AI agents could birth the first one-person unicorn — but at what societal cost?

Thanks to the arrival of cloud computing and distributed digital infrastructure, the one-person micro-company is far from a new concept. Cheap on-demand calculation, cooperation on external, payment processing APIs, social media and e-commerce market places have made it all easier to “only” as an entrepreneur.

But what about scaling up that single company in slightly meatier-a company of unicorn relationships?

Historically, this would have been an incomprehensibly heavy task, because of the required skills and resources, not only to scale a product, but also to grow and maintain a sufficiently abundant customer base. But AI agents were able to release the so-called solo preliminary disorders in the world.

AI agents are all about the inclusion of human workflows in software, so that people can do more in less time. Agents can be assigned tasks and they can make decisions with a variety of autonomy. Multiple AI agents can even work together on complementary tasks, so that the road is cleared for the fact that real work is done completely autonomously.

In one interview Last year with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Sam Altman from OpenAi predicted this exact scenario.

“In my small group cat with my friends of my technical CEO, there is a gambling pool for the first year that there is a single company,” Altman said. “That would have been unimaginable without AI – and now [it] 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 the single companies of single beds and, even more importantly, which could mean for the future of the work.

With people we trust

Recent history reveals a whole series of slim billion dollar companies. Microsoft handed out $ 2.5 billion for Minecraft maker Mojang, who had reported 40 employees. Facebook took over WhatsApp for $ 19 billion when the Messaging app maker used 55 employees. Two years earlier, Facebook bought Instagram for $ 1 billion with only 13 employees In his ranks.

This proves that internet technology has already generated large companies with a minimum workforce. But this is not the same as a unicorn of one person.

Kanjun QiuCEO of AI Research Lab PenetrateThat is built agents who are able to reason and cod, think that the kind of companies that will help AI will help the great time where the product is largely self -service.

“I think the places where it will be easiest, and first ‘soils up’ are consumers or prosumer products that do not require large go-to-market teams,” Qiu explained during the panel discussion. “I think Go to 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 better product that wins; It is the people behind the product who have done the trust better to build trust with customers. So if you have to sell your product proactively, you may still need to be staff.

“That trust in humans, I think, is still very necessary and very important,” Qiu added.

Benjamine LiyouCEO of AI Drug Development Company Formation Bio, Bullish is over the growing role that AI has in his company and then.

“I think we live in one of the most exciting areas to build companies,” Liu said at Davos. “We have a doctorate on intelligence on our pockets and we are starting to see AI systems do the work of entire teams. I think that in that world AI-Native companies have a pretty considerable advantage. “

Liu, however, repeated the feelings of Qiu: although the potential for one person’s mega business is really, it may not be really useful from a company or entrepreneur’s perspective and it all comes down to the human condition that appreciates relationships.

“The potential to get there is rather than people think,” said Liu. “My opinion is that 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 started by people. I think you want some people to share the journey. ‘

So the reality is that we may even end up in a place where companies have always started: a founder with complementary skills. But instead of scaling through incremental recruitment, they maintain that initial slenderness with AI agents who connect the gap.

But even if the legendary unicorn of one person never happens, there is little doubt that the oncoming Agentic AI-AGRTRUE will disrupt the workforce in a large way.

“The era of AI employees”

If this still seems hypothetically, think carefully again. Agentic AI is already in the workforce in the form of lawyers such as Harvey or Softwareing Seniores such as such as such as Devin van Cognition.

AI sales agents are also boomingof VC-stunned Companies such as Artisan brag that it wants to replace human staff – As his dystopian Billboard advertisement in San Francisco demonstrates.

Many other companies also lay the foundation for agent AI to flourish.

Lattice, a platform for HR and “People Management” that is last appreciated at $ 3 billion, continues by giving “digital employees” Official employee dataWhich means that the AI ​​agents of its customers actually appear in the organizational card, full of profile photo and a manager who is assigned to them.

Sarah Franklinwho came to Lattice as CEO last yearThis transition called a “Great New Age of Collaboration”, in which people and AI agents work side by side. And what this means is to manage these agents in a similar way as people to promote transparency and accountability.

“We want to prioritize the success of people as primary, and when you work with AI agents, it is important to understand what they are assigned to do,” Franklin explained to Davos. “It does not say that AI is human; It is more that we have to clearly identify where AI is. Since AI speaks on behalf of brands and people, decisions make on behalf of brands and people and integrates with other systems, we must be able to follow that. “

But if companies can work on a scale without any significant human workforce, what does this mean for society? People have to earn money; They need goal – could society not simply implode in itself if people can’t work?

As with earlier industrial revolutions, A Common chorus around the AI ​​revolution Is that new jobs will pop up in the longer term – we just don’t know what they are yet.

“There will also be a lot of job creation,” Mitchell Greensaid founder of investment firm Lead Edge Capital, in Davos. “If you think about when the iPhone came out in 2007 – Uber and Airbnb are now $ 100 billion. [They] Could not have existed for this. Where the opportunities can be, are the companies we don’t even think about – they become these next gigantic companies. “

However, that does not mean that there will be no whole lot of pain in the short term. And because we are already seeing with the Chinese AI sensation Deepseek, the speed of the advance of AI is considerably in terms of cost-to-performance ratio of AI models. And this can be an important distinctive factor compared to earlier industrial and technological revolutions: we may not be able to adjust quickly enough.

“I think there is a lot talking about in terms of retraining and upskilling,” said Liu. “But there is something very unique to the pace of developments and how fast these models get better, in particular where we see these AI systems, doing the work of entire teams.”

“Manager of AIS”

There was a general consensus under the panel that, regardless of the speed of change, everyone will have to learn not only to live with AI, but also to learn how to use it at the workplace.

With you.com, for example, companies can access the API to bring real -time web research into every large language model (LLM). Although it offers its own package of agents for specific tasks, companies Can also create their own Custom AgentsChoosing their favorite AI model and giving instructions based on all data sources they need to connect.

“We, as CEOs, are the first generation to manage people and AI,” you.com CEO Richard Socher said in Davos. “But I think the most interesting change here is that every individual employee, every employee, becomes a manager of AIS. And in that sense everyone becomes a kind of entrepreneur. “

So the jury is still very much on the question whether we will ever see a real unicorn company with one person. However, the principle behind sentiment has already been proven a bit, as we have seen with the incredibly high value-to-headcount ratio of WhatsApp, who worked out at the time of $ 345 million at the time of $ 345 million.

Even Nvidia, with a market capitalization of more than $ 3 trillion, has a relatively slim workforce of less than 30,000 employees – That is the equivalent of approximately $ 100 million in value per employee.

With the right type of company and the right version, it is difficult to see how AI will not push these dollar figures to the north if the personnel voltage goes to the south. But in all likelihood it will simply come down to the question of whether there is a wish for one person to build alone, with sufficient entrepreneurial knowledge to bed in a strong, defensible business model that someone else cannot simply replicate with a drop of hat.

But whether society is ready to tackle this is a completely different question.