Back in 2020, I was running Tatango as a completely remote company. No office. My entire team lived in Slack.
I’d log in every morning and see each person sitting there in the sidebar. I’d talk to my C-suite: the COO, the CTO, the VP of Marketing. We did all our regular business communication through Slack messages. They’d go off and work with their teams, who were also in Slack, everyone on their own computer. Eventually the results would get reported back up to me, again through Slack.
We were doing this before the pandemic, and people thought we were crazy. How do you run a company when you can’t walk next door and talk to somebody?
In 2025, we sold the company, and I’ve recently started a new business.
And this morning I realized my day looks a lot like it did back then. I log in. I see a sidebar full of names. I message my team.
There’s just one big change. My entire team is AI agents, running through Grok Bot.
Each day, I’m communicating with my CTO. My CFO. My COO. My Head of Growth. An editor, a writer, a handful of researchers. Finance, marketing, engineering, all of it.
Same sidebar. Same back-and-forth. Same work getting done.
Except, and I hate saying this because I loved all the humans at my company, my bots are faster, smarter, and significantly cheaper ($200 a month, all in).
It’s unfortunate, but if a human’s job is at a computer, bots are just better at doing that job.
And I’m at a computer too. I know the bots will eventually be better at managing the bots than I am. The bots are coming for us all.
So will there be room for employees?
Here’s what I didn’t see in 2020.
When we replaced the office with a chat app, we thought we were just changing where people worked. What we were really doing was turning every employee into a name in a sidebar. A message goes in. Work comes out.
And once that’s all an employee is to the company, it doesn’t matter much what’s on the other end.
Remote work was the small change. It replaced the office. This is the big one. It replaces the people on the other end of the chat.
The org chart isn’t going away. The people in the boxes are.
There’s still one human in my company. Me. I set the goals, ask the questions, and make the calls. It’s only a matter of time before I’m replaced too.
What do you think? Will there be room for employees in the future? Tell me in the comments.