We Automated Everything With AI and Tripled Our Headcount

**Brandon Gell** (0:00)
You prompt AI to do something, it blows your mind, you feel inadequate, you feel like, oh my god, this thing is going to take my job. And then it stops working and it looks back at you and says, what should I do next?

**Dan Shipper** (0:11)
The further away an agent gets from a human, the less valuable it is. If you just ride the models, you're going to be fine. If you care about leading a really ambitious life, I truly think that this is going to make that more possible for more people.
Every is the only subscription you need to say at the edge of AI. If you care about being on top of the latest models and using the latest tools, you have to subscribe to Every to separate out the signal from the noise. Go to every.to slash subscribe today.

**Brandon Gell** (0:49)
So we are here because we're gonna flip the script a little bit. I am gonna be interviewing Dan.

**Dan Shipper** (0:55)
Sick.

**Brandon Gell** (0:56)
About the piece that he published yesterday, May 21st.
And we're gonna try to understand why he wrote it, what's underneath his reasoning for it. There's gonna be some conflict. I'm gonna fight with him on it. Let's go.

**Dan Shipper** (1:09)
Let's fight.

**Brandon Gell** (1:09)
And see, you know, bring in some of my opinions, which are more or less aligned, but trying to understand, does this, is this piece gonna reflect the future in 10 years, in five years?

**Dan Shipper** (1:21)
And who are you again?

**Brandon Gell** (1:23)
I'm Brandon. I'm our COO.
And that's it.

**Dan Shipper** (1:29)
So the piece is called After Automation. And it comes from this feeling that I have, and there's a video about this, and there's a piece, but just for people who have not seen either of those things, it comes from this feeling that I have that at Every, we are as AI native, as agent native, as it gets, you know? If you swing a stick around in our Slack, you're as likely to hit a human as you are an agent. Everyone's using Claude Code and Codex and all these tools to do their job every day.
Yet, it feels like there's more human work to do than ever. In fact, since the GBT-3 days, we've grown from four people to 30 people, and we're hiring more now.
It came from me looking at that, and then looking at the environment and being like, what's going on? Because the whole information environment, if you look at Dario is out there saying like half of entry-level white-collar jobs may be wiped out. Even people like Ken Griffin from Citadel is like, you can tell he just had this moment where someone showed him an AI doing like an advanced data or finance question, and he was like, holy shit, like that's what I would pay PhDs to do for me, and it just did it. And I feel like I'm watching a lot of people who maybe don't have a ton of experience with agents and don't have a ton of experience with the curve of improvement that we've been riding for the last three and a half years, hit it for the first time, and then come to all these conclusions about, oh my God, all work is going away, we're not going to have jobs. And I'm just sitting here being like, actually, your intuitions when you first see a technology like this are usually very off. And we've seen a lot over and over again over the years every is a very good bellwether for where things are going because it's a group of early adopters. We have people doing all sorts of work internally at every. And if something works here, there's a good bet that it's going to spread to other places, other businesses that are adjacent to ours.
And so when I look around at every, I see so much automation and I also see way more human work. So I was really, the whole piece is saying, here's the current state of work with agents. And then pulling apart that paradox and sort of explaining, why does more automation mean more work?

**Brandon Gell** (4:13)
Yeah, when I read the piece, there wasn't an explicit call to action in it, but I sort of felt this call to action of like, there is actually a massive amount of hope right now in a world that is filled with a lot of do-mers.
And this is why. But I am gonna come out of the gate and ask you a devil's advocate question, which is a couple hours before you publish this piece, the CEO of ClickUp came out with this long tweet about why he fired 8,000 people and 3,000 people.