Imagine you join a fast-growing startup. On your first day, you get the usual Slack invite, onboarding docs—and a chat link to your personal AI assistant. This assistant knows your team, your goals, your role, and can handle tasks from writing code to drafting emails. You don't just work with AI tools here—you work alongside AI agents. This isn’t the future. This is happening now.
Welcome to the world of agent-native companies.
From AI-Enhanced to AI-Native
We’ve entered the era of companies that do more than just adopt AI. Agent-native companies are built around it. They don’t use AI as an enhancement layer—they embed it into the foundation of how work gets done. Take away the AI, and the company would simply stop functioning.
Think of it like this:
- AI-enhanced = Driver-assist. The human is in control, and AI helps around the edges.
- Agent-native = Self-driving. The AI is at the wheel, and humans guide the direction.
Agent-native organizations rely on software agents—autonomous, goal-oriented AI systems—to perform work that previously required teams. These agents write code, answer support tickets, create marketing assets, manage CRMs, and more. It's not as much a matter of humans being replaced by agents; it's more about the work that humans and agents do, and how that work is being redefined.
Real Example: The Rise of the Agent Manager
When Basis, an accounting AI startup, posted a job listing for an Agent Manager, it made waves in the tech world. The job wasn’t for a traditional manager or engineer. It was for someone who could oversee and coordinate the work of intelligent agents—"hiring" AI workers, assigning them roles, and measuring their performance.
The role fused engineering thinking (system design, logic) with management intuition (goal-setting, feedback, evaluation). And it introduced something new.
Just last week at an AI Tinkerer meetup in Miami, there was an engineering leader with the title "Agent manager". When I asked what kind of agents, he instantly replied, "Well AI agents of course".
This is a sneak peek into a new reality: when your "team" includes non-human intelligence, you need new leadership roles, new skills, and a new mindset.
Why It Matters
We believe the agent-native approach is the next evolution in how great companies are built. At our own startup, we are seeing this firsthand. With just 6 people and a suite of homegrown agents & off the shelf agents (like Devin), we built the equivalent of 14 months of product in just 8 weeks.
That wasn’t hustle-itis. It was the result of humans doing only the work that required human creativity and judgment, and delegating a lot to AI. We built our own internal agents to create changelogs, update our website and docs, manage our CRM, track AI news for internal podcasts, and more. Every week, we make our agents a little better—and our team a little more efficient, faster, and smarter.
This is not just automation. It’s a new way of thinking.
What to Expect in This Series
Over the next few weeks, we’ll break down the pillars of an agent-native company:
- Part 2: Designing the Agent-Native Organization – How workflows, teams, and systems are built around AI agents.
- Part 3: Work and Roles in the Agent-Native Era – How jobs evolve, hierarchies flatten, and new titles emerge.
- Part 4: Hiring and Onboarding in an AI-First World – What we look for in new hires, and how we onboard both humans and agents.
- Part 5: The 100x Advantage – How AI agents give small teams exponential leverage.
The goal? Help founders, builders, and leaders understand how to thrive in this new paradigm.
A Question to Leave You With
If you had to onboard a new AI coworker tomorrow, would you know how?
Stay tuned. In Part 2, we’ll explore what it actually takes to design an organization where humans and AI agents work side by side—and why doing so from first principles is the key to staying ahead.