The CEO of Replit says the future of work is the "autonomous company".
Replit CEO Amjad Massad envisions a future of "self-driving companies," where AI agents handle everyday tasks and people focus on higher-level decisions.
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Replit CEO and co-founder Amjad Massad has seen how AI impacts the workplace as businesses use his company's AI coding tools to develop and run their own software. At TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Thursday, Massad shared what Replit has learned about what the future of work means in the age of AI, including how humans will continue to play key roles as AI agents work alongside them.
He described his vision of a "self-driving company," referring not to robotics makers, but to how agents can do a lot of the unsavory work in companies while people become more valuable because of their judgment and taste.
“The reality is that all of our businesses — maybe everyone in this audience, in particular — have changed in the last year,” he told the audience at Disrupt. "But a large part of America and the world, they still don't know that this change is coming, and it will come as a surprise to a lot of people," Massad said.
He said the Replit team has spent the past year exploring how AI technology could affect the workplace, especially after AI agents became more reliable earlier this year.
"Our company completely changed the way we operate, and I would say the closest analogy is a self-driving company," Massad said. "The company is kind of self-healing, so a lot of what's going on is agent-driven."
To demonstrate the change, Masad said that when support tickets are entered into Replit, they are first reviewed by an agent who performs initial triage by reviewing GitHub issues, the codebase, and line tickets. By the time a support request reaches a person, they have all the additional information to help them decide how best to proceed.
And when that support person decides to send a patch to apply a fix, it's just one click to deploy another agent.
“You have a whole loop where agents were doing most of the work, but the important thing is that human judgment is in the middle, and we don't think that's going away anytime soon. You need human judgment. Massad explained that you need taste.
The bottom line is that instead of taking jobs away from people, agents change what people work on.
"We spend a lot of time figuring out what to work on," continued Massad. I go around the company, I see a lot more discussions, I see a lot more whiteboards. We spend a lot of time on architecture, how things are made. And so I think the future of work—the idea of the self-driving company—is really trying to figure out what the AI revolution means.
He also noted that when Replit talks to other businesses, the conversation is more about how AI can help people be more productive and happier at work. (The latter, he said, because AI agents make work more boring and creative).
"There's a positive, Mossad added: a view of the world that Silicon Valley doesn't really offer, and we hope to do that."
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