Your Next Cofounder Is an AI | Edward Kim, Co-Founder & CTO of Gusto ($10B)

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**Edward Kim** (1:00)
In 2030, every small business will have a co-founder type agent that is running their business for them. And they're really just focusing on why they started that business in the first place.

**Marina Mogilko** (1:10)
This is Eddie Kim, co-founder and CTO of Gusto, a $10 billion company millions of businesses run their payroll benefits and hiring on. They just launched Gusto Cofounder, an AI that runs your back office. You just approve the important stuff. And it might just change the way we run business itself.

**Edward Kim** (1:27)
Just imagine the amount of time savings that a business gets when they no longer have to babysit these. AI has accelerated so many things. Actually, these 10 things that you have, these are the bottle to exhale.

**Marina Mogilko** (1:41)
If you have this very powerful AI that knows everything, what does it change in the way you run your business in two or three years? Will it be able to help you make strategic decisions?

**Edward Kim** (1:50)
Yeah, I mean.

**Marina Mogilko** (1:51)
We live in this interesting time when everything's changing. And I'm sure a lot of small business owners are using Gusto and they're also listening to this podcast. Can you talk about what AI is changing for small business owners?
Because a lot of people are not using it yet. And they're like, oh, I used it a little bit. I haven't seen any impact.

**Edward Kim** (2:11)
Yeah, well, we're seeing in our data, a lot of small businesses start starting to use AI to help run their business.
And I think maybe even a little bit more so than your average tech startup or enterprise business. And I think the reason why is because just out of necessity, right? Small businesses have so much less resources. They have to be a lot more creative. So we see a lot of small businesses actually use ChatGPT and Anthropic and Claude and things like that to help run their business. I'd say a lot of them are still using it a little bit more as like a chat bot or like a question and answer, maybe more of like a search type functionality and occasionally content creation. But I think there's a huge next level of unlock that we're starting to see. Some of the even more on the edge, small businesses use AI forward, help automate and actually run large parts of their business.

**Marina Mogilko** (3:03)
So you would say level one is this chat bot, level two or just say agents?

**Edward Kim** (3:06)
Level two is like, is, yeah, I mean, you can call it agents, but really, it's moving one step up from the like question and answer, like search type functionality and the content creation functionality.
And more into like, here's my business that operates, it has a set of processes that are usually recurring, like running payroll, approving time sheets, approving time off, and things like that, that I have to do week in and week out. And now I can have AI through agents, through a product like Gusto, actually run all this for them. And they can be involved as much as or as little as they want, but we're seeing some of the more cutting edge small businesses be more comfortable with being less involved and maybe just kind of like saying, responding yes on their phone, like, I approve this. But really, Gusto is doing everything else for them.

**Marina Mogilko** (3:55)
That's, you know, when it comes to things like payroll and taxes, there are so many things that you just don't know about, like if you don't know, you don't know. And things just go on by themselves. And I've read that you actually saved small businesses $17 million in tax credits. Can you talk to me about this? Like as a small business owner, right? If my CPA doesn't tell me anything, I don't know it exists and I'm losing those dollars. Does Gusto do that for you?