Belle Lin

Logging off, I'm Belle Lin for The Wall Street Journal.

We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute.

Thanks for listening.

In most cases, it's the software engineering function.

So these software developers that use tools like Anthropic's Cloud Code or OpenAI's Codex, which are really sort of supercharging the way in which they write code in many times.

replacing the active writing code at all.

And so what they're doing is just reviewing the code or looking at the code that's being written by the AI.

And that's the kind of pattern that's seen across many companies, not just startups in Silicon Valley.

You can look at the definition as a startup that has maybe less than 100 employees and is tracking revenue per employee.

So they're looking at efficiency as one of the most important metrics very early on.

And that's more important to them in some cases than growth, because the old way of looking at things in Silicon Valley was that you had these companies that were just trying to grow as quickly as possible.

These startups that considered it a badge of honor to have a lot of employees.

And that was something you touted in a press release.

But nowadays, it's really about staying small and lean and very mean.

According to some folks in Silicon Valley, it is very possible.

You have folks like Sam Altman, who has touted this idea.

And with the rise of AI agents like OpenClaw, that was very viral a few weeks ago, this personal AI agent that can do a lot of things on your behalf.

It's very likely that you have millions of these agents working on behalf of one person and then you start generating the revenue like a billion dollars.

And so it's very possible, but there's a lot of technical infrastructure that needs to be built before we get there.

That is also a possibility.