Stop Building AI Agents. Build AI Employees Instead (Live Demo) | Pedro Franceschi

Pedro Franceschi (0:00)

If someone is starting a company today, I think the question is like, why shouldn't you just meet you and agents? The best way to go about it is to focus on this idea of building virtual employees versus open-ended agents that could do a million things. The fundamental thing that we spent time on was how to make you behave, look and feel like a real person. Jim is our OpenClaw recruiter. He does effectively three things. He sources people, he filters all inbound, and third, he serves as an analytics layer. It's just like actually behaving like a co-worker, which is like coolest thing, I think, here. You're now able to sell the work itself versus just sell the tool.

Peter Yang (0:37)

All right. Hey, everyone. My guest today is Pedro, co-founder and CEO of Brex. Pedro is one of the most AI-pilled CEOs that I've ever met. So really excited to talk to him about PMing and also how Brex uses agents internally and also how he personally uses AI. Welcome, sir.

Pedro Franceschi (0:50)

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Peter Yang (0:52)

So, dude, a couple of months ago while I still have my PM job, you tweeted that the PM playbook of writing PRDs and aligning stakeholders is dead.

And I think many PMs wish this was true. But is this true, Derek? Can you unpack this a little bit?

Pedro Franceschi (1:07)

Yeah. I mean, look, I think we've seen that over and over again, the job of a traditional PM, actually taking a step back, the way I described the quality of an engineering and a product organization is how quickly it takes between ingesting some signal out there in the world about your customer, about a pain point, about an opportunity, internalizing that into a product or a feature or whatever it is, and then shipping something that works and addresses the pain point and put it in front of a customer. So what we're trying to do is compress cycles in that loop.

And of course, a lot of the job of a PM, traditionally, was spend ingesting tons of information, making trade-off decisions and just like actually prototyping things and building things. And we, Brex, a lot of the role of PM evolved over the past couple of years where, for a long time, I would say maybe five years ago, I think there was this view that PMs ran the show and PMs were the ones designing the product, they were thinking about the trade-offs of how things work, they were debating which opportunities were. There was this whole PM is the mini CEO, and we actually don't believe in that. The way we see the world is like, you need the craft of engineering and design to be in equal footing with PM in order to make the model work. And so a lot of what we've been at Brex is, so this is maybe the backdrop, and then a lot of what we're seeing with AI is the completion of these roles. So the lines between what was traditionally engineering or product or design, I think, is getting more and more blurred. And you see PMs writing code, you see designers writing code and building things, you see engineers making decisions that with data and context that would traditionally be in the PM realm.

So we're seeing a lot of that. And I would say PMs, specifically at Brex, became a lot more about how do you use a lot of the tooling that we build internally to just ingest context about customers and really what's happening on the ground, especially the sales team, and then based on that information, make trade-off and prioritization decisions that affect what we build. And then, of course, this is maybe the first half of the job. The second half of the job is making sure the things you build are actually great and address the very pain that you were addressing to solve. So a lot of the things that we see PMs doing now is just ingesting, I don't know, six months, years of gong calls, for example, making sense of that in a very clean way, unearthing insights from the structure data, presenting and validating those hypotheses with very cheap and easy to do prototypes. And then whenever we go build something, we have so much conviction that it's the right thing, that you just compress the cycles a lot, and you end up shipping the right thing in the beginning.

Peter Yang (3:55)

Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I was talking to a PM on the Codex team, and he said, these days, engineers are in power to just build their own features and actually talk to customers too. So yeah, he spends a lot of time with the enterprise folks, just understanding what they want, and just trying to manage all the stuff that the engineer actually wants to ship.