In February 2024, Sam Altman mentioned AI will quickly permit a founder to surpass a billion-dollar valuation with out having to rent a single worker. In that interview with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Altman even mentioned he had a betting pool amongst his CEO associates as to what yr this would possibly occur.
This single-person unicorn he imagines might very possible be led by a creator. One of many essential obstacles to entry into the creator financial system is that there are such a lot of administrative duties for a person to do; from video modifying to managing enquiries, coordinating sponsorship invoices to researching your subsequent video. There are unseen, and sometimes underestimated, hours of labor, each pre and post-production behind any influencer’s snippet of content material.
But, the way in which we have interaction with AI is altering, shifting away from giant language fashions or image-generation software program that simply produces an output, and in the direction of AI brokers that may full complicated, time-consuming duties autonomously. Leveraging this quickly growing expertise implies that creators can construct one-person firms, with brokers performing those self same administrative duties on their behalf.
Relevance AI builds groups of AI brokers that may autonomously course of and full complicated duties for shoppers together with Roku and Activision. A no-code platform, Relevance AI’s brokers are skilled by firms and freelancers to assist deal with gross sales, advertising and marketing, and operations actions. Because the barrier to constructing AI brokers lowers because of platforms like Relevance AI, creators can construct customised AI groups or brokers for enterprise or private use. “The most effective brokers received’t be made by profession engineers in hackathons, they are going to be made by specialists in that particular discipline,” says Daniel Vassilev, the corporate’s CEO and co-founder.
Automation makes it simpler for creators to develop their pastime right into a profession, constructing well-oiled income and liberating up their time for the necessary bit: being artistic. As Vassilev describes, “Agentic AI seamlessly connects with different instruments, to equip brokers with abilities similar to web search and transcription, plugged-in emails, calendars, and just about the rest you may consider.”
By way of platforms like Relevance AI, creators can use pre-existing template brokers to shortly get began on tedious duties, from gross sales brokers who will e book new enterprise conferences in your behalf, to life cycle advertising and marketing brokers who will message each buyer like they’re your solely buyer, individually drafting and tailoring each message based mostly on analysis from throughout the web.
Creators have even requested Relevance AI to assist construct instruments like this particularly to develop their one-person careers. “In the mean time, careers within the creator financial system are resource-constrained, so at a sure stage, creators will want somebody to run their funds or deal with any potential partnerships. With AI brokers doing a few of the extra labour-intensive back-end work, we would like creators solely to be restricted by the wildness of their concepts”, Vassilev explains.
Relevance AI’s founders know a factor or two about viral wildness: with little programming coaching Vassilev and fellow co-founder Jacky Koh created the smash hit app PokeWhere, a real-time Pokemon monitoring app, at “the peak of the Pokemon Go craze” Vassilev explains that “quickly sufficient it had hundreds of thousands of downloads and was prime of the app retailer charts.”
“With the success of PokeWhere, I noticed first-hand that you would create worth from the stroke of a keyboard, and that there was an actual profession and pathway in creating this stuff which individuals use.”, Vassilev says.
That is additionally true for creators embedded within the AI house, who’ve discovered profitable enterprise fashions by providing to construct these AI brokers for his or her audiences, with Vassilev noting “We’ve got seen a number of instances the place a creator began doing tutorials on YouTube after which over time has expanded this right into a thriving AI automation company. This has created a symbiotic ecosystem the place free instructional content material drives consciousness and primary understanding, after which the creators themselves seize the marketplace for implementation and customisation.”
Because the adoption of AI brokers will increase additional, Vassilev believes this may improve the time to try various things, “automating the, fairly frankly, boring boring duties leaves extra space to attempt new issues. AI brokers will assist turbocharge the creator financial system, as a result of finally what we’re constructing supplies a stage of freedom for us to suppose creatively.”
So what of Sam Altman’s prediction that we might quickly see a “one-person unicorn”? “We’re technologically approaching the potential for a single-person unicorn”. But, Vassilev additionally stresses the human penchant for creativity stemming from interpersonal collaboration, “So whereas we might probably construct a billion-dollar enterprise alone, why would not we construct a ten-billion-dollar enterprise with ten folks?”.