673: (Solo) Your Next Team Member Might Not Be Human

**Nathan Chan** (0:01)
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Foundr fam, welcome back to another solo episode of the Foundr to Foundr Podcast. These are solo episodes where I share everything I'm learning from building Foundr for the past decades, being to the greatest Foundr of our generation. All right, so there's one thing I'm learning a lot about and that is your next hire might not be human. So I want to talk about something I genuinely believe is going to change how Foundr's build teams over the next few years. And it's something that's already happening right now. And I'm sure you guys are seeing this online. I'm sure you guys are seeing it everywhere. These screenshots of people where they have an AI org chart, where they've got employees for all these different things. And the question is, before you next hire, have you actually asked yourself whether it needs to be a person?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:45)
Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan.

**Nathan Chan** (1:59)
Let's dive in. Here's what's actually shifting right now. AI agents are not the same thing as AI tools. You know, tools help you do a task faster and agents, they do the task for you. And I'm here to tell you right now that this AI employee stuff in the org chart stuff, it's a load of BS, right? All it is is clawed co-work where you, you know, as long as you know what your tasks are that are repeatable, you can set them up in clawed co-work, right? So as an example, like, let's take this podcast as an example, right? So there's a ton of research that goes into researching our guest. And there's a series of steps that we take with Notebook LM and all these different things. We can actually just get clawed co-work to map it out and build out that particular task and activity and make it scheduled. And it happens, let's just say, once a week or two times a week. And then we've got like a research agent, you know, a podcast researcher as one of our team members, right? And then that person can verify, we can have another agent that goes and verifies the information. And then we have another person that comes up with the questions. And you see where I'm going with this. There's no such thing as actual AI employees. It's all BS. All it is, is a series of tasks grouped under what you would give a team member, right? So at Foundr right now, we have agents that handle customer support queries end-to-end, no human involved. We have agents that monitor inventory and trigger reorders. We have agents that qualify leads, follow up with potential customers, manage onboarding. We have agents that write tests and optimize ad copy in real time. And the businesses that are deploying these right now are not big tech companies. They're small medium-sized businesses that have figured out that when you're looking to hire somebody or you're looking at somebody's role, it is your job as the founder, as the CEO to make sure you have the correct systems in place and really look hard on if you can automate this through AI. So one example that really stuck with me is a founder recently cut his 48 person team down to 30 people without losing any revenue. His AI agents were handling marketing copy, customer follow up operations, and he replaced four major software subscriptions with custom AI tools and saved $250,000 a year in the process. And he said the results were actually slightly better than before. And that's not the future, guys. This is what's happening right now. And the e-commerce angle here is significant. Like think about how many roles a typical e-commerce business, online business has that's repetitive, process driven work, like customer service, order management, returns, social media, content creation, all of these things. These are exactly the areas where AI agents are performing at the highest level right now. So Klarna, one of the world's biggest buy now pay later platforms, employed an AI agent for customer service that does the work of 700 humans, right? That's not a small efficiency gain. That's a fundamental rethink of what a team looks like. Now, I'm not saying you need to be thinking at that scale. And I'm not saying that AI is going to take every single person's job. But if you're listening to this podcast, I'm going to assume that you are growing your business and you have a small team or you're building your team. And whether you're doing, you know, $100,000 a year or $10 million a year, the question is always the same. Does this task actually need a human or does it need a system?