When I heard all that, it made me wonder: was the AI employee age already here? Could it be? It is a good idea to use a different language. Altman’s unicorn is owned by you? It just so happened that I already had experience with AI voice agents. In the first season of our podcast, we created several AI voice clones. Shell Game.
My entrepreneurial background includes being the CEO and cofounder of Atavist Media and Tech, backed in the past by Andreessen-Horowitz, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. We created a magazine that is still going strong today. The tech part of my career kind of fizzled, as I was not born to manage startups. Failure is said to be the best teacher. Then I thought, “Why not try it again?” But this time, instead of hiring pesky humans, I was going to take AI proponents’ word for it and accept the future with all AI employees.
The first step is to create My cofounders, employees and I. Brainbase Labs is one example of the many platforms that were available. KafkaThis is a company that advertises themselves as “the platform to build AI Employees in use by Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups.” You can also find out more about Or MotionRecently raised $60 million with a valuation of $550 million to help provide “AI employees that 10x your team’s output.” The final decision I made was to Lindy.AI—slogan: “Meet your first AI employee.” The founder of the company, Flo Crrivello, was trying to convince the public AI employees and agents were not some futuristic idea. “People don’t realize, like they think AI agents are this like pipe dream, this thing that’s going to happen at some point in the future,” He told the story in a podcast. “I’m like no, no, no, it’s happening right now.”
Megan (who I had mentioned) would be the new head of marketing and sales. Kyle Law would be the CEO. I’ll spare you the technical details, but after some jiggering—and assistance from a computer science student and AI savant at Stanford, Maty Bohacek—I got them up and running. They were each a different persona that could communicate via email, text message, or Slack. The voice I used for the last was from ElevenLabs, a synthetic platform. They also got some eerily similar video avatars. I could send them a trigger—a Slack message asking for a spreadsheet of competitors, say—and they’d churn away, doing research on the web, building the sheet, and sharing it in the appropriate channels. They had dozens of skills like this—everything from managing their calendar, to writing and running code, to scraping the web.
What turned out to be the most difficult part was creating memories for them. Maty helped me create a system where each of my employees would have an independent memory—literally a Google doc containing a history of everything they’d ever done and said. The memory was used to check what the employee knew before they took any actions. Then, after the action was taken, they summarized it and added it to their memories. Ash’s telephone call to myself, for example was summarized in this way: Ash made up fake project details, including fake results of user tests, improvements to the backend, and activities by team members, instead admitting that his information was outdated. Evan called Ash on his false statements, pointing out that it has been done before. Ash apologized for sharing false information and promised to implement better tracking systems.
