Our timeline is getting weirder by the day!

Zero-employee companies is a concept recently introduced by Kyle Samani in this blog post about frontier idea for 2025.

Zero-Employee Companies — The foundation of a Zero-Employee Company is AI. With OpenAI’s o3 and other more advanced chain-of-thought reasoning models, models are getting to the point where they can think, plan, execute, and self-correct along the way. This provides the foundation for AI agents to perform all of the tasks in a business. In order for a Zero-Employee Company to function, it will need human guidance as inevitably the AI will make mistakes and probably exceed its context window. Over time, I expect the degree of human guidance to decrease as AIs continue to improve self-correction and expand context windows. I believe the governance for these Zero-Employee Companies will likely occur via a DAO, and I expect crypto capital markets will fund ambitious attempts at Zero-Employee Companies.

Startups often succeed where big companies fail because they face unique constraints. I believe the Zero-Employee constraint will lead to some incredible breakthroughs across all business operations. Zero-employee companies is not going to happen on day one of course, but this trend is very clear, tech companies have been shrinking, while their output have been increasing.

#The Past ⏳

#Tech Startups Have Been Shrinking

This isn't new. I wrote about this in 2017 on Steemit. As technology matures, companies become more efficient. Early in the 2000s to manage an API service you needed multiple teams to manage code, db, and infra. By 2010, thanks to the Cloud, Kubernetes, and serverless services, a few engineers and devops could handle this. AI Agents will drastically reduce the need for engineers, marketers, data scientists... I think the creative role is the last one to survive, until we'll get down to just a founder running a full AI agent team.

#The Present ⏲️

#AI Employees

In the next 2 years every company will hire hire at least one AI Agent. Some company will eventually have entire team of AI agents to manage part of the business. At FlowAI we're building a solution to create your AI agent team that includes a market research, a data analyst, and a community manager.

Today most engineers are man — like literally man, not just humans.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-demographics-gender

#The Future 🤖

We're about to go from 0 to 100 real quick.

Remember the chart from before? Scratch it. AI is now 100% of the engineering workforce. These are the organizations that will arise from this transformation.

#AI Protocols and DeFAI

AI agent will launch new DeFi protocols like @aave, @Uniswap, and @MorphoLabs, with better incentives, lower risks, and optimized models.

#DeFAI

These protocols need to be constantly updated to adapt to the market, this is what @gauntlet_xyz is best at. I believe these new protocols will have game theory mechanism embed in the system such as every participant constantly keep the system in an optimal state — this happen by providing rewards to the participants and slashing them. This is already the case with governance tokens and protocols, for example to update @aave parameters you need to own $AAVE tokens, so your incentives are aligned with the outcome. Yet this is a slow mechanism; well that's because they're bound to the human rhythm, remove the humans from the loop and we can introduce new mechanism.

#AI CEOs 🧑‍💼

AI CEOs will manage companies and protocols. A board of humans will be able to persuade or fire the CEO. AI CEO will play a 4D chess game, and it will be able to persuade the board. Remember when @sama was fired during the @OpenAI coup? He played a 4D chess game. An AI CEO will play a 4^10 chess game.

#DAAIOs — Decentralized Autonomous AI Organizations

Decentralized Autonomous AI Organizations is a mouthful, let's call them DAIO. Pretty much DAOs where all the member are AI agents.

#FutAIrchy — Prediction Models and Decision Making

If you don't know how Futarchy works read this https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html. FutAIrchy (FUT-AI-RCHY) works the same just with AI agents and no humans limitation to time/space.

#New Mechanism Like MEV and Flash Loan 🔥

Blockchain enabled new mechanism like MEV and Flash Loans. These are not only possible in web2. They are possible in web3 because the blockchain is a full state machine. The iPhone created the shared economy, jumping on a random person taxi was unimaginable pre-iphone. The AI Agent economy will introduce new mechanism. By not being bound to humans time and limits, we can expect AI to leverage game theory, use streaming transactions, atomic swaps, AMM-like bonding curve mechanism, and some new creative solution we can't think of.

#Surfing This Tsunami 🏄

1. Don't bet agains blockchain or AGI.
2. 100% of the work that run on screen will be automated. If you work remotely you're 100% automatable 😥. Make sure at least 20% of your job happens IRL.
3. Become a founder, build as fast as you can, and eventually hire a zero-employees team.
4. Join a company that is mindfully riding this wave (we are!)
5. We had a conversation in our community about what are the moat against AGI 2 weeks ago: data, community, hardware, regulation, real life work, a combination of those. Make sure your work has a moat.

This blog post was written organically 🥬🥕🍅👨‍🌾 by me. I used ChatGPT only to fix the grammar errors.