673: (Solo) Your Next Team Member Might Not Be Human

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1:03Founder fam, welcome back to another solo episode of the Founder to Founder podcast. These are solo episodes where I share everything I'm learning from building a founder for the past decade, speaking to the greatest founders of our generation. All right, so there's one thing I'm learning a lot about and that is your next hire might not be human so i want to talk about something i genuinely believe is going to change how founders build teams over the next few years and it's something that's already happening right now and i'm sure you guys are seeing this online i'm sure you guys are seeing it everywhere these screenshots of people where they have an ai org chart where they've got employees for all these different things and the question is before your next hire have you actually asked yourself whether it needs to be a person hear the stories learn the

1:47Nathan Chan:proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

1:59Let's dive in. Here's what's actually shifting right now. AI agents are not the same thing as AI tools. You know, tools help you do a task faster and agents, they do the task for you. And I'm here to tell you right now that this AI employee stuff in the org chart stuff, It's a load of BS, right? All it is, is Claude Cowork where you, you know, as long as you know what your tasks are that are repeatable, you can set them up in Claude Cowork, right? So as an example, like let's take this podcast as an example, right? So there's a ton of research that goes into researching our guests. And there's a series of steps that we take with Notebook LM and all these different things.

2:41We can actually just get Claude Cowork to map it out and build out that particular task and activity and make it scheduled. And it happens, let's just say, once a week or two times a week. And then we've got like a research agent, you know, a podcast researcher as one of our team members, right? And then that person can verify. We can have another agent that goes and verifies the information. And then we have another person that comes up with the questions. And you see where I'm going with this. So there's no such thing as actual AI employees. It's all BS. All it is, is a series of tasks grouped under what you would give a team member, right?

3:18So at Founder right now, we have agents that handle customer support queries end to end, no human involved. We have agents that monitor inventory and trigger reorders. We have agents that qualify leads, follow up with potential customers, manage onboarding. We have agents that write, test, and optimize ad copy in real time. And the businesses that are deploying these right now are not big tech companies. They're small, medium-sized businesses that have figured out that when you're looking to hire somebody or you're looking at somebody's role, it is your job as the founder, as the CEO, to make sure you have the correct systems in place and really look hard on if you can automate this through AI.

3:57So one example that really stuck with me is a founder recently cut his 48-person team down to 30 people without losing any revenue. His AI agents were handling marketing copy, customer follow-up operations, and he replaced four major software subscriptions with custom AI tools and saved$250 ,000 a year in the process. And he said the results were actually slightly better than before. And that's not the future, guys. This is what's happening right now. And the e-commerce angle here is significant. Think about how many roles a typical e-commerce business, online business has that's repetitive, process-driven work, like customer service, order management, returns, social media content creation, all of these things.

4:36These are exactly the areas where AI agents are performing at the highest level right now. So Klarna, one of the world's biggest buy now, pay later platforms, deployed an AI agent for customer service that does the work of 700 humans, right? That's not a small efficiency game. That's a fundamental rethink of what a team looks like. Now, I'm not saying you need to be thinking at that scale. And I'm not saying that AI is going to take every single person's job. But if you're listening to this podcast, I'm going to assume that you are growing your business and you have a small team or you're building your team.

5:09And whether you're doing, you know,$100 ,000 a year or$10 million a year, the question is always the same. Does this task actually need a human or does it need a system? Right? So as an example, we've started using agents recently for checking in with prospective students or customer support. We have so many different ways that we're using agents. It's crazy. We even got my AI coach to come in and do a session with our whole team going through Claude Cowork. We are working on tons of AI solutions for our members at Founder Operators and we're having all sorts of experts come in and do live builds with you.

5:46But I want to be clear on something. We don't want to replace people for the sake of it. We want people to take ownership more of outcomes and thinking, how can I take a monotonous, repeatable task and build tools? Have AI agents doing that work so I can spend more time being creative and thinking strategically and focus on more output and more outcomes in a meaningful way. I can't stress this enough. I want you thinking, we want people thinking to build a leaner, faster, more capable operation so the human team can focus on the things that actually require human judgment, right? Like I was talking to one of my friends and he's automated all of his Instagram posts and he's generating now 500 email subscribers a day.

6:32And out of those 500 email subscribers, he's selling on the thank you page, like a$19 ebook, 10 % of people are taking that. And he said to me, he's making like$1 ,000 a day purely on automation, autopilot. Now there is some manual intervention. It gets 90 % of their away there, but he has to oversee it. But how good is that? He's got a cash flowing machine making$30 ,000 a month in profit. Crazy, right? Automating his whole Instagram. And I'm going to get him to talk about this in founder operators to our members, right? So how do you actually do this? How do you actually practically implement this?

7:07Like how can an e-commerce founder right now do this? Well, start with something simple. Look at customer support. If you're manually answering the same questions every week, that's the first place an agent can take over. And you can look at tools like Gorgeous or Tidio already who have strong AI agent capabilities built in. Or you can look at things like Claude Code and MCPs and setting up scheduled tasks, right? But whether you're a solo founder or a small team, this changes the math entirely. You don't have to choose between doing everything yourself and hiring before you can afford it. You can build a lean operation that punches well above its weight now and the game has changed.

7:47Now, we're really working hard to help support founders with this transition. So the big takeaway is before your next hire, ask yourself one question. Could an AI agent handle this instead? Not because it's always the right answer, because if it is, you just freed up your human team to focus on what actually matters. Your next hire might still be a person. I don't know, but it's worth asking the question before you assume it has to be. So if this got you thinking about building your team, share it with another founder who needs to hear it. And if you'd like to work with us to get support on capitalizing on AI, go to founder.com forward slash operators.

8:25We've got an incredible community we are building there and so many cool things we're doing on helping you scale your ads, increase your conversion rate optimization, increasing your AOV, helping you scale. And we're starting to do a lot of cool stuff with AI too. You go to founder.com forward slash operators. And if you're enjoying this, I'd love to hear feedback. Shoot me a DM at Nathan Chan. Leave us a review. It would mean the absolute world to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you're listening. Thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next one.