We Automated Everything With AI and Tripled Our Headcount

Dan Shipper runs one of the most AI-native companies today. Every has agents embedded in nearly every workflow—“if you swing a stick in our Slack, you're as likely to hit a human as an agent,” he says. And yet the company has grown from four people to 30 since GPT-3 came out, and is still hiring.

Why does Dan believe there's more human work to do than ever?

In a format flip for AI & I, Every's COO Brandon Gell turns the tables and interviews Dan about his latest essay, “After Automation”—an 8,000-word argument for why rising automation doesn't eliminate demand for human work, it increases it. The thesis: AI makes yesterday's expert competence cheap and widely available, which floods every field with output that's close but not quite right—and that creates more demand for the humans who can take it the rest of the way.

Dan talked with Brandon about the paradox at the heart of agent-native work: The more AI can do, the more humans are needed to direct it, refine its output, and decide what matters next.

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Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• “After Automation” by Dan Shipper: https://every.to/chain-of-thought/after-automation

• Brandon Gell on Every: https://every.to/@brandon_5263

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Timestamps:

00:00:51 Introduction

00:05:51 The AI paradox: more automation, more human work

00:10:00 How AI makes yesterday's expert competence cheap

00:18:00 AI can act autonomously but it does not have agency

00:20:39 Why Dan is all in on AGI

00:21:57 AI layoffs are a lie

00:25:42 Ride the models and you'll be fine

00:35:30 How to use AI as a long-form features editor