Replit CEO Amjad Masad pitches the 'self-driving company' at TechCrunch Disrupt
Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Replit co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad described a "self-driving company" in which AI agents take on much of the grunt work while people are valued for judgment and taste. He said support tickets at Replit are first triaged by an agent that reviews GitHub issues, the codebase and Linear tickets, and that once a support person decides to submit a patch, deploying another agent to apply the fix is a click away. Masad said agents do most of the work in that loop but human judgment remains in the middle, with staff spending more time on whiteboarding, architecture and deciding what to work on.
Masad offers a fairly concrete example of agents handling front-line work with a human checkpoint, though the account of Replit's internal productivity gains comes from the company itself.
Replit CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad has seen how AI is impacting the workplace firsthand, with businesses adopting his company’s AI coding tools to develop and launch their own software. At TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Thursday, Masad shared what Replit has learned about what that means for the future of work in the AI age, including how humans will still play key roles as AI agents come to work alongside them.
He described his vision of a “self-driving company,” referring not to robotaxi makers, but how agents will come to do much of the grunt work at companies while people become more valued for their judgment and taste.
“The reality is, all of our jobs — perhaps everyone in this audience, especially — changed over the past year,” he said, addressing the audience at Disrupt. “But a big part of America and the world, they still don’t know that that change is coming, and it’s going to be surprising to a lot of people,” Masad said.
He said Replit’s team had been reflecting on how AI technology impacted their own workplace over the past year, particularly after AI agents became more reliable sometime earlier this year.