Replit CEO: The Future of Work Is the 'Self-Driving Company'
Replit CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad has witnessed firsthand how AI is reshaping the workplace, as businesses increasingly adopt his company's AI coding tools to build and launch their own software. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Thursday, Masad shared what Replit has learned about the future of work in the AI era—including why humans will continue to play a critical role as AI agents join them in the workplace.
A Vision of the 'Self-Driving Company'
Masad described his vision of a "self-driving company"—a concept that borrows its name from autonomous vehicles but applies it to how AI agents will handle much of the routine 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," Masad told the Disrupt audience. "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."
How Replit Rebuilt Its Own Operations
Masad said Replit's team had spent the past year reflecting on how AI technology affected their own workplace, particularly after AI agents became significantly more reliable earlier this year.
"Our company entirely changed how we operate, and I would say the closest analogy is a 'self-driving company,'" Masad said. "The company is sort of self-improving, so a lot of the work that's going on is driven by agents."
To illustrate the shift, Masad described Replit's support workflow. When support tickets come in, an agent examines them first, performing initial triage by reviewing GitHub issues, the codebase, and Linear tickets. By the time a support request reaches a human, that person already has all the context needed to decide how best to proceed. And when the human decides to submit a patch to apply a fix, deploying another agent is just a click away.
Human Judgment Remains Essential
"You have an entire loop where agents did most of the work, but crucially, there's human judgment in the middle, and we don't think that's going away anytime soon. You need human judgment; you need taste," Masad explained.
The end result, he argued, is that agents are not taking jobs from people—they are changing what people work on.
"We're spending a lot more time figuring out what to work on," Masad continued. "I go around the company, I see a lot more discussions, a lot more whiteboarding. We spend a lot more time on architecture, how to build things. And so I think the future of work—the self-driving company idea—is really trying to discover what AI transformation means."
A More Positive Vision for AI at Work
Masad also noted that when Replit talks with other businesses, the conversations increasingly focus on how AI can help people become more productive and happier at work. The latter, he said, stems from AI agents making work less boring and more creative.
"There's a positive vision of the world that Silicon Valley is not really putting out, and we're hoping to do that," Masad added.
via TechCrunch AI