📈 Agents replace the entry-level analyst — static team size at scale

“AI is going to put everyone out of work. By the way, no sense of perceived contradiction between those two things.”

“I think that I wouldn't say that's a reasonable bogey. I think that might be a little aggressive. The world always, I think it's a Bill Gates quote, the world always changes less than you expect over the next one, two, three years, but way more than you expect over 10 years. Just takes time for technologies to diffuse.”

“Meaning like we don't know what the layoff cycle and the pattern of layoffs inside of companies may be with AI. Meaning, if we all become more generalized, skilled workers, and there may be many, many, many more companies, then the odds are more likely that you provision highly skilled vertically specific work to a set of agents.”

“most code generated by AI is crap. ... When you allow these models to run over complicated tasks over long periods of time, the error rates compound to such a degree that the resulting output is not worthwhile. And so until that problem is fixed, which I'm sure it will be, and I'm going to bet that it will be, the idea that all of a sudden it's because of coding agents that people are getting laid off, I think is a fallacy.”

“I think knowledge workers are incredibly flexible. They can take their tools from, you know, one particular skill set to another. So I think this is going to unleash incredible opportunities for the economy. I think it is going to make us more productive and wealthier. So I'm definitely on the more optimistic side of the scenario.”

“when you hear public CEOs talking about lowering the number of employees while they're growing 10, 20 percent per year, this is obviously awesome for earnings, the share price. But there's going to be a massive job displacement.”

“Yeah, I tend to believe that's true. I think the customers that we sell into at 80, 90 are largely large enterprises as well, so not dissimilar to Aaron's customer base.”

“I think that's the right take because Chamath, I can tell you in our firm, we would never have associates or researchers or analysts, Sacks, you also were in this line of work as well, Venture Capital, you would never have them review legal documents.”

“And so I think that'll probably be actually like 90% of the usage of AI in the future will be things that if we look back and we snap the line right now, we said this is what knowledge work is today, 90% of AI usage will be things that we don't do today. 10% will replace what we're doing in some areas.”

“Whereas with AI, it's almost free. I'm calling thousands of them a day going, hey, this load looks like it's a good match for you. Are you interested? And then we activate them on the platform. That's new work that wasn't gonna happen before not just a replacement.”

“That actually unlocks a tremendous amount of building, a tremendous amount of opportunity for new employment, for people to come in and small teams of three or four to get hired.”

“it's not good for human employment, but what will be kind of, I would say, the rate-limiting factor is just compute.”

“How many companies are we seeing hit a million dollars in revenue with five employees, where that used to take 25”

“What I think is going to happen is that you will have job loss, but the amount of productivity that will be released in the US economy is going to be extraordinary.”

“You thought that it was the customer support person, maybe you thought it was the engineer, maybe you thought it was the designer, maybe you thought it was the product manager. I think those are less true. I think it's the middle manager”

“This is an accountant, we're going to take an accountant, we're going to make the number one accountant in the world that's an AI agent.”

“I do agree with you, Aaron, by the way, that when you bring that whole offline services category online and you automate them with AI, I agree with you that that TAM could be ginormous.”

“And so that then conversely expands the TAM software, where IT budgets weren't usually applied to those types of things.”

“This whole thing about job loss is so overdone. There's going to be a lot of job disruption. But in the case of coders, just as an example, I think we can say that coders, depending on who you talk to, are 10, 20, 30 percent more productive.”

“those agents are going to do a lot of the work, so we're going to see the number of people working at companies become fixed. And I think the static team size that we're seeing at a lot of large companies is only going to continue.”

“the atomic size of companies changes because each company will get much more leverage from using software and few people versus lots of people with a few pieces of software.”

“But now you don't even need the analyst because the analyst is the chain of thought. It's the prompting from the model. And it's completely going to change how knowledge work is done. Everyone that owns a function no longer needs an analyst.”