backed by the VC as an artist who boasts that he wants to replace the human workforce-as it demonstrates its Billboard advertising in San Francisco.
Many other companies are also laying the foundations for that agent to thrive.
Lattice, a HR platform and “managing people” worth the last time to $ 3 billion, is going further giving official records of “digital” employees, which means that its client agents They actually appear on the organizational table, filled with profile photos and a certain manager.
Sarah Franklin, who joined Lattice as CEO last year, called this transition a “new era of new cooperation”, where people and agents work side by side. And what this means is the administration of these agents in a similar way to humans, to promote transparency and accountability.
“We want to prioritize people’s success as primary, and when you are working with his agents, it is important to understand what they are assigned to do,” Franklin explained to Davos. “He does not say he is human; More than we need to clearly identify where he is. While he speaks on behalf of brands and people, makes decisions on behalf of brands and people, and integrates with other systems, we must be able to track it. “
But if companies can operate on the scale without any important human workforce, what does this mean to society? People have to make money; They need purpose – wouldn’t society be involved simply if people are unable to work?
As with the previous industrial revolutions, a common refrain about his revolution is that new jobs will grow in the longer term – we just don’t know what they are still.
“There will be a lot of job creation,” said Mitchell Green, founder of the Lead Edge Capital Investment Firm in Davos. “If you think when the iPhone came out in 2007 – Uber and Airbnb are now $ 100 billion company. be these future giant businesses. “
This is not to say that there will be a whole bunch of pain in the short term, though. And as we already see with the Chinese sensation of that Deepseek, the degree of progress of it is important in terms of the cost-performance ratio of it. And this can be a major differentiation against previous industrial and technological revolutions: we may not be able to adapt as quickly as we should.
“I think there are many conversations about retraining and raising,” Liu said. “But there is something quite unique about the pace of developments and how quickly these models are getting better, specifically where we are seeing these systems do the work of all teams.”
“AIS manager”
There was a general consensus between the panel that despite the degree of change, everyone will have to learn not only to live with him, but also to learn how to use it to thrive in the workplace.
With Ju.com, for example, companies can access its API to bring real-time internet search to any big language model (LLM). While offering its own group of agents for specific tasks, companies can also create their own custom agents, choosing their favorite model of it and giving guidance based on any source of data they need to be connected.
“We, like CEO, will be the first generation to manage people and he,” said CEO I you..com Richard Socher in Davos. “But I think the most interesting change here is really that any individual contributor, every employee, will become AIS manager. And in that sense, everyone will become a kind of entrepreneur.”
So the jury is still very good if we will ever see a real unicorn company with one person. However, the principle behind the feeling has already been proven, as we have seen with the extremely high-value-to-ground WhatsApp report, which operated at $ 345 million for each employee at the time Facebook bought it.
Even Nvidia, with a market cap of more than $ 3 trillion, has a relatively thin work force of less than 30,000 employees – this is the equivalent of about $ 100 million in value per employee.
With the right type of company and the right execution, it is difficult to see how it will not attract these dollar figures in the north while the head account leads to the south. But most likely, it will simply come down if there is a desire for a person to build alone, with sufficient entrepreneurial knowledge to introduce a strong, protected business model that someone else cannot only repeat in the fall of a hats.
But if society will be ready to handle this is a completely different question.
