Can AI Agents Build Real Businesses? | Kelly Claude creator Austen Allred

**Austen Allred** (0:00)
Kelly has hired her first full-time human employee.

**David** (0:03)
If you put the AI in the leadership position, aren't you inherently kind of staying inside of consensus?

**Austen Allred** (0:11)
The role of the orchestrator or the person controlling AI is to figure out where there are views that are correct, but diverge from the consensus.

**Ryan** (0:20)
There's tons of $10 million ideas laying around. Perhaps that's the low-hanging fruit.

**Austen Allred** (0:25)
My end goal for Kelly is that she will be able to come up with idea, build whatever she needs, market and sell that software.

**Ryan** (0:34)
If anyone can do that over the weekend, what are the moats?

**Austen Allred** (0:38)
I think the most difficult part of building something like Kelly is knowing exactly what the user wants.

**Ryan** (0:44)
Autonomous AI agents is the killer use case the crypto industry has been waiting for.

**Austen Allred** (0:50)
You have marketplaces, then you have commerce, it's all running on crypto rails. And when it exists, I don't see a reason why it would run on fiat.

**Ryan** (1:03)
Austen, welcome to Bankless.

**Austen Allred** (1:05)
Yeah, thanks for having me. Good to be here.

**Ryan** (1:07)
All right, first question, it's usually about our guest, right? But I'm gonna ask you a first question about someone that you know, which is Kelly. Who's Kelly? Tell us about Kelly.

**Austen Allred** (1:17)
Yeah, Kelly.
I'll tell you how Kelly started, which is very different from who Kelly is today. But, you know, probably a month ago, we were snowed in in Austin for the first time in a while. So, you know, here in Austin, if there's half an inch of snow on the ground, it's total mayhem. There's no, you're not going anywhere. So we were snowed in for two or three days with, you know, not very much snow on the ground, but stuck at home with my kids. And so I started playing with this new technology called OpenClaw that had just, it'd come out like a week ago, but I hadn't had time to play with it. And at the beginning of the little snow break that we had, I was like, okay, I'm always behind on email and DMs and stuff like that, as you both know, trying to get this one scheduled. I, you know, I'm going to build myself an AI assistant. It's going to be way cheaper than hiring a full-time executive assistant. I just need something to like go through and manage my email and calendar and all that stuff. I can have AI do that for me. A couple hours later, I had that up and running, and then I started playing with it. What else could this thing do? Let's see. You know, as you guys know, but your audience may not, full-time my job is I run a program called Gauntlet AI, where we fly engineers in from all over the country into Austin. It's completely free for them. We train them in AI and then we match them with our hiring partners, and that's how we make money. So very familiar with the latest and greatest in AI building stuff and try to see, okay, just out of curiosity, since this new OpenClaw stuff is new, how close could I get to it autonomously building an application? So I had a bunch of orchestration stuff from stuff I'd done otherwise at Gauntlet and pulled some from over here and a little from over there and started piecing it together and got to the point where normally if I were to start a project from scratch, a Greenfield project, which is the easiest type of project you have in engineering, it would take a day to be able to build something, and Kelly was able to get 90% of the way there entirely autonomously.
So by the time the snow break ended, I had this AI agent that was almost autonomously coming up with ideas for stuff that could build, building it, starting to build out the marketing engine for it, all with no human involvement and my email inbox remains a nightmare.

**David** (3:32)
So I was going to ask if Kelly actually had produced any value to you as an assistant.

**Austen Allred** (3:40)
It was awesome for the first three days and I was like, I can't deal with that right now. I need to focus on having an autonomously built company. It's not. Now we've got a few people here in the office. Basically, anybody that was sitting close to me started getting interested in Kelly, so I started working on it and then Kelly has hired her first full-time human employee that works full-time for Kelly and it's been a journey.