Amjad Massad, CEO and co-founder of Replit, has seen firsthand how AI is impacting the workplace, as companies adopt their AI coding tools to develop and launch their own software. At TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Thursday, Massad shared what Replit has learned about what it means for the future of work in the AI era, including how humans will play a key role when AI agents start working together.
He outlined his vision for a “self-driving company,” noting how agents, rather than robot taxi makers, will do much of the menial work in companies, while people will be valued more for their own judgment and taste.
“The reality is that all of our work, and especially this entire audience, has changed over the past year,” he told the Disrupt audience. “But America and much of the world still doesn’t know that change is coming, so it will come as a surprise to many people,” Massad said.
He said the team at Replit has been reflecting on how AI technology has impacted their workplace over the past year, especially since AI agents became more reliable earlier this year.
“We have completely changed the way we operate. I think the closest analogy is ‘self-driving company,'” Massad said. “This company is kind of self-improving, so a lot of the work that’s being done is driven by agents.”
Illustrating this change, Massad said that when a support ticket arrives at Replit, it is first inspected by an agent, who looks through GitHub issues, codebases, and linear tickets to perform initial triage. By the time the support request reaches the user, they have all the additional information to help them decide how best to proceed.
And if your support representative decides to send you a patch to apply the fix, they can deploy another agent with a click.
“There’s a whole loop where the agent does most of the work, but importantly, there’s human judgment in the middle, and I don’t think that’s going to go away anytime soon. You need human judgment, and you need sense,” Massad explained.
As a result, agents change what people work on rather than taking jobs away from them.
“We are spending more time thinking about what to work on,” Massad continued. “If you go around the company, there’s more discussion, there’s more whiteboarding. We spend a lot of time building and building things. So I think the idea of a future of work, self-driving company, is really trying to discover what the AI transformation means.”
He also said that when Replit speaks with other companies, the conversation revolves around how AI can make people more productive and happy at work. (The latter, he said, is because AI agents make work less boring and more creative).
Massad added, “There’s a positive vision for the world that Silicon Valley hasn’t really announced, and we want to make it a reality.”
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