Replit CEO champions the "self-driving company": agents do the heavy lifting and people provide judgment and discernment

Amjad Masad, CEO and co-founder of Replit, laid out his vision of how AI is changing work at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. According to TechCrunch's report by Sarah Perez, Masad has seen this shift firsthand, as many companies use Replit's AI coding tools to build and ship their own software.

Masad put forward the concept of the "self-driving company". He is not referring to robotaxi makers, but to an organization in which AI agents take on much of the more routine work, while people become more valuable for their judgment and "taste". He said the jobs of much of the Disrupt audience changed over the past year, but that a large part of the United States and the world does not yet know that change is coming, and that it will surprise many people.

The executive explained that the Replit team reflected on how AI transformed its own workplace, especially after agents became more reliable earlier this year. In his view, the company completely changed the way it operates, and the closest analogy is a self-driving company: a self-improving organization where much of the work is driven by agents.

To illustrate, he described the support workflow. When a ticket comes in, an agent reviews it first and does an initial triage by checking GitHub issues, the code and Linear tickets. When the request reaches a person, they already have the additional information needed to decide how to proceed. If that person decides to ship a patch with a fix, deploying another agent is a matter of one click. Masad summed up that there is a full loop in which agents do most of the work, but with human judgment in the middle, something he said he does not think will go away anytime soon: judgment and taste are needed.

For Masad, the result is that agents are not taking away jobs but changing what people work on. He said they spend much more time deciding what to work on, that he sees more debates and more whiteboards around the company, and that they invest more time in architecture and in how to build things. That is why he believes the idea of the self-driving company is about figuring out what AI transformation really means.

He also noted that when Replit talks with other companies, the conversations focus more on how AI can make people more productive and happier at work, partly because agents make work less boring and more creative, according to him. Masad added that there is a positive vision of the world that Silicon Valley is not conveying and that Replit hopes to do so.

These statements should be read with caution: they come from the CEO of a company that sells AI tools, and the article reports his testimony and vision, without independent data or figures quantifying the effect on employment or productivity.