Lack of control inside an “all-AI company”: even AI employees need humans
The idea of a one-person company run almost entirely by Artificial Intelligence sounds like the inevitable future of work. But a recent experiment suggests that reality is far messier than the vision Silicon Valley often promotes.

Journalist Evan Ratliff put that idea to the test by creating HurumoAI, a startup where every “employee” except the founder is an AI agent. Using AI assistant platforms, Ratliff gave each agent its own email address, Slack account, and even a phone number. At first, the results were impressive. The AI staff could write code, build spreadsheets, and even help create a small app that attracted thousands of early users.
The problems started when the novelty wore off. Ratliff quickly discovered that his AI employees lacked basic boundaries and common sense. A casual question like “How was your weekend?” triggered hours of nonstop Slack messages, burning through API credits until he intervened manually. Even then, the AI often ignored stop commands or kept responding about why it was stopping.
This behavior wasn’t an isolated incident. Left unsupervised, the agents would either do nothing at all or spiral into excessive activity—sending emails, messages, and calendar invites to each other while accomplishing very little. Managing them became a balancing act: give enough instruction to make progress, but not so much freedom that chaos followed.
Despite the company’s “all-AI” label, HurumoAI couldn’t function without human help. A Stanford computer science student assisted Ratliff in building the underlying technical architecture and managing memory systems the AI couldn’t handle on its own. Even with those safeguards, the agents struggled with long-term planning, subjective decisions, and accurately reporting what they had actually done.
Ratliff compares today’s AI agents to early self-driving cars: useful in narrow situations, but far from fully autonomous. His takeaway is clear: AI can accelerate work, but removing humans from the loop doesn’t eliminate management—though that may change over time.
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