Employees of the future
Celebrate the brave or watch them go.
The self-employed people I meet are super excited about agents, but the employees are split. Some are quietly running circles around their own departments, building things their teams have not seen yet. The rest are waiting to see what happens, mostly to other people.
A self-employed designer ships an agent dashboard and posts a screenshot on LinkedIn that night, and her clients comment, “I want this.” An employee at a 200-person company ships the same dashboard and shows it secretly to one teammate after work.
She is not sure whether to be proud or careful.
I have been watching that asymmetry for months now, and I cannot stop noticing it. Visibility is cheap for the self-employed. It is expensive for employees. Same artifact, opposite cost. The thing the brave employees are quietly figuring out is that the cost is real, and they are paying it anyway.
The first swing of the door
Let me show you a few people. They all took my workshop. Some are employees, some run their own thing. All of them are having too much fun with their agents to be careful about it.
Meet Lilach Goldis, Social Media Manager at Wix. She started where most people start, with a research agent and a content agent, two small things doing small jobs. Then one day she connected her stack to Wix Harmony, the design system her team builds inside, and the math changed. Now, before a brief is even written, she generates dozens of website inspirations and feeds them to her designers. The brief has not arrived. The inspirations have.
She put it like this:
“I started small, like most people do. But at some point, you just know it’s time to go bigger.”
Her job description still says Social Media Manager. What she actually runs, from her seat, is a small research department, a content department, and a design feeder. Nobody has updated her title. The work updated itself, quietly, on weekday afternoons.
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Nitzan Landman, founder of Creator Lab. Influencer marketing agency, mid-size, the middle, where the wind blows hardest. She built her own financial system, her own branding stack, a new website, a digital product, a knowledge base that runs the company, pricing proposals, CRM, and a layer of complex automations nobody on her team has to touch. She voice-records her feedback to the model and lets it do the magic in the background while she does something else.
She put it bluntly:
“There isn’t a single area of the business I haven’t touched with the system.”
That is what the next kind of CEO sounds like.
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Hilla Michowiz Setton (AKA: the “Kartzia”). four-person business, which is the hardest scale to run because nobody is coming to help. Her dashboard pulls from seven systems and tells her the morning’s truth before the day has started. Her virtual CEO, modeled on her favorite coach, pushes her toward the hard decisions. There is more, a copy agent, a trend scanner, a morning organizer, an evening reflection, but those two carry the day.
She put it cleanly:
“The best time to start working with agents was six months ago. The second-best time is now.”
Different sizes of company with same posture toward the tool.
Just building without asking for permission.
The receipts pile up
There are more, many more.
Shira Ben Cohen, Senior UX Researcher at Melio, built a 10-agent system she uses for real deliverables. Idan Segev, VP Product Design at Tipalti, is leading his entire design org into agentic design. Yair Golan, Head of Design at Optibus, with 20 years of experience, ships custom Figma plugins now. Danielle Greenberg, Growth Lead at Oasis Security, runs a 12-agent system with a custom dashboard for her VP. Limor Reznik, CMO at JGive. Dana Moverman, Head of Sourcing at AddedValue. Tamar Shachar, VP Product at ReasonsLabs and there are mooooooooooooore I have not listed because the brief got long. I meet everyday the new employees of the future.
The second swing of the door
Here is what I keep hearing. An employee, in a side conversation after a workshop, drops a sentence like: “I have been doing this for months. My boss does not know. I am starting to look around.” I have heard close versions of it enough times that it has stopped being one person’s story. It is a pattern.
That is the second swing of the door. Right now the brave ones are quietly running circles. Soon they will start moving. Not for higher salaries or fancier titles. For places that let them use the tools openly, the way the self-employed already do, without the side-channel and the after-work demo.
The choice in front of every company is small, and I think most leaders have not noticed it yet. Celebrate the brave or watch them go. They are already inside the building. They are the ones building agents on a Thursday night and not telling anyone.
The brave ones leave first.
That’s it for this week.
If this was useful, forward it to one person at your company who needs to read it. The brave one. They will know.
See you next week ✌️
-- Tom
(the guy who keeps meeting employees who have already become small companies)
P.S. Almost all of this newsletter was made by my AI team. And me. The AI team picked the names. I argued for two of them.
P.P.S. Want to know what 20 agents actually do in a week? check it out
P.P.P.S. Workshop slots open. If you want to learn how to build the stack the people in this issue are running, join us. www.getagents.today
P.P.P.P.S. I read every reply. The real me, not Alter 😉