Replit CEO Amjad Masad says AI agents are reshaping how companies work, and he has a name for where it is heading: the "self-driving company." Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Thursday, Masad described a workplace where software agents handle much of the grunt work while people are valued more for their judgment and taste.
He was not talking about robotaxis. Masad used the phrase to describe how his own company runs. Replit's team spent the past year reflecting on how AI had changed its workplace, particularly after AI agents became more reliable earlier this year. "Our company entirely changed how we operate, and I would say the closest analogy is a 'self-driving company'," he said. "The company is sort of self-improving, so a lot of the work that's going on is driven by agents."
Masad pointed to the company's customer support process as an example. When a support ticket comes in, an agent examines it first and performs the initial triage by looking at GitHub issues, the codebase and Linear tickets. By the time the request reaches a person, that employee already has the information needed to decide how to proceed. If the support staffer decides a fix is needed and submits a patch, deploying another agent takes just one click.
"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," Masad said. "You need human judgment; you need taste."
In Masad's account, the technology is not simply taking jobs away. It is changing what people spend their time on. Employees are spending more time deciding what to build in the first place.
"We're spending a lot more time figuring out what to work on," Masad said. He said he sees more discussions and more whiteboarding around the office, and that the team now devotes more time to architecture and how to build things. "I think the future of work — the self-driving company idea — is really trying to discover what AI transformation means."
Masad said conversations Replit has with other businesses tend to focus on how AI can make people more productive and happier at work. He argued that AI agents make work less boring and more creative.
He also said many people outside the tech industry have not yet grasped how much is about to change. "The reality is, all of our jobs — perhaps everyone in this audience, especially — changed over the past year," he told the 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."
Masad said Replit wants to offer a different story about the future of AI at work. "There's a positive vision of the world that Silicon Valley is not really putting out, and we're hoping to do that," he said.
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