AmiSight 8/12: A Team of One?
One of the more interesting things AI is changing isn't what businesses can do. It's how many people they need to do it.
A recent Wall Street Journal article profiled entrepreneurs who have built million-dollar businesses with just one employee: themselves. AI is handling coding, customer support, marketing, bookkeeping, and a growing list of tasks that not long ago required a small team.
My first reaction wasn't, "People are going to disappear."
It was, "The bar for starting a business just got a whole lot lower."
That excites me.
I've spent my career around entrepreneurs, and one thing I've learned is that great businesses aren't built because someone has the biggest payroll. They're built because someone sees a problem, solves it well, and keeps getting better. AI gives entrepreneurs another tool to do exactly that.
But I also think there's a trap here.
If AI becomes a substitute for relationships, judgment, empathy, and trust, you've probably gone too far. Those are still the things customers remember. They're also the things that are hardest to copy.
Maybe the real opportunity isn't to build a company with no employees. Maybe it's to build a company where every person is far more productive than they could have been just a few years ago.
That's a future I'm excited to watch.
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