Can AI agents help?
Recently, there has been a lot of attention being drawn to the use of “Solopreneur,” or one person to run their business using digital tools or platforms. It is even suggested that a billion-dollar company built and operated by Solopreneurs could soon be seen. Is this sustainable? With support from the military of AI agents, can one person, or a very small team, really do it all?
There are a lot of very small, funded, ambitious businesses. In the US alone, there are at least 10,000 companies with fewer than 10 employees receiving large investments or venture capital funds in millions of dollars, according to CrunchBase estimates.
At least in theory, it can build a rather large company with little or no human help, according to the main solpreneurs. Tim Cortinovis. It is possible to build a huge and competitive company with just AI tools and freelancers, and he explained in his recent book, Single Hand Unicorn: How to Solo Building a Billion Dollar Company and Recent. Podcasts. With the help of an AI agent, he said, “We can handle everything.”
The ideas of small but profitable companies built around digital technology have been basking for a while. In 2009, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called it an element of the “do-it-yourself economy.” There, the type of entrepreneur or business could pull out the online services they needed from the internet to launch a new product or service.
How has this changed over the past 10 and a half years? There is an agreement across the industry, particularly among the entrepreneurs themselves, that mass solplenaling is possible, but there is a warning.
“Entrepreneurs in the past needed grit. entrepreneurs today needed architecture,” said David Brudenell, executive director of Decidr.AI, Australia's only publicly listed AI company. “If data can generate insights, insights trigger actions, and action loops can design a business that returns to performance, then all without human friction, you are no longer constrained by size. You are limited only by your imagination.”
While ideas for large companies run by solopreneurs and very small teams are achievable, “it's not all niches, not all niches,” says Alexandr Korshykov, founder and CEO of DreamX, a Ukrainian UX/UI design and development company. “Today, thanks to AI, automation and global access to the market, it is possible to build large companies with small teams and solos. My company works with startups to see how to create SaaS products, manage e-commerce empires and launch the Edtech platform.
Leaders cannot afford to step back and place their business on autopilot, Korshikov warned. “It requires a clear vision, systematic thinking, process management skills, strong self-management and a willingness to delegate technical tasks to machinery and everyday tasks to freelancers and microteams.”
AI, particularly Agent AI, suggests, is adopting self-sufficiency at the next level. It starts with one managing agent acting as a supervisor and the “brain of another person.” “You can have a subgate on your way down and have access to the subgeants to client information, client addresses, etc.”
And Presto! Growing and scalable business. But is it sustainable? “AI is undoubtedly removing many barriers to expanding business with limited resources,” says John Jackson, a veteran entrepreneur and founder of Hitprobe, a fraud device platform. “But you rarely see a lot of one unicorn.”
More likely, Jackson continues, “We start seeing very lean businesses with small teams of 3-5 people that scale to the level that previously required the entire workforce.”
Initially, these are likely technology or SaaS companies, but “but there could be a large opportunity that could be disrupted in more traditional sectors, such as auditing and compliance.
Support for growth of these highly lean companies is “enabled by smart use of AI tools for everything from customer support and automated marketing platforms to low-code product builders to scalable cloud infrastructure,” he said. “Wonders can be competitive by using these tools to enable them to scale without increasing their employees, and by providing them with the ability to act with much faster and more agile than a much larger company.”
“We're looking forward to seeing you in the process of delivering a great deal of money,” said Eli Goodman, CEO and co-founder of Semrush Company's Datos. “But building a billion-dollar business still requires a combination of product market fit, relentless execution and a bit of luck. You can't automate decision-making, relationships, resilience, and many other human components.”
What is often underestimated is that “many other people contribute directly or indirectly to the outcome.” Goodman pointed out. “We may not have full-time staff, but depending on how we build our team, we have contractors, advisors, legal, and perhaps even immigration lawyers.
Goodman said it is up to human experts to oversee “operations, sales, compliance and products” from a strategic perspective. “Yes, you can automate execution, but you can't automate judgment.”
It explained, “AI is not always reliable when it comes to high levels of analysis, emotional interaction with clients, or handling unpredictable situations,” Korshikov explained. “For example, generating content without editing is often superficial or untargeted. Full automation of legal processes, financial audits, and strategic consulting remains a challenge. Furthermore, data security and privacy issues often become blockers of scaling, especially in regulated industries.”
You can have all the cutting edge digital technologies in the world, but nothing can be successful without the will of successful humans. “The most important thing isn't the tools, it's time management and prioritization,” Goodman said. “You can outsource tasks, but you can't outsource the ability to identify what's really important. A successful founder is someone who knows when to delegate and when to dig out.
The current difference is “convergence of basic models, agent frameworks and cloud-native infrastructures,” Brudenell said a few years ago. “We finally have tools to reason, act and expand autonomously. The only question is whether we have a vision to build with them.”
