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Saurabh Chauhan

đŸ‘€ Speaker
140 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

Sure.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

I'll touch on how agents are actually changing how enterprises scale first.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

So the old SAS playbook was that when your revenue grows, headcount needs to grow linearly or essentially proportionally.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

And that usually leads to some form of margin compression.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

So essentially every doubling of revenue meant some proportional increase in the number of headcount.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

And that playbook tends to break once you go beyond the 2021, 2022 era of Gen AI and now subsequently AI agents being deployed.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

So now the new playbook essentially is great.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

Your revenue grows, but so does your agent fleet.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

The human managers or your human headcount more or less stays flat.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

And that allows a margin expansion.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

So...

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

Like I mentioned inside Pico, we replaced potentially engineering hires that we had planned with essentially $10,000 of monthly agent spend in terms of tokens, infrastructure, and other compute costs.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

And that fundamentally changes the unit economics of enterprise software.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

And this just isn't a mutual thing.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

Gary Tan, who's the current CEO of Y Combinator, mentioned that 25% of YC's last batch had 95% of their code written by AI.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

Cursor, that's doing about a billion dollars in animal recording revenue, or some of all these companies that are coming out of the AI accelerators.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

And these are all micro unicorns, meaning you have teams that are incredibly lean,

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

and are doing millions, if not, sorry, are doing billions, if not hundreds of millions in revenue with an incredibly lean team, which was completely unthinkable, let's say, three years ago.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

And that's really the new default.

The Digital Executive
Saurabh Chauhan: AI Agents Are Replacing Workflows—Not Workers | Ep 1249

Obviously, startups tend to show emerging trends first, but we do believe that these trends will catch up to large enterprises over the next couple of years because that's how most changes sort of trickle down.